10
Religion and Politics
Religion never exerted greater influence in Europe than in the period 1500 to 1660, and perhaps at no time in history was it so closely bound up with politics. But—at first largely unrecognized—it was also being undermined and discredited.
Spain
Spain, which had been in political and economic decline since the death of Philip II, had sunk to the level of a second-rate power, but the Church was perhaps stronger there than anywhere else, due in part to the fact that most bishops were not from the nobility and thus were not secular princes. There were more priests per capita than in any other country, and piety was intense at all social levels. The Inquisition continued, under royal control, but it had relatively little business, since Protestantism was virtually unknown and the influence of skeptical ideas was minimal.
England
In England, Catholics at first hoped for better treatment from the new Stuart dynasty, but when that did not happen a small group hatched the Gunpowder Plot, with the aim of blowing up the houses of Parliament while James I (1603-1625) and the leading men of the kingdom were assembled. Several plotters were executed, including a solider named Guy Fawkes, whose name was thereafter associated with an annual anti-Catholic celebration. A few Jesuits who were not even aware of the plot were also executed.
James and his son Charles I (1625-1649) both had Catholic wives and did not enforce the anti-Catholic laws rigorously. Charles also supported efforts to make the Church of England more “Catholic”—marble altars, altar rails, pictures in church, a heightened emphasis on episcopal authority—which contributed to his overthrow and execution at the hands of the militant Protestants called Puritans. During the Puritan interregnum that followed his death, Catholics were severely persecuted.
Charles II (1660-1685) proposed a blanket policy of limited religious toleration, but Parliament rejected the idea, and he acquiesced passively in the execution of several Catholics in the Popish Plot of 1678—a fraudulent claim that Catholics were conspiring to overthrow Charles in favor of his Catholic brother James.
But Charles, who himself became a Catholic on his deathbed, made a secret agreement with Louis XIV (1643-1715) to restore England to the Catholic Church, and he successfully fended off attempts to deny James the throne.
James II (1685-1688) sincerely desired religious toleration but encountered trouble because he attempted to achieve it by royal edict, without parliamentary agreement, and arrested seven bishops who refused to recognize his decree. When his wife gave birth to a son, thereby ensuring a Catholic succession, many of the leading men of the kingdom invited his Protestant daughter Mary II (1688-1694) and her Netherlander husband, William III (1688-1702) to take the throne, and James fled to France.
After this so-called Glorious Revolution, Catholics continued to be subject to harassment, especially because of Stuart attempts to regain the throne, which reinforced the idea that Catholics were traitors. In 1780, a proposal to grant freedom to Catholics was abandoned when it provoked massive riots in London, in which numerous people were killed.1 Catholics were officially allowed freedom of worship a few years later, while remaining excluded from public office and subject to various other civil penalties.
Ireland
In Ireland, the blood of martyrs once more proved to be the seed of Christians. A rebellion during Charles I’s reign was put down, and a few years later, the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell (d. 1658) invaded and brutally suppressed all resistance, beginning a policy of seizing the lands of the Catholic nobility and systematically settling English and Scottish Protestants in their place.
But the restoration of the English monarchy did not help the Irish. As archbishop of Armagh, St. Oliver Plunkett (d. 1681) was a reformer according to the prescriptions of Trent, and he braved extreme conditions to minister to his scattered flock. He was captured and executed at London on trumped-up charges of treason, in which Charles II passively concurred.
At the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, William III defeated James II’s last bid to regain his throne. It was the decisive “Orange” victory (the name of William’s princely house) that marked the beginning of the fierce strife between Catholics and Protestants in northern Ireland that continued even into the twenty-first century.
As priests in Ireland were outlawed, hunted down, and often savagely persecuted by the British crown, Irish seminaries were established in Rome, Spain, France, and the Spanish Netherlands, and priests replaced the aristocracy as the leaders of Irish society, identifying with the people against their English landlords and associating the Church with liberation from English rule.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, Irish Catholics were given legal freedom of worship in exchange for a promise of loyalty to the crown, and the English government not only allowed the opening of the Maynooth Seminary for the training of priests but partly financed it. The Catholic promise of loyalty was kept. Few Irish supported an abortive uprising in expectation of a French invasion, and many poor Irishmen served in the British army.
Netherlands
The Netherlands was a relatively open society, with toleration urged mainly for pragmatic reasons. Catholics were barely tolerated, however, and were not permitted public places of worship.
Thirty Years’ War
In 1618, the German Hapsburg prince Ferdinand was elected king of Bohemia and announced his intention of enforcing the minority Catholic faith on a society that included a large number of Husites, as well as Lutherans and Calvinists. But the Bohemian Diet repudiated Ferdinand and elected in his place a German Calvinist prince, Frederick, ruler of the Rhine Palatinate (d. 1632).
Frederick placed restrictions on Catholics, but Ferdinand soon conquered Bohemia, expelled Fredrick from the Palatinate, and also expelled a Protestant prince who had been elected king of Hungary. Ferdinand first assumed both the Bohemian and Hungarian titles himself, then granted them to his son. Ferdinand was subsequently elected Holy Roman Emperor (1619-1637), but the Protestant princes of the Empire rallied in support of Frederick (who did not, however, regain the Palatinate), precipitating the greatest of all religious conflicts—the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648).
Ferdinand II’s aims included the strict enforcement of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which had excluded Calvinists, although by 1618 only one of the princely electors of the Empire was a Lutheran, while three were Catholic and three Calvinist. Ferdinand also sought the return of all church lands taken since 1555. Other factors complicated the struggle, especially the fact that Ferdinand’s cousins, the Spanish Hapsburgs, hoped to regain control of the Netherlands.
Like other “religious wars”, the Thirty Years’ War was only partly about religion. Religion provided an often murderous passion, and Ferdinand sincerely wanted to promote the Catholic faith, but the Catholic princes were alarmed that he sought to increase imperial power at their expense.
Several times, Ferdinand was close to victory, but each time the Protestant cause was saved by foreign intervention: first by Lutheran Denmark, then by Lutheran Sweden, finally by Catholic France, whose foreign policy was implacably anti-Hapsburg and demonstrated that, when religious and political interests conflicted, the latter always prevailed. The papacy tried to remain aloof from Hapsburg interests, because of the Hapsburgs’ continuing designs on Italy. During its final decade, the war was essentially between the two leading Catholic powers—France and Spain—fought on German territory.
In 1648, Emperor Ferdinand III (1637-1657) had to acquiesce in the Peace of Westphalia, which was a victory for the German princes as a whole, who retained the right to determine the religion of their subjects (including Calvinism) and retained church lands seized contrary to the Peace of Augsburg. The northern Netherlands officially gained their independence, while the southern Netherlands (roughly modern Belgium) remained Catholic under Hapsburg rule, first of Spain, then of Austria. Pope Innocent X (1644-1655) condemned the treaty.
The princes’ victory in effect reduced the Holy Roman Empire merely to Austria—one German principality among many. Only in his hereditary lands, including Bohemia and other central European territories, did the emperor have the authority to enforce Catholicism as the official faith.
France
The architect of French support for the German Protestants was Cardinal Armand de Richelieu (d. 1642). Of noble birth, at age 22 he was made bishop of a diocese where his family exercised hereditary influence. During almost twenty years as the power behind the French throne, he pursued a foreign policy in which explicit religious considerations had no place, although he invoked the divine authority of the king to silence criticism. The complexity of the situation was reflected in Richelieu’s intimate associate, the Capuchin Joseph du Tremblay (the “Gray Eminence”, d. 1638), who was, paradoxically, at the same time a kind of mystic, a fervent advocate of a Crusade against the Turks, and an unwaveringly discreet and loyal agent of the crown.
After Richelieu’s death, his place at court was taken by another cardinal, Giulio Mazarini (Mazarin, d. 1661), who had been the papal legate before going over to the royal service. One of his achievements was to help bring about the Peace of Westphalia. A layman, he may have been secretly married to the widowed Queen Anne of Austria (d. 1666), mother of Louis XIV.
Poland
In 1772, Poland, one of the largest countries in Europe, was brutally and cynically dismembered by Catholic Austria, Lutheran Prussia, and Orthodox Russia. Although Poland ceased to exist as a separate country, the Polish people retained their own language and culture. Although Pope Clement XIV (1769-1774) remained silent, the Catholic religion came to be the core of their ethnic identity as they resisted both German Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy.
Absolute Monarchy
Two realities favored the absolute state—control by the monarchies over the churches and the weakening of the feudal nobility, both of which had been effective limits on kingly power in earlier times. The Church had begun to lose the struggle in the fourteenth century, and by early modern times royal entanglement had compromised her liberty in a number of ways, leaving her semi-impotent before the power of princes.
The Reformation had given the state control of the churches in virtually all Protestant lands, but pious Catholic monarchs also made the Church pay heavily for their support. The absolute monarchies were in effect Erastian, treating the Church as subordinate to the state, an idea already formulated in the Middle Ages but associated with the Swiss physician Thomas Erastus (d. 1583). Some theory of divine-right monarchy prevailed almost everywhere, although countered by theories that emphasized the consent of the governed.
Bellarmine, notably, refuted the theory of divine right expounded by James I of England, primarily in order to affirm papal authority over monarchs but in the process offering cautious justification for the will of the people. The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez was even more direct in justifying popular sovereignty.
The Papacy
But Catholic theorists of royal absolutism published sweeping attacks on papal authority, even echoing the Protestant claim that it was a medieval usurpation, and secular princes constantly intrigued in the papal conclaves, ensuring that the man elected was often merely the one with the fewest enemies. The Spanish prevented the election of the great historian Baronius in 1605; and during a deadlock in 1740, Cardinal Prospero Lambertini advised the cardinals, “If you want a good fellow, pick me.” (He was promptly elected as Benedict XIV [1740-1758].)
Clement XI (1700-1721) was a cardinal of the Roman Curia who was not even ordained a priest until shortly before his election. Elected after a conclave that lasted 241 days, Pius VI (1775-1799) proved to be both an able leader in a great crisis and a nepotist.
As temporal rulers over the Papal States, the popes were participants in international politics; and, while the popes of the era led blameless personal lives, they were notable mainly for whatever diplomatic skills they possessed. Few showed much courage, and most made concessions—surrendering territory or conceding to princes rights over the Church—in order to retain a precarious independence, a strategy that emboldened secular governments to demand still more concessions and left the Church in an increasingly weakened state.
Religious Toleration
The ideal and the practice of religious toleration gradually grew during the seventeenth century, mainly for political reasons.
France
Before 1600, there emerged at the French court a group dubbed the Politiques, because they urged that the needs of “policy”—the state—take precedence over the demands of religion, a position that was given urgency by the assassination of Henry III and Henry IV by Catholics. The practice of limited tolerance seemed the only hope for peace.2
Richelieu made war on the Huguenots, personally leading the royal armies and destroying the Huguenot fortresses, but mainly because of their semi-independence of royal control. The provisions of the Edict of Nantes granting them toleration remained in effect. But Louis XIV, the longest-reigning monarch in European history, revoked the Edict in 1685, and in some cases, soldiers were billeted in Huguenot houses to force conformity. The revocation sent numerous Huguenots into exile, although many also remained, always in danger of persecution, and even occasionally achieved prominence in national life. In his ceaseless quest to expand his territory, Louis also invaded the Rhine Palatinate and oppressed its Calvinist inhabitants.
The official Assembly of the Clergy condemned the use of force against the Huguenots, and even Jacques-Bènigne Bossuet (d. 1704), the dominant bishop of the age, doubted its wisdom. Pope Bl. Innocent XI (1676-1689), however, congratulated Louis on his action but privately thought it was unwise and ineffective.
Louis acted against the Huguenots mainly because toleration of a nonconforming religion seemed to show that he did not have full control of his kingdom, but he perhaps also had a sense of guilt that he was a less-than-exemplary Catholic. One of his mistresses, Françoise d’Aubigné (Mme. de Maintenon, d. 1719), whom he secretly married, became quite pious and may have encouraged the revocation of the Edict.
Locke
After the Glorious Revolution, the principal theorist of toleration was the Englishman John Locke (d. 1704), who urged freedom for all forms of Christianity except Catholicism, which he accused of being politically subversive. Momentously, he also reduced religion to a private matter, allowing people to believe what they wished but requiring them to accept the fact that their faith was merely one among many.
Jews
The Catholic Church herself remained officially opposed to religious toleration, except for Jews. When Jews in Poland were once again accused of having murdered a Christian child and used him in their rituals, a claim dating from the Middle Ages that was used to persecute Jews, the future Pope Clement XIV was sent to investigate and declared the charge to be a libel.
Ecumenism
There was some incipient ecumenism. The unorthodox Dutch Calvinist Hugo Grotius (d. 1645), one of the greatest political thinkers of the age and the author of the concept of international law, carried on friendly discussions with Richelieu and hoped for the reunion of the churches under the pope, although he stopped short of actually becoming a Catholic. The German Lutheran philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (d. 1716) had similar ideas and for a time attracted the interest of Bossuet and Innocent XI.
Witchcraft
Inexplicably, even as both the rationalist spirit and the idea of toleration developed, the mid-seventeenth century also marked the height of the systematic witchcraft prosecutions that had been growing in both Protestant and Catholic lands for almost two hundred years. In 1632, a French priest named Urban Grandier was burned at the stake as a sorcerer, accused of having brought about the demonic possession of an entire convent of nuns in the town of Loudun. A Jesuit subsequently conducted a mass public exorcism of the nuns, although his superiors disapproved of his action.
At the same time, there were also an increasing number of skeptics, who either thought that innocent people were being condemned or doubted the reality of witchcraft altogether. Their skepticism was based either on rationalism or on the belief that God’s sovereignty could not allow Satan the powers attributed to him. Both the prosecutions and the beliefs behind them declined precipitously in the latter half of the century.
The French Church
In keeping with the politique spirit, the decrees of the Council of Trent were not officially accepted in France until after Henry IV’s death, and then only by the clergy, not by the monarchy. The Tridentine decrees were thought to violate the freedom of the Gallican church, and the kings wanted as free a hand as possible in dealing with the religious divisions of the kingdom. The long delay meant that French clerical life to a great extent went unreformed, especially because the crown controlled the appointment of bishops. But, once the decrees were accepted, the delay allowed pent-up spiritual forces to explode suddenly in a great flowering in which France replaced Spain and Italy as the center of the Catholic Reformation.
Richelieu
Initially, much of the revival was under the patronage of the Oratorian Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (d. 1629), who encouraged many of its leaders. Richelieu was genuinely devout, but his support or opposition of reforming movements was largely dependent on how they related to royal policy at a given moment. Royal appointment of bishops tended to produce relatively worldly men of noble birth, but Richelieu to some extent promoted better candidates.
The reformers tended to identify both practical charity and the education of priests as the chief needs of the day, recognizing that often the faith had not penetrated very deeply into the lives of ordinary people and was intermingled with both unthinking worldliness and superstition. Carmelite nuns from Spain, in the branch reformed by Teresa of Avila, were introduced into France under Berulle’s patronage and attracted many members.
The Company of the Blessed Sacrament was founded by devout men at the royal court and eventually expanded to four thousand members in sixty towns. Secretive in its activities, it performed works of charity, financed reform movements, and attempted to influence royal policy, as in opposing the toleration of Huguenots. Richelieu tried to dampen its zeal, and Mazarin suppressed it, although it continued to exist unofficially.
Francis de Sales
St. Francis de Sales (d. 1622) was officially bishop of Calvinist Geneva, which he was never allowed to visit, but in France he succeeded in winning back thousands of Huguenots to the Church. Rare for a bishop, he personally catechized children. His classicIntroduction to the Devout Life had a profound effect especially on lay spirituality, teaching that holiness need not be dramatic but consisted in the sanctification of daily life in all its details, including marital love.
Although he had been part of Bérulle’s circle, de Sales moved in a different direction. Influenced by Loyola, he espoused a kind of Christian Humanism that encouraged a cheerful attitude, advising that vices be rooted out by cultivating their corresponding virtues, including natural virtues.
The Community of the Visitation was gathered together by the aristocratic widow St. Jane Frances de Chantal (d. 1641), under de Sales’ guidance. Like the Ursulines in the previous century, the Visitadines were originally a group of pious ladies devoted to education and works of charity, but they too were required to become an officially chartered, cloistered order, after which they spread throughout France and French North America, working primarily as educators of girls.
Vincent de Paul
As a young priest, St. Vincent de Paul (d. 1660) was captured by Muslims and taken to North Africa, where he became the slave of a former Franciscan with three wives, whom he persuaded to repent and with whom he returned to France. Partly because of his unique experiences, Vincent moved in high circles, serving as chaplain to a princess and becoming nominal abbot of a Cistercian monastery, at a time when such benefices were still granted to men who did not discharge their official duties.
Vincent experienced a calling to revitalize the faith in France and serve the poor while serving briefly as pastor of a rural parish where the church was in ruins and the sacraments neglected. He repaired the building with his own hands and effected a spiritual revival. At Bérulle’s request, he then became a pastor in Paris, where he continued to move in aristocratic circles but worked especially among the poor and sick. He became a friend of de Sales, at whose canonization proceedings he testified, and at de Sales’ death gave up all his benefices. Vincent attended the dying Louis XIII (1610-1643) and was the spiritual advisor of his widow, Anne of Austria, although Mazarin resisted his influence and ridiculed him.
The members of the Congregation of Priests of the Mission (Con-gregatio Missionis), which Vincent founded in 1625, were commonly called either Vincentians or Lazarists, after their headquarters in the former monastery of St. Lazare in Paris. With Richelieu’s support, Vincent drew up a plan for the evangelization of France. Called “The Mission”, the program aimed primarily at rural France, where Vincent and others had discovered the superficial character of much of the faith, bordering on paganism and including such things as riotous drunkenness on major feast days. The Lazarist mission extended even to criminals serving as galley slaves.
Vincent identified the low state of the parish clergy as the chief problem, and he established minimal criteria for ordination, along with regular exercises for priests and seminarians that emphasized practical pastoral training. “Missions”, which became extremely popular, were week-long visits to parishes by passionate preachers who sought to touch the hearts of their hearers and bring about moral and spiritual conversion. Supported by Richelieu, the Lazarists conducted missions even in Paris, including the royal court; and Lazarists, Jesuits, and others exported the practice to other Catholic countries.
Female Orders
Vincent was deeply moved by the plight of the poor and recruited groups of women—the Ladies of Charity—under the direction of an aristocratic widow, St. Louisa de Marillac (d. 1660), to work among them, especially to look after abandoned children. In 1646, an affiliated group, the Daughters of Charity, was officially approved as a religious community, the first community of women in the history of the Church who were not strictly cloistered.
Seventeen teaching orders of women were founded in the century following. However, an English woman, Mary Ward (d. 1645), was actually imprisoned by the Inquisition and the community she founded, the Institute of Mary, suppressed, because they did not live in cloisters. (Her cause for canonization has been introduced.)
Male Orders
Like Vincent, St. John Eudes (d. 1680) preached in rural areas and became convinced of the need for better priests. He left the Oratorians and with Richelieu’s support founded both the Society of Jesus and Mary to run seminaries and a group of women to work with reformed prostitutes.
Jean-Jacques Olier (d. 1657) was a worldly priest who underwent conversion under Vincent’s influence and founded a seminary in Paris that took its name from Olier’s parish—St. Sulpice. The Society of St. Sulpice (Sulpicians) became the leading educators of the diocesan clergy, with special concern for their inner spiritual formation.
Armand-Jean de Rancé (d. 1700) was a secular priest and an absentee abbot. The death of his mistress brought him to conversion, and he assumed the active direction of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe, which was said to have only six monks, who supported themselves by thievery and poaching. De Rance attracted new recruits and soon transformed La Trappe into a legendary center of monastic austerity—with severe fasts, perpetual silence, and other penances—so that the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance became known as Trappists. (Many of the monks, including de Rancé himself, became seriously ill because of the austerities.) The irascible de Rancé provoked a public quarrel with some Benedictines by his claim that authentic monasticism required hard manual labor, from which study and scholarship were deviations.
St. Louis-Mary Grignion de Montfort (d. 1716), who nursed the sick and for a time lived as a ragged beggar, founded two religious communities: the Missionaries of Mary and the Brothers of the Holy Spirit, who pursued Vincent’s goal of evangelizing the rural areas.
St. John Baptist de la Salle (d. 1719) founded a school for boys in the parish of St. Sulpice and, in order to ensure that it would serve only the poor, forbade the teaching of Latin, which was considered essential for gentlemen. La Salle’s school taught practical subjects like bookkeeping and arithmetic and required manual labor by its students. In time, his Brothers of the Christian Schools (Fratres Scolarum Christianarum) became a major educational influence all over Europe.
Devotions
Private devotions multiplied: retreats for lay people; frequent Communion; exposition of the Blessed Sacrament; and Forty Hours’ Devotion, which was originally a watch from Holy Thursday until Holy Saturday but now held at various times of the year. The Divine Praises (“Blessed be God”) were composed to counter the blasphemies of the growing number of skeptics.
Eudes promoted the medieval devotion to the Sacred Heart, but it spread especially because of the Visitation nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (d. 1690) and her Jesuit spiritual director St. Claud La Colombière (d. 1682). While urging humble self-abasement, Margaret Mary went quite far in her ecstatic celebration of the soul’s intimate union with God. The new cult3 was held in great suspicion by some and for a time was denied official approval.4
Jesus’ display of His bleeding but compassionate Heart was an invitation to repentance, one of the numerous contemporary antidotes to Jansenist pessimism (below). In time, it became one of the most popular of all devotions, with the image of the Sacred Heart commonly on display in churches and private homes and many Catholics making a novena of nine first Fridays in reparation for sin. The custom of the “holy hour” also originated with Margaret Mary.
Baroque
The Baroque style was the last great manifestation of predominantly religious art in the history of Western civilization: its visual expressions mainly inspired by the Catholic Reformation, its music having both Catholic and Protestant form.
Baroque architecture came relatively late to the German lands, but there it had its last, and in some ways most spectacular, flowering, for example in Salzburg and the great abbey churches of Bavaria and Austria.
Baroque music was often religious, as in the work of William Byrd (d. 1623), a Catholic who wrote music for the Anglican liturgy; the Italian-French Jean Baptiste Lully (d. 1687); and the Italian priest Antonio Vivaldi (d. 1741). The Baroque in music culminated in the Austrian Catholics Franz Josef Hayden (d. 1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (d. 1791) and in the Lutherans Johann Sebastian Bach (d. 1750) and George Frideric Handel (d. 1759), who occasionally wrote music for Catholic patrons.
At its height, Baroque exuberance sometimes crossed a line into a theatricality that threatened to compromise its spiritual purpose, with the worshippers as spectators, some distance from the sanctuary. Some liturgies were compared to the new secular genre of opera, combining the elements of text, music, “scenery”, “costumes”, and dramatic reenactments. Some incorporated the court ceremonial of the monarchy, such as bishops in procession wearing fifty-foot trains held up by servants. (De Sales resolved to pray the rosary during such liturgies, so as to make profitable use of the time.) The Holy See forbade translations of the Mass into the vernacular even for the private use of worshippers, a ban that was not consistently enforced but was in effect for two centuries.
For reasons that are not clear, while the tradition of religious music continued strong, religious painting declined in the later seventeenth century. The Fleming Peter Paul Rubens (d. 1640) continued the Baroque paradox of sacred themes executed in exuberant, even worldly, ways, and the Spaniard Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (d. 1682), an austere and devout man, was the last major religious painter in an unbroken tradition that extended back to the Middle Ages. A century later—uncharacteristic of his age—Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (d. 1770) was the last major artist to paint religious subjects.
Baroque Spanish statues were often painted in gaudy colors, with the sufferings of Christ and the martyrs carried to the furthest point of graphic detail. In Bavaria and Austria, statues of saints were surrounded by plaster clouds, and on Ascension Day in Italy, an image of Jesus was taken up to the ceiling of the church on a wire, while an image of a dove descended on the same wire on Pentecost.
Some great writers remained devout believers, like the Spaniard Lope de Vega (d. 1635), who wrote plays on religious subjects, and the French playwrights Pierre Corneille (d. 1684), who translated the Imitation of Christ, and Jean Racine (d. 1699), who was close to the ultra-devout Jansenists. The Jesuits continued to use drama as a means of instruction and inspiration in their schools.
The English poet John Dryden (d. 1700) was raised a Puritan, converted successively to Anglicanism and Catholicism, and defended the necessity of an infallible Church to guard against false understandings of Scripture. The poet Alexander Pope (d. 1744) was also a Catholic, although perhaps a merely nominal one.
Augustinianism
Unforeseen at its peak, the glorious French Catholic revival evolved into one of the greatest crises in the history of the Church, contributing in no small measure to the eventual wreck of both church and state in France. The crisis began because of the divergences between Augustine and Aquinas on the fundamental but extremely subtle issue of the relationship between grace and free will, which was not entirely resolved at Trent. In the century following, it became the most contested Catholic doctrine—the central issue in seventeenth-century French Catholicism.
The Flemish theologian Michael Baius (d. 1589) was condemned for holding what seemed like an extreme Augustinian view that bordered on Calvinist predestination. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Jesuit theologians charged that Dominicans slighted free will, while the Dominicans countered that the Jesuits did not fully recognize the need for grace. Pope Paul V ordered an end to the dispute, decreeing that both positions were within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy.
The Spanish Jesuits Suarez and Luis de Molina (d. 1600)—the former perhaps the most influential theologian of the seventeenth century—taught that God foresaw free human choice and gave graces to individuals to aid their salvation but they could freely reject those graces. But Bérulle and many of his disciples were Augustinians in seeing the human will as severely impaired by sin and holding a version of the doctrine of predestination.
Jansenism
The Flemish bishop Cornelius Jansen (d 1638), in his book Augustine, emphasized that God was remote and inscrutable, an understanding that had been particularly strong since the time of Ockham and that was taken to its furthest point by Calvin. For two centuries, Jansenism continued to be the single most influential and tenacious modern Catholic heresy.
Jansen attempted to win over Protestants by showing that authentic Catholicism also recognized that men were incapable of keeping the Commandments; that God’s will was absolutely sovereign; and that grace was wholly unmerited, freely given, and incapable of being resisted. Human nature was so corrupt that it was possible to sin without willing to do so.
Port-Royal
Jansen’s priest-friend Jean-Ambrose de Hauranne, abbé5 de St. Cyran (d. 1643), who knew Richelieu, Bérulle, de Sales, and de Paul, spread Jansen’s ideas in France, especially through the convent of Port-Royal, a fashionable community of Cistercian nuns near Paris. There the way of life had been lax under a superior from a prominent family, Angelique Arnauld (d. 1661), who became abbess at the age of eleven but later underwent a conversion that motivated her to transform the convent into a model of austere piety.
Like Angelique, some of the leading figures of the French Catholic revival were worldly people who underwent conversion and developed a strong sense of sin. When Port-Royal moved into Paris from the countryside, it began attracting people seeking spiritual guidance under St. Cyran’s direction. Members of the Arnauld family were conspicuous converts to Jansenist doctrines and practices, which helped give the movement notoriety, but as controversy developed, Richelieu came to regard St. Cyran as dangerous and had him imprisoned, after which Angélique’s priest-brother, Antoine Arnauld (d. 1694), became the movement’s leader.
Condemnations
Jansen’s work was condemned by the Sorbonne, by the king, and by several popes. As shown by his revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV took seriously his coronation oath to oppose heresy, and as many as two thousand Jansenists were imprisoned during his reign. After Jansenism’s initial condemnation in 1654, many of its institutions were closed by royal authority. Angelique was forced to retract her expressions of anguish over the huge number of souls she believed were condemned to Hell and her claim that it was not appropriate for men to inquire into God’s justice. Antoine Arnauld fled to Flanders, and in the Netherlands, Jansenists formed a schismatic church.
The nuns of Port-Royal resisted, despite efforts by Bossuet and others to persuade them, leading the archbishop of Paris to characterize them, famously, as “pure as angels and proud as devils”. The monastery was suppressed, even its cemetery was dug up, and its nuns were scattered to other convents, although they later regrouped at the old Port-Royal in the countryside near Paris.
The Jansenist response to official condemnations was to accept them in principle, protest that in fact they did not hold the condemned propositions, and reformulate their teachings in such a way as to try to escape the condemnations. But this strategy led merely to further condemnations, culminating in a 1713 decree by Clement XI that some bishops refused to accept.
Jansenist Spirituality
The heart of Jansenist spirituality was its sense of the immense gulf that separated man from God, a sense of sin that required continuous penance. Because they thought many people were predestined to damnation, Jansenists denied that Christ died for all men and symbolized this by crucifixes on which His arms were stretched vertically over His head, thereby showing that He did not embrace the whole world and that the entry to Heaven was very narrow.
Jansenist criticism of popular piety at times seemed to veer close to Protestantism. They were cool to a Marian piety that regarded Mary as a kindly and forgiving Mother; in their view, she was almost as high above mankind, and as inaccessible, as her Son.
Jansenists discouraged frequent Communion, because men were wholly unworthy to approach the holy table, a teaching that seemed to deny the power of the sacraments to transform those who received them and reserve them instead for those already saved. By contrast, de Sales advocated weekly Communion, and Vincent, who was at first friendly with St. Cyran, broke with him over the same issue. (St. Cyran jibed that Vincent was “ignorant”, and Vincent replied, “I am even more ignorant than you think.”)
The term Jansenist referred to those who held, or appeared to hold, the condemned propositions concerning nature and grace, but it was used much more loosely to designate anyone who held to very strict moral principles.
The Jansenists themselves were conspicuous for their austere lives and—repelled by easy worldliness—held even ordinary pleasures, such as the enjoyment of food or the appreciation of the beauties of nature, in suspicion.6 As a result, those influenced by the movement avoided attending purely social gatherings. (De Sales was suspect to Jansenists because he had cautiously permitted worldly pleasures like dancing and the theatre.)
Jesuit Moral Theology
The Jesuits, because of their emphasis on free will and a kind of “humanism” that saw God’s presence in ordinary things, were Jansenism’s greatest antagonists. Following Ignatius, Jesuits sought to influence every area of culture and make it Christian, while Jansenists, fearing that Christians themselves would thereby be corrupted, advocated withdrawal from the world. One of the disputes of the Renaissance was revived, as Jesuits praised, and Jansenists condemned, works of art and literature on classical pagan themes—the Jesuits finding a fundamental human wisdom and goodness even among pagans.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart, which was especially promoted by the Jesuits, emphasized the love of Jesus and His accessibility to those who sought Him, and Jesuits, following Aquinas, taught the existence of natural human virtues that made restraint possible. Mistrusting display and exuberant joyfulness, the Jansenists also mistrusted much of Baroque religiosity, including devotion to the Sacred Heart. By contrast, the Jansenists had a strong sense of God’s remoteness, man’s helpless proneness to sin, and the soul’s predestination to Heaven or Hell.
The Jansenists castigated the Jesuits for holding that it was possible to do good without conscious thought of God and that there was no guilt except in a deliberately sinful act. In response, the Jesuits warned against scrupulosity—a compulsive and exaggerated sense of one’s own sinfulness that plagued a disordered soul.
Jesuit moralists developed the theology of casuistry (“cases”), in which general moral principles were illustrated by hypothetical examples, in order to give confessors practical guidance—a system that was criticized for being excessively legalistic and encouraging the search for moral loopholes. The Jansenists accused Jesuits of catering to the lax consciences of the aristocracy by, for example, allowing a lady to attend a ball on a day when she had received Communion or allowing the reception of Communion by a married couple on a day when they had had intercourse.
Whereas Jansenists taught that the actual emotion of sorrow was necessary for the forgiveness of sins, the Jesuits taught that fear of Hell was sufficient. The Jesuits also taught that, of several reputable opinions on a moral question, Catholics were free to choose any one that seemed credible (Probabilism). When that theory was officially condemned, the Jesuit alternative was Probabiliorism, which held that the individual had to follow the most probable opinion. Rigorists—mostly Jansenists—held that in each case the strictest opinion must be followed.
Pascal
The layman Blaise Pascal (d. 1662), the most important Catholic thinker between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, had a close relationship with the Jansenist movement. For a time, he lived a rather worldly life, but he underwent conversion and often visited Port-Royal, where his sister was a nun. Pascal’s Jansenist spirituality was manifest in the fact that, chronically ill and in pain, he said he did not wish to be cured, because illness was the natural state of man. Also, he persuaded a close friend to break off his engagement in order to live a life of sanctity. (A relative of the jilted woman tried to have Pascal killed.)
After the condemnation of Jansenists, Pascal supported their claim that they did not teach the condemned propositions. When his niece, who was also a nun of Port-Royal, underwent what he regarded as a miraculous cure, he thought that it proved that Jansenists could not be heretics. Pascal was the Jesuits’ most formidable antagonist, satirizing them as sophistical promoters of fallacious moral teachings.
Jansenists generally eschewed mysticism, because it seemed to narrow the gulf between man and God, but among others, there was a continued strong interest in the inner spiritual life, which was analyzed with great subtlety by numerous authors. A dominant theme was “the practice of the presence of God”—a habitual sense of being in His presence even when not consciously praying or meditating.
Mysticism
Most spiritual writers, on the other hand, emphasized the passivity of the mystical experience—the individual could not seek it, and it was not granted to everyone—and it was from this sense of passivity that the other principal heresy of the age was derived.
Quietism
Quietism originated with the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (d. 1696) and may have been influenced by the Alumbrados heresy. It took its name from the fact that in its extreme form it advocated a completely passive surrender to the will of God, the abandonment of all human effort toward salvation, even the effort to resist temptation. (“I desire to desire nothing, but I do not even desire that.”) Quietists appeared to have no need of the sacraments or any other religious “externals”.
Molinos taught at Rome and at one point attracted the support of the future Pope Innocent XI, but he was later accused of immoral relations with women and imprisoned by Innocent. His fate posed an intriguing question about Quietist spirituality—did Molinos actually commit fornication, because he did not resist temptation, or was he innocent but made no effort to defend himself?
Quietist beliefs were espoused in France by a rather unstable widow, Jeanne-Marie de Guyon (d. 1717), who claimed mystical experiences, traveled with a friar with whom she achieved “complete fusion of souls”, was tormented by the Great Beast of the Apocalypse, and wondered if she bore the Baby Jesus within her. She taught that one should be indifferent to one’s own salvation, that sin was involuntary, and that to commit a sin that one abhorred was the greatest sacrifice an individual could offer to God. The soul was completely in thrall to the devil and could only await divine deliverance, not hoping or praying for it, lest it not be God’s will.
Archbishop François Fénelon (d. 1715), one of the great prelates of the age, was eager to promote heartfelt piety as an antidote to religious formalism, and he saw in Quietism the potential for the soul to expand until it reached the divine. But Fénelon compromised himself by encouraging Mme. Guyon while attempting to moderate her teachings. Bossuet, who thought she was mad, moved against her with the support of Louis XIV, and she was imprisoned until Mme. de Maintenon, who was something of her disciple, interceded.
Although the Molinos and Guyon episodes were eccentric, Quietism was not a peripheral movement, in that many devout people shared its sense that one should place oneself entirely in the hands of God. But as a heresy, it provoked an anti-mystical reaction, so that throughout much of the eighteenth century spiritual writers were closely scrutinized for Quietist tendencies and several, including even a cardinal, were forced to retract.
Skepticism
Much of the intellectual and spiritual dissatisfaction of the period from 1300 to 1600 came from the belief that reason had been valued too much by Scholastic theology. There was no philosopher of the first rank during the sixteenth century, which was dominated instead by theological disputes about the meaning of the Bible, but there were stirrings of skepticism about religion.
In the middle of the Reformation, the popular French satirist François Rabelais (d. 1553), a physician and sometime monk, mocked what he considered the extreme credulity and fanaticism of religion, although the extent of his own skepticism is uncertain. He was condemned by some Church authorities but protected by others.
Tomasso Campanella (d. 1639) was an Italian Dominican who was imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition, primarily for his interest in magic and his semi-mystical speculations about a future City of the Sun that would replace existing kingdoms. For a time, his speculations were taken seriously by both the papacy and various civil governments.
Michel de Montaigne (d. 1592) was a believing Catholic, a civic official connected to the Politiques, who professed a highly personal, common-sense kind of skepticism that raised questions but did not attempt to resolve them. Montaigne, who thought that uncertainty was endemic to human nature, marveled that anyone could be so sure of his beliefs as to kill and be killed for them.
Pyrrhonists—named for an ancient Roman philosopher—cast doubt on all certainties. While some doubted religion, many were religious believers who used skeptical arguments against their theological opponents in order to show the need for some kind of authority—the Bible for Protestants, the Church for Catholics.
In the seventeenth century, the claims of reason once again came into their own, although in ways very different from the Middle Ages. The two centuries after 1600 came to be called the Age of Reason, when reason came to deny divine revelation.
Although he lived long after the age of skepticism had begun, Bossuet was in a sense the last great exponent of an untroubled confidence in the existing cosmic order, someone who might have well have said, “God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.” In his Discourse on Universal History, he ranged serenely over the past to show the hand of Providence clearly discernible in every age.
The Scientific Revolution
Copernicus
The earliest and most dramatic incidence of potential conflict between faith and reason came from the new astronomy. For some time, astronomers had been entertaining speculations of the sun, not the earth, as the center of the universe, and in 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (d. 1543), a cleric in minor orders, published a treatise proposing that idea. His hypothesis was not based on empirical observation but on the attempt to overcome certain mathematical anomalies in the geocentric model of the universe.
Galileo
For decades, the new theory was confined largely to scientific circles, but by using a telescope, the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei (d. 1642) saw that the surface of the moon was irregular, like that of the earth, and that the planet Jupiter had four moons—facts that contradicted the Aristotelian claim that the heavens were unchanging and were made of a different substance from the earth. Emboldened by these discoveries, Galileo in 1615 presented the Copernican hypothesis to the general educated public. It provoked strong reactions pro and con, and he was summoned before the Inquisition and examined by Bellarmine.
Since earliest times, the Catholic tradition had insisted that faith and reason must ultimately harmonize, so that in principle the Galileo dispute was not over whether science or religious authority was supreme but over facts—whether Copernicanism was true. (There were in fact errors in the new theory, although it was a decided improvement on the geocentric model. Copernicanism was not conclusively proven until much later.)
The Jesuit Response
Jesuits, notably Christoph Clavius (d. 1612), who had devised the Gregorian calendar, were among the leading astronomers of the day, and the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (d. 1680), who was possibly the most learned of Galileo’s contemporaries, proposed important theories concerning volcanoes, acoustics, and other natural phenomena. Some Jesuits were better empirical astronomers than Galileo and pointed out that the Copernican theory remained unproven. Most Jesuits held the theory of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (d. 1601): that the planets revolve around the sun, but the sun in turn revolves around the earth.
Bellarmine objected that the heliocentric picture of the universe contradicted certain passages of Scripture where the sun was said to move. Beyond this, the thesis contradicted Aristotle’s claim that the heaviest matter, which was assumed to be the earth, was naturally at the center of the universe, just as common-sense experience seemed to show that the earth was stationary while the sun moved. Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellectual foundation of Scholasticism, so that Bellarmine and others feared that to discredit Aristotle’s astronomy might discredit much of Catholic theology as well. Galileo responded that the Bible did not intend to impart scientific knowledge but merely made use of the world view common at the time it was written.
Bellarmine did not demand that the Copernican theory be denied even if it were proven true but commanded that, since it was not proven, Galileo could only teach it as a theory useful for the study of astronomy and should not upset people’s faith by insisting on its truth. Galileo agreed, but in 1632, he published a second book setting forth the heliocentric theory even more boldly than before and refuting objections.
Galileo was again summoned before the Inquisition, where the issue in part revolved around exactly what Bellarmine, who was now dead, had told Galileo in 1616. Galileo was forced to retract under pain of prosecution for heresy and spent the remainder of his life under a kind of house arrest, although still engaged in scientific investigation. (In 1992, Bl. John Paul II formally stated that the Church had erred in condemning Galileo, and later Pope Benedict XVI praised Galileo as someone whose work helped men to “contemplate with gratitude God’s works”.)
Scientific Progress
Almost all areas of science developed very rapidly in the seventeenth century. Some research practices encountered resistance from the Church, such as the dissection of human bodies for the study of anatomy, while some findings prompted new and difficult questions. Early discoveries in geology, for example, were beginning to raise questions about the age of the world as set forth in Genesis.
However, the successes of the new physical speculations were dazzling, and they pushed the study of nature into the center of the culture. The word science, which had traditionally meant simply “knowledge”, was increasingly limited to the empirical study of the physical world, which was viewed as alone providing true knowledge.
Descartes
The French philosopher Rene Descartes (d. 1650) emerged from his Jesuit education dissatisfied that the philosophers of the past had been unable to agree on the nature of truth, just as different peoples and nations differed in their laws and customs. Bérulle, among others, encouraged Descartes in his quest to overcome that failure.
Partly to refute Pyrrhonism, Descartes began the search for truth by undertaking to doubt everything that could be doubted, so that whatever remained would be certain. As it turned out, he could doubt absolutely everything, including the existence of God, and while the world outside his mind might be a figment of his imagination, he could not doubt his own existence as a thinking being.
But, he reasoned, the idea of God—of an infinite Being—could not be the product of a finite mind and therefore had to be true. God was a necessary Being whose existence guaranteed the existence of the external world, since the all-good God would not allow men to be systematically deceived.
Descartes seemed to have created a new synthesis between faith and reason, and his philosophy was accepted by Antoine Arnauld and Bossuet, among others, while his principal disciple was the Oratorian Nicolas de Malebranche (d. 1715). Some Catholics were attracted to Cartesianism as an antidote to materialism, since he made a sharp separation between mind and body. Augustinians approved of the fact that, unlike Aristotle and Aquinas, knowledge for Descartes did not come through the senses but was innate in the mind. (Malebranche explained the interaction of mind and body by God’s action of planting in the mind an idea each time the body experienced a sense impression.)
Bacon
Francis Bacon (d. 1626) was an English lawyer who was so impressed by the new science that he urged that almost all the learning of the past be discarded and the search for truth begin again, based on empirical investigation.
Descartes and Bacon were each impressed by different aspects of the new science—Descartes by mathematics, Bacon by the painstaking sifting of empirical facts. Because of the revolutionary ideas of the new science, each saw the past as a burden on the present.
Bacon was an Anglican, and both he and Descartes attempted to protect religious belief from doubt. Descartes said, as he embarked on the journey of doubt, that he would continue to live according to the teachings of the Church and the laws of the state, and Bacon said that religion, since it was based on divine revelation, was beyond empirical proof or disproof. Both were sincere. However, they protected religious belief by in a sense making it irrelevant, which allowed later generations to conclude that there could be no rational basis for faith.
Newton
Isaac Newton (d. 1727) completed the scientific revolution by formulating a few simply stated laws that explained the movement of all bodies, from the planets to the smallest grains of sand. He was a serious Anglican, albeit with an eccentric theology, who believed that he had placed religious belief on firmer ground than ever before, by showing that the universe had to have been planned and governed by a superior intellect.
Jesuit physicists generally opposed Newtonianism, seeking to preserve Aristotelian physics as mediated by Aquinas. But others, especially some Oratorians, saw Newton’s model of the mechanical universe as discrediting magical beliefs, thereby allowing miracles to be understood as occurring only through the power of God, who temporarily suspended the laws of nature.
Pascal
Pascal was almost alone in seeing fully what was involved in the scientific revolution, attempting to overcome skeptical rationalism several generations before that skepticism had fully emerged. He was himself a great mathematician, one of the inventors of calculus and of a kind of mechanical calculator.
Despite his Jansenist strictures against worldliness, he associated with gamblers in order to study mathematical odds, from which he formulated a science of probabilities. In the gambling rooms, he noticed that the threat to the Catholic faith came not from philosophical skepticism but mainly from a casual worldliness that he called “Libertinism”. To counter this, he formulated his famous “wager” to convince the Libertines to embrace the faith—if God existed they gained everything, whereas if He did not exist they lost nothing.
The wager, however, gives a misleading picture of Pascal, who was deeply devout and not in the least self-interested and calculating. Sewn into the lining of his coat was a cryptic reminder of a mystical experience he once had. Beyond the idea of the wager, he strove to formulate a highly original defense of Christianity that by the time of his early death had only reached the stage of aphoristic notes that are usually called simply Pensées (Thoughts).
While the new science seemed to reveal a serenely ordered universe under God’s presiding intelligence, Pascal pronounced, with regard to Descartes, “The god of the geometers is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”, meaning that Descartes had merely proven the logical necessity of a Supreme Being, not the existence of the living God.
Lurking beneath some of the resistance to the new science was the sense, often only half-conscious, that man was being dethroned from the center of the universe, which was now revealed to be a vast, cold place that took no notice of his existence. Pascal above all fully sensed this profound disorientation and confessed, “Those infinite spaces frighten me.” But, reflecting on the irony that man, however great he thinks himself to be, can be killed by a drop of water, Pascal confronted that reality with characteristic boldness: in nature man was indeed a fragile reed, but he was a thinking reed, whose consciousness allowed him to encompass the vast impersonality of the universe, even if that universe knew him not.
While he did not reject arguments for the existence of God based on the order of the universe, he saw that in some ways the very objectivity of the scientific world, of the impersonality of the universe, had thrown man back on his own resources, and it was in that experience that Pascal sought a new basis for faith. Insofar as his theology can be discerned, Pascal was an Augustinian and in a sense a forerunner of modern Existentialism, his starting point being man’s profound sense of unease and anxiety in the world, the root of which was the fact that by nature man yearned for infinity yet was himself finite, his longings and aspirations destined to be thwarted. Many of the Pensées were sharp observations on the paradoxes of human existence, a perception consonant with Jansenist pessimism. For Pascal, the only solution to the human dilemma was faith in that Being who was fully human but who elevated humanity to the level of eternity—Jesus Christ.
Critical History
Building on the work of Renaissance humanists like Valla, the new spirit of critical inquiry expanded beyond the physical world into the study of history, hence to a reassessment of the Church’s past.
The French Benedictine Jean Mabillon (d. 1707), whom de Rance accused of not living as a true monk, evaluated the sources for the history of the early Church, and the Bollandists, a group of mainly Flemish Jesuits (named after their founder), did the same for the lives of the saints. Historical studies sometimes posed troublesome problems, as when the Bollandists disproved the Carmelite tradition that their order had been founded on Mount Carmel by the prophet Elijah, doubt was cast on whether the so-called Athanasian Creed had actually been composed by St. Athanasius, and certain venerable documents were proven to be forgeries.
But the greatest controversy was caused by the French Oratorian Richard Simon (d. 1712), who was expelled from his order after publishing a book denying that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch and anticipating modern biblical criticism in other ways as well. Simon was not a religious skeptic and thought of himself as in some ways refuting the Protestant appeal to the Bible, by showing that the authority of the Church was necessary to overcome scriptural uncertainties.
The Enlightenment
Deism
Despite Pascal’s reservations, the new science seemed to require a kind of natural theology, as Descartes insisted. God was seen as the ultimate principle of intelligibility in the universe, so that even most of the Church’s enemies considered atheism irrational. The impetus for “natural religion” also came from the growing reaction against the bitter religious conflicts of the previous century. There began a search for a religion that transcended theological differences and was accessible to everyone.
The term Deism, from the Latin word for God, is now conventionally used for this rational religion, while Theism, from the Greek equivalent, is used to designate belief in a personal God. But the terms were often used interchangeably in the eighteenth century, and “natural religion” was a more common term than either.
Deism was an abstraction in which God was the divine engineer, architect, or clock-maker who designed and built a complex mechanism but then left it to move according to its own laws. The moral law—natural law—was part of that same order and could be known entirely through reason.
Deism existed in both mild and strong versions. Some orthodox Christians, seeing Deism as a way of persuading skeptics of the existence of God, merely deemphasized the distinctiveness of Christianity, while others, even some clergy, restricted belief to what they thought could be proved.
As Pascal foresaw, “natural religion” was by no means necessarily Christian and often coexisted with doubts about revealed religion. It was often espoused by a new intelligentsia who tended toward free thought and lax morals—precisely Pascal’s “Libertines”. There was a growing skepticism about Christianity, which after Louis XIV’s death burst into the open.
The Persistence of Faith
But although Deism created a gulf between the religious culture of much of the educated classes and the beliefs of most other people, traditional religion remained vital. Thus Jansenist claims about miracles were widely believed, and Louis XV of France (1715-1774) was thought to have offended God by his adulteries and was blamed for no longer “touching for the king’s evil” (curing scrofula by his royal touch), a ceremony he felt unworthy to perform.
Catholic Europe appeared to be stable and serene, under the rule of princes who supported the Church and with ubiquitous public manifestations of religion—large and beautiful churches, elaborate liturgies, frequent public processions, and many other things. The Church’s spiritual strength lay in her deep appeal to the imagination and the emotions, ranging from the highly personal apologetics of Pascal to popular beliefs that bordered on superstition. Popular preachers validated Pascal’s famous claim that “the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing”. In both Catholicism and Protestantism, the “religion of the heart” was extolled as an antidote to what was considered a desiccated rationalism.
Parish missions were still effective, and retreat houses were established for lay people to make the Spiritual Exercises. Confraternities of pious laymen remained strong, especially the sodalities (“companionships”) that were composed mainly of alumni of Jesuit schools and included people of high rank, including bishops.
Many kinds of devotion flourished, especially that of the Sacred Heart, the newly established stations of the cross, and Marian piety of various kinds. The first reported private Marian apparition in the history of Europe was to a French shepherdess, Benoite Rencurel (d. 1718), in 1664. The incident was the forerunner of numerous later such events: the girl claimed repeated visions in which Mary commanded her to warn people about their sins, the site attracted numerous pilgrims, and miraculous cures were reported, with Church authorities making no official judgment.
Saints
As in every age, there was sanctity in the Age of Reason, even in high places. Venerable Louise of France (d. 1787), daughter of the promiscuous Louis XV, joined a strict Carmelite convent.
One of the favorite saints of the age was sixteen hundred years old: St. Joseph, the foster-father of Jesus, who for reasons that are unclear was not popular until early modern times. The growth of his cult in the seventeenth century was probably related to the renewed devotion to the loving Jesus, as in Sacred Heart and Marian devotions.
St. Benedict Joseph Labre (d. 1783) was one of the strangest saints in the history of the Church. A Frenchman, he was rejected by various religious orders and became a kind of tramp, affronting in his person almost every social convention of the age. He lived by begging in various places but finally in Rome, where he slept in the Coliseum in order to associate himself with the martyrs.
St. Paul of the Cross Danei (d. 1775) was an Italian who founded the Passionists (Congregatio Passionis—Congregation of the Passion), primarily to preach missions centered on Christ’s Passion and especially in reparation for the irreligion of the age. Paul was so effective a mission preacher that his hearers were often reduced to tears as he dramatically recounted the Passion story.
Liguori
St. Alphonsus-Mary Liguori (d. 1787), also an Italian, was a lawyer from an aristocratic family who founded the Redemptorists (Congregatio Sanctissimi Redemptoris—Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer), especially for the evangelization of the common people, and also served as a diocesan bishop. Like the Passionists, the Redemptorists included female branches of cloistered contemplatives.
Liguori was a major influence on spirituality, emphasizing Christ’s love and that of Mary, whom he venerated as “Mediatrix of all Graces”, a belief that, while it came to be believed by many, has not been officially accepted by the Church. Once again in contrast to the Jansenists, he taught that fervent prayer, freely embraced, brought salvation, and he urged the cultivation of emotions like love and fear.
Liguori was also the only significant theologian of the eighteenth century, the leading moral theologian of the age, and a doctor of the Church. He revived a modified kind of Probabilism and wrote books that for the next century were standard guides for confessors. He followed the milder Jesuit moral theology rather than Jansenist rigor, insisting that “God is not a tyrant” and advising confessors against being overly inquisitive. Significant in terms of later controversies, he held that, if a penitent did not realize that contraception was a sin, the confessor should leave the conscience undisturbed. (After about 1650, upper-class families in Western Europe were having fewer children.)
Social custom was moving slowly toward the idea of “companionate marriage” based on mutual attraction, and the future Pope Benedict XIV even justified elopement, on the grounds that the power of the sacrament rendered such a marriage holy. In a sense, the traditional idea of marriage and the romantic idea of courtly love were being harmonized.
Royal Court Culture
But it was in France, which had assumed the spiritual leadership of the Catholic Reformation, that the greatest trials of the Church occurred in early modern times, as the revival cooled and weaknesses were exposed.
Tellingly, the French were reserved in their response to the Baroque. There were few French buildings as unrestrainedly exuberant as some in Italy and elsewhere, because French culture was to a great extent controlled by the monarchy and under Louis XIV the Baroque was replaced by a classical spirit that emphasized order, regularity, good taste, reason, and clear ideas, as embodied in the royal palaces of the Louvre and Versailles.
Bossuet justified divine-right monarchy, arguing that a stable society had to be based on divinely ordained obedience to authority. He departed from the doctrine of Bellarmine and Suarez, according to which subjects had rights, including the right of resistance to unjust government. Bossuet was sincerely pious, performed his episcopal duties conscientiously, and took great interest in the various schools of spirituality, but he was also a classic court bishop, for whom the authority of the monarchy was seamlessly interwoven with the faith. (In the chapel at Versailles, the king looked down on the altar from a balcony, while the congregation faced not the altar but the king, on whom it was forbidden to turn one’s back.)
Gallicanism
The Gallican movement severely undercut papal authority in France, where the kings had obtained from the pope control over the appointment of bishops and most bishops submitted to royal power. Louis XIV consistently nominated bishops for political reasons, many of whom were absentees from their dioceses, and he fell into a protracted conflict with Pope Innocent XI over the king’s claim to collect the revenues of all vacant dioceses.
During that dispute, the Assembly of the French Clergy issued the Gallican Articles, according to which the king was not subject to any higher authority “in temporal things” and could not be deposed. The pope was supreme in “spiritual matters” but subject to correction by a general council and in France limited by the laws of the kingdom.
Innocent XI condemned the Articles and refused to confirm the king’s nominees for a number of vacant dioceses, but Innocent XII (1691-1700) acquiesced. The Articles were then officially withdrawn, although they continued to be widely held.
Louis XIV was in fact devout and had a bad conscience about his adulteries, enduring chastisement from the pulpit, briefly banishing one of his mistresses from court after a priest refused her absolution, and undergoing personal reform at the hands of Madame de Maintenon. For a time, he endured blunt sermons by the courageous Fenelon, but Fenelon had a monumental dispute with Bossuet, his former teacher—essentially over Quietism—and was banished from court. Louis then pressured Innocent XII to condemn Fénelon, who received the news as he was entering the pulpit and who proceeded to preach a sermon on obedience. Later, however, he became an open critic of royal absolutism.
The Church continued to be involved in politics. The practice of royal government through a cardinal continued with André-Hercule de Fleury (d. 1743), regent and first minister for Louis XV. When Bishop Etienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne (d. 1794) was proposed as archbishop of Paris, Louis XVI (1774-1793) refused with the words, “No. The archbishop of Paris ought at least to believe in God.” But if Lomenie was not fit to be archbishop of Paris, he was qualified to serve briefly as Louis’ first minister, after which he was made a cardinal.
State of the Church
The condition of the institutional Church—authentic piety in the midst of worldliness—was similar throughout Europe.
Patronage and family connections meant a great deal in obtaining promotion, and there was an almost impassible gulf between higher and lower clergy. Bishops were seldom parish priests but were drawn from the ranks of cathedral canons and professors. Except in Spain, there were a disproportionate number of aristocratic bishops, especially younger sons of noble houses, whose quality was uneven. Despite the decrees of Trent, there were still some pluralists, some of whom were quite worldly and primarily political in their outlook, alongside others who were very dedicated. Most were conscientious.
The financial gulf between bishops and cathedral clergy on the one hand and village priests on the other was enormous, and many of the lower clergy—some of them impoverished village pastors—resented the huge disparity of income between themselves and their superiors. Dating from the Dark Ages, many parishes were still under the control of a patron—a cathedral chapter, a monastery, a wealthy layman—who had the right to appoint the cure (the priest who had the “care” of the parishioners) and who doled out a stipend to him. Despite reforms, the system also survived in some monasteries, where the abbot was an absentee—not even a monk—who was entitled to the revenues.
The Church was extremely wealthy (owning about 10 percent of all the land in France, more than half in Bavaria), and high-ranking clergy lived in luxury, as was thought befitting their offices. But much episcopal wealth was used for charity and education, since the Church was the only institution that took responsibility for those needs—one Spanish archbishop, for instance, fed thirteen hundred people a day during a famine.
The quality of the priesthood was uneven. Most village priests seem to have been respected men devoted to their flocks, even if in many cases they were poorly educated. Large urban parishes, however, housed numerous sinecures—corps of priests who enjoyed endowed benefices but of whom only a few had pastoral responsibilities (Chartres cathedral had eighty canons), an abuse that stemmed in part from a superfluity of priests, although vocations declined during the eighteenth century.
About half the clergy belonged to religious orders. Although most of those were vowed to poverty, there was nonetheless a popular image of monasteries as full of idlers, in contrast to the hard-working parish cures. As a privileged class, clergy of all ranks had long been vulnerable to attack, with occasional scandals fueling popular anticlericalism, which was often motivated not by skepticism but by Jansenist rigor and contempt for such misconduct. In the Affair of the Diamond Necklace,7 for example, Cardinal Louis-René Rohan of Strasbourg (d. 1803) was at the center of a sordid sexual intrigue that may have involved Queen Marie Antoinette (d. 1793). The aristocratic bishop Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (d. 1838), who claimed to have been forced into the priesthood by his family, kept a mistress even while a seminarian.
Intellectual Defects
The Church’s greatest failure was intellectual. Theologically, it was a rather barren age, and for two centuries after Pascal, there was no major Catholic thinker, while an indeterminate part of the educated classes, including clergy, lost the faith or compromised it.
Most of the defenders of orthodoxy, especially the Jesuits, remained Thomists. Others, however, were self-consciously modern in outlook, and the Oratorians especially espoused a Cartesianism that turned out to be a philosophical blind alley. Over time, Descartes’ system seemed less and less persuasive to many people and what eventually remained was only his insistence on the obligation of universal doubt—modern man was to be skeptical of all received ideas.
While some Catholics sought to bring their faith as close to enlightened Deism as possible, others did the opposite, readily admitting that many beliefs (the Trinity, Transubstantiation) were mysteries but arguing that this showed that they emanated from the infinite God, whom man could not comprehend.
Catholic apologists appealed to experience against abstract critical reason, demonstrating the truth of the faith by citing all the miracles that had occurred from biblical times to their own day. This argument, however, begged the question, since the skeptics also doubted the reality of miracles. (The argument posed a particular problem for Jesuits, in that the Jansenists claimed a number of miracles as proving the truth of their own beliefs.)
The Philosophies
The self-styled Enlightenment—so-called because its adherents claimed to have emerged from the darkness and superstition that had long prevailed and for which the Church was primarily responsible—began in France and spread from there all over the Western world. Its apostles were called philosophes, meaning not “philosophers” in the formal sense but something like the modern term “intellectuals”.
Secret Societies
New secret societies like the Rosecrucians (their symbol being the “rosy cross”) and the Illuminati (“enlightened”) falsely claimed an ancient lineage, exalted science, and harbored outright antagonism to Christianity. The Freemasons, whose historical origins are obscure (they claimed descent from the medieval stonemasons’ guilds), were mainly composed of men dissatisfied with organized religion who sought to transcend it through a Deistic creed. Despite their Deism, the emotional need for religion survived in those societies, which incorporated ritualistic, semi-mystical elements into their rationalist creeds. Such groups had some success in undermining Christianity, although their exact role is uncertain because of their secrecy. Freemasonry was condemned by a succession of popes, but the movement had influence even within the Church, including priests among its members. Philip, duke of Orleans (d. 1793), the cousin of Louis XVI, was the chief of the French Masons.
The War on Tradition
Mankind, the philosophes announced, had been freed by the new science. They readily admitted that from a purely scientific standpoint their age was less profound than the previous century (“We stand on the shoulders of giants”), but they ignored the fact that most of those giants had been believing Christians.
The critical spirit manifested itself in the demand that every belief and every institution justify itself rationally, precisely the thing Descartes had said he would not do. It was a demand that logically applied to the entire Old Regime (the society of the period roughly from 1500 to 1800), which to a great extent justified its existence by the authority of tradition. The philosophes openly questioned the legitimacy of most institutions but questioned the monarchy only obliquely, partly out of fear of royal power, partly because some of them hoped that “enlightened despots” would use their authority to change society.
The philosophes made use of books, pamphlets, plays, caricatures, and every other kind of propaganda, with their great Encyclopedia—an attempt to present all available knowledge in a properly rationalistic way—especially effective. Mere fashion played a part in the acceptance of new ideas that seemed daring and exciting, as in the institution of the salon (“room”), a kind of party presided over by fashionable hostesses, where witty philosophes dazzled and amused many of the aristocracy and the clergy. (An index of the way in which fashion had invaded the Church was the bishops, including conscientious ones, who wore their miters perched on top of powdered wigs.)
Although the new ideas turned out to be subversive, at first the institutions of French life appeared so solid and secure that it seemed possible to throw verbal rocks at them without doing serious damage. Princes, including ecclesiastical princes, even used Enlightenment ideas of rationality and efficiency to justify imposing uniformity and order on their often quite diverse jurisdictions.
Enemies of Faith
The dominant intellectual figure of the age was François-Marie Arouet (d. 1778), who wrote under the name Voltaire. Like Descartes, he was educated by the Jesuits, but he soon abandoned Catholicism and came to see the Church as the chief enemy of mankind (“crush the infamous thing”), because in his opinion she exercised power through ignorance and superstition.
Religion was the creation of the “first knave and the first fool”, in the words of Marie-Jean Condorcet (d. 1794), a philosophe of noble birth, and its influence over society, especially in education, had to be destroyed. The Church’s influence included not only her authority over institutions of formal learning but, prior to the age of mass literacy and the popular press, the Sunday sermon, which was the chief means by which most people were exposed to ideas.
Since the philosophes placed their faith in reason, it followed that only the educated—the enlightened—could be trusted. Thus it was thought necessary that, while the process of enlightenment was going forward, the common people still had to undergo the discipline of supernatural religion. Voltaire even built a chapel for the peasants on his estate.
The philosophes encountered relatively little official repression, largely because the censorship machinery of the Church and the government was somewhat lax and inefficient. The official royal censor was actually sympathetic to new ideas, and much depended on a writer’s political and social connections. Voltaire went into exile several times and was several times thrown into prison, but when he died, in what turned out to be one the last years of the Old Regime, he was hailed as a great hero and buried in Paris in a triumphant kind of secular liturgy.
Although Voltaire recognized the force of both Pascal and Bossuet’s ideas, on the whole the philosophes, sensing that they were in the ascendancy, did not attempt to refute their opponents fairly. The aim of the Enlightenment was not toleration but the replacement of one kind of orthodoxy by another, demanding liberation from political and religious authority but by no means espousing complete freedom of expression. The philosophes themselves were quite willing to use repression, including appeals to the official censors, to silence their opponents.
Enlightened Catholics
Whereas the philosophes were driven by passionate conviction and an urgent sense of mission, for a time most Catholic intellectuals seem to have been complacent about the threat, and many, including clergy, were eager to prove that they too were enlightened. A group of Benedictines at the abbey of St. Germain in Paris complained of their monastic discipline and said they wanted to be known as scholars, not monks; students at the great Paris seminary of St. Sulpice rioted because they were not allowed to wear powdered wigs and attend the theatre. A seminarian tried to stab their rector, Jacques-André Emery (d. 1811), in his bed.
Even Benedict XIV at first praised some of Voltaire’s work, although he later condemned it. Voltaire dedicated his book on Muhammad to the Pope, who at first did not comprehend that Voltaire’s ridicule of Muslim beliefs as absurd was a way of insinuating the same thing about Christianity.
Although the philosophes savagely attacked the Jesuits as ignorant bigots, in general the Jesuits were better educated and more rigorous in their thinking than their opponents. At first, the Jesuits even greeted the Encyclopedia with qualified approval (some of it was in fact plagiarized from Jesuit writers), but then began compiling their own Dictionary, with the similar aim of making all knowledge available to the educated public.
Neo-Paganism
The Enlightenment sought to answer definitively the unanswered question of Renaissance Humanism that had been interrupted by the Reformation—whether ancient pagan culture had been superior to Christianity. The Old Testament was considered to be the chronicle of an uncivilized people, and attitudes toward Jesus ranged from seeing Him as a moral teacher whose doctrines had been distorted by His followers to seeing Him as a fraud or as self-deluded.
Edward Gibbon (d. 1794) was an Anglican who briefly became a Catholic, then a skeptic. His Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire endeavored to prove in massive detail that the triumph of the Church had been the triumph of ignorance and barbarism. (He partly built on the research of Catholic scholars like Mabillon, while ignoring their belief in a divine purpose in history.)
The Enlightened view of history was the story of the gradual emergence of mankind from barbarism, requiring that the old order be repeatedly destroyed in order to make room for “progress”—change that brought continuous improvement. Such progress, measured in worldly terms, was the highest good, replacing the salvation of souls, which was now condemned as a kind of deluded fanaticism. (Some philosophes did believe in personal immortality, but only in terms similar to those of ancient paganism.)
Deism
Most philosophes were Deists. Voltaire denounced atheism, because it would both make the universe unintelligible and encourage anarchy, and extolled “natural religion” or the “religion of reason”. Its principal difference with Christianity was its denial that there could be such a thing as divine revelation. “Worship” simply meant respecting the order of the universe, and men obeyed the divine will merely by adhering to that order.
Both Catholics and philosophes believed in natural law—that moral truth could be understood by reason. But Catholics saw immorality as inherent in fallen human nature, while the philosophes believed that it was merely the product of ignorance and tyranny. The philosophes made human happiness—understood in a worldly sense and restrained only by respect for the rights of others—the highest moral good.
A New Morality
There was a kind of Enlightenment “sexual revolution”, in which common violations of the Sixth Commandment were justified—pornography, for instance, for the first time became a thriving industry. But just as Machiavelli’s blunt extolling of naked power in a sense showed the limits of Renaissance Humanism, so the limits of the Enlightenment’s “natural man” were perhaps demonstrated by the infamous Marquis Donatien-Alphonse de Sade (d. 1814), who perpetrated rape and torture on servant girls and tried to elevate his vices into a philosophy of life (“sadism”). (He died in an asylum.)
“Natural Man”
The fundamental debate over human nature was complicated by the Jesuit-Jansenist split, in that the Jesuits agreed with the philosophes that there are natural human virtues. Orthodox Catholics could accept the idea of progress in a limited way, while insisting that a perfect society could never be achieved, while for Jansenists there could be no such thing as progress, since men were slaves to sin and all human effort was ultimately futile.
The Jansenists were almost the only people of the time who denied natural religion, and they charged that the Jesuits, by entertaining such an idea, made Christianity merely an option.
Certain political theorists, notably Hobbes and Locke, posited a “state of nature” that existed before there was organized human society, and some Enlightenment thinkers saw it as a perfect time, prior to later corruptions. The idea was carried to its furthest point by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d. 1778), born a Calvinist in Switzerland and briefly a Catholic, who repudiated the whole idea of sin and blamed society for all moral evil. He extolled the most primitive kind of existence as the most virtuous and authentic, a teaching he claimed to have found in Jesus’ warnings against worldliness. Thus, in addition to skeptical rationalism, Christianity was assailed by a kind of new religion that retained the religious instinct while repudiating Christianity.
Catholic Divisions
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had mounted a systematic and passionate attack on the Church and on the Old Regime in general. But in many ways, internal Catholic disputes were equally important.
In the seventeenth century, the Sorbonne professor Edmond Richer (d. 1631) asserted that parish priests, as the direct successors of Jesus’ seventy-two disciples, had authority independent of their bishops, an idea that carried Conciliarism one step further. Most German bishops were territorial princes who pursued their own interests above that of the Church and were anti-papal, including the prince-bishops of Trier, Mainz, and Cologne, who were electors of the Empire.
The German bishop Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (d. 1790), writing under the name of Justinus Febronius, revived conciliar theories, making the pope merely a kind of presiding officer in the Church and holding that diocesan bishops receive their authority directly from Christ. (He recanted after his work was condemned by Clement XIII [1758-1769].)
Febronius did not attribute religious authority to the state, but his ideas were readily adapted for that purpose. Like Gallicanism, Febronianism was a logical corollary of the idea of the absolute state: the prince has responsibility for the spiritual as well as material welfare of his people and therefore needs to have authority over the Church.
Enlightened Despotism
The Enlightenment’s contempt for traditions of all kinds appealed to self-consciously enlightened rulers who wanted to reorganize their realms in order to centralize their power and make it more efficient, a goal to which the Church, and especially the papacy, was at least a passive obstacle. Though not hostile to religion as such, these “enlightened despots” redrew diocesan and parochial boundaries to conform to the units of civil government, seized what they considered the Church’s excessive wealth in order to use it for other purposes, claimed authority over seminaries to ensure that priests would be properly “enlightened”, suppressed “superstitious” practices, and abolished holy days that interfered with productive labor.
In accord with the Enlightenment idea that the purpose of religion is the improvement of society, the monastic orders were a special target, because the contemplative life seemed idle and unproductive. (The nursing orders of nuns, on the other hand, were respected.)
As late as 1731, the prince-bishop of Salzburg in Austria expelled all Protestants from his domain, something he was entitled to do under the Peace of Westphalia. But Enlightenment reform programs usually included some degree of religious freedom, something that the Catholic clergy generally opposed.
In 1768, the diocesan Synod of Pistoia, Italy, meeting under the authority of the grand duke Leopold of Tuscany (1765-1792), officially espoused Jansenist doctrines about salvation, decreed the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, and proclaimed its essential independence from the papacy. After being condemned by Pius VI, Pistoia’s decrees were revoked, and the bishop, Scipione de’Ricci (d. 1810), was forced to resign.
Josephinism
Emperor Joseph II (1765-1790), Leopold’s brother, thought of himself as an enlightened despot and adopted Febronian principles so sweeping that Leopold dubbed him “the sacristan”, because he even went so far as to decree the number of candles on the altar at Mass.
Joseph closed seven hundred monasteries of contemplative religious, pruned the liturgical calendar, redrew diocesan boundaries, forbade the publication of papal bulls, and undertook supervision of the Catholic schools, including seminaries, a policy of state control of the Church that came to be called Josephinism. Although Joseph met with the increasing disapproval of his mother, Empress Maria Teresa (1740-1765; d. 1780), and although Pius VI traveled to Vienna in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade him from his policies, he usually had the cooperation of the bishops.
Because they went against deeply ingrained habits of piety, the religious programs of the enlightened despots were usually unpopular. The Synod of Pistoia was rejected by the people of the diocese, who drove De’Ricci out because of his attempt to suppress Marian and Sacred Heart devotions, and Austrian peasants later welcomed invading French armies, because the overthrow of their emperor permitted a return to traditional piety.
Assault on the Jesuits
Although as far as possible they followed Ignatius’ injunction to remain in the favor of princes (some served as confessors to kings), and although they educated the sons of the elite, the Jesuits were the target of increasingly aggressive hostility on the part of Catholic monarchs, because they were directly subject to the pope. The Jesuits were dubbed “Ultra-montanists” because their loyalty was “across the mountains” (Alps) and therefore a threat to the supremacy of the state.
Combining Enlightenment ideas with brutal ruthlessness, Portugal during the ministry of Sebastião de Carvalho e Mello, Marques de Pombal (d. 1782), in a sense foreshadowed the French Revolution, taking the lead in attacking the Jesuits. When an attempt was made on the king’s life in 1758, Pombal blamed the Jesuits and effected their wholesale expulsion or imprisonment. (One was even strangled and burned as a would-be regicide.)
Jansenism
In France, both king and pope condemned Jansenism, which gradually lost most of its aristocratic following but continued strong, with a few sympathetic bishops and a good deal of clerical support, especially in Paris. Sometimes violent divisions arose from the policy of some bishops, especially in Paris, of withholding the sacraments from anyone who would not affirm the papal condemnation of the movement. Jansenists appealed to the Parlement, which espoused the Jansenist cause as a way both of affirming Gallicanism and of putting a limit on royal power, making use of Jansenist grievances without sharing Jansenist beliefs.
Like most religious groups at the time, Jansenists did not espouse religious freedom for everyone but only for “the truth”, of which they were the sole possessors. Anti-Jansenist priests were arrested on the grounds that the denial of the sacraments was a violation of civil rights and a slander on those affected.
The Jansenists were closely watched by the police, but they managed to build a quasi-underground network, including an effective clandestine press that waged a propaganda war against both civil and ecclesiastical authority, contributing in no small measure to the undermining of authority that made the French Revolution possible. They allied themselves with the Parlement in attempting to check royal authority, with Gallicanism in rejecting much of papal authority, and with Richerism in undermining episcopal authority.
Jansenists claimed that God approved their movement by miraculous cures, and one such incident in Paris created such popular excitement that the government tried unsuccessfully to suppress its manifestations, which included apocalyptic prophecies and frenzied outbursts by people allegedly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Processions, either by Jansenists or their opponents, were a major way of publicly witnessing to controversial beliefs.
Partly because they were repeatedly condemned by Church authority, Jansenists emphasized a “spiritual” Church in which hierarchy was relatively unimportant. They relied heavily on lay leadership, encouraging lay people to read the Bible in the vernacular and use vernacular missals at Mass, practices that aroused further suspicion that they were crypto-Protestants. By their unremitting, and ultimately successful, hostility to the Jesuits, the Jansenists unwittingly aided the triumph of unbelief in France, since the Jesuits were by far the most effective defenders of orthodoxy.
The Suppression of the Jesuits
In 1761, the Parlement of Paris, the highest law court in France, forbade the Jesuits to accept new members and closed their schools, of which there were well over a hundred, far more than those of any other order. A few years later, Jesuit involvement in the Caribbean trade led to their being sued by various creditors, which gave the Parlement an opportunity to urge their expulsion from France as enemies of the crown. Virtually all the French bishops opposed the expulsion, but Louis XV reluctantly agreed, because he needed the Parlement’s help in his chronic financial troubles.
One by one, Catholic states began expelling the Society Clement XIII vigorously defended the Jesuits, but the Catholic powers continually increased their pressure, at one point temporarily seizing the papal territory of Avignon and hinting at the possibility of schism. Clement XIV was elected after a three-month conclave on which the princely enemies of the Jesuits brought strong pressure, and in 1773, he acquiesced in the Society’s suppression, something that went completely against the papacy’s own interests and once again demonstrated its impotence.
There were twenty-three thousand Jesuits at the time of the suppression. Many were imprisoned for years under harsh conditions, some herded onto ships and deposited on the shores of the Papal States, others receiving grudging sanctuary from various other governments. Ironically, the Society remained officially in existence only in Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia, whose rulers did not recognize the papal decree and who valued the Jesuits’ educational work.
The French Revolution
Before the Storm
Through all this, the monarchy was losing much of its spiritual charism, especially because Louis XV’s notorious adulteries, for which his Jesuit confessors, despite their reputation for laxity, refused him absolution. Louis was a sincere believer who accepted that he was unworthy, and his conspicuous failure to receive Communion raised fears that he and the kingdom no longer enjoyed divine favor.
Like his predecessors for many centuries, Louis XVI was crowned in ceremonies that symbolized the divine character of the monarchy. In contrast to his grandfather-predecessor, he led an exemplary life and at first won popular respect by, among other things, once again touching for the king’s evil. But the crown’s chronic financial crisis and worsening poverty among the common people, caused by a series of bad harvests, eroded that popularity.
Besides the complexities of the Jansenist controversy, the secular ideas of the Enlightenment had also been long discrediting established institutions and beliefs, although by 1789 most of the philosophes were dead and those who were not soon perished on the scaffold. Voltaire, relying on the power of persuasion and education, would probably not have approved of the hysterical passions that fed the Revolution. But, whatever Rousseau would have thought, his exaltation of spontaneous human emotion provided some justification for fanatical violence.
The Failure of Reform
While ideas served as its ultimate rationale, the Revolution would not have occurred when and how it did except for a specific concrete events that served as its trigger. Louis XVI was cautiously open to reform. The Old Regime was only fitfully repressive—its critics on the whole survived and even thrived, the hated Bastille had long since ceased to be a political prison, and in 1787, the government decreed religious toleration, something that most bishops opposed.
Because of his chronic financial deficits, in 1789, the king was reluctantly persuaded to summon the Estates General, France’s principal representative assembly, which had not been called since 1614. The meeting began with a solemn Mass of the Holy Spirit, and for a time, religious observances continued to be part of its proceedings. No one at the time foresaw the savage attack on the Church that would soon follow.
Of the three estates, the Third—commoners, mostly of the upper middle class—was reform-minded and sought to alleviate the financial crisis by depriving the nobility of their privileged exemption from taxes. Although the clergy were in principle also not taxed—instead they offered the king a periodic “free gift”—a substantial number of clergy in the First Estate also favored reform, as did some of the nobles in the Second.
The bad harvests of the 1780s caused serious want and much popular discontent. While the privileged members of the Estates General debated reform, riots broke out both in Paris (the destruction of the Bastille) and in the countryside, alarming the Estates and giving them a sense of urgency about change. Partly under the leadership of Talleyrand and two priests—Emmanuel Sieyes (d. 1836) and Henri Gregoire (d. 1830)—the Estates quickly abolished all feudal privileges and created a “constitutional monarchy”. An elected National Assembly, with Talleyrand as president, was given legislative power, and the king’s authority was limited—reforms whose enactment was celebrated with a solemn Te Deum. But there were unresolved issues: the practical one of the continuing financial crisis and the ideological one of the authority of the Church.
The Attack on the Church
The two issues were “resolved” by the same action—the seizure of the wealth of the Church, an action proposed by Talleyrand. As during the Reformation, the sale of church property, much of which was bought by devout Catholics, created a class of people who had a vested interest in the legitimacy of the new government. The Assembly also abolished tithes, which for many centuries had been the support of most of the clergy. With those gone, they were to be paid salaries by the government, a plan some of the lower clergy favored, hoping it might correct the imbalance of income between themselves and their superiors.
Here the opponents of the Church saw their opportunity: the clergy were in effect to become employees of the state. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which Louis XVI reluctantly signed but which Pius VI eventually condemned, required all priests to take an oath of loyalty to the government and to swear that they no had no higher loyalty, a provision specifically aimed at papal authority.
Gregoire, who had Jansenist sympathies, successfully proposed the abolition of all papal taxes in France, the same action that had begun Henry VIII’s break with Rome 250 years before. Bishops and priests were to be elected by laymen, including non-Catholics, and were subject to governmental supervision, while parish and diocesan maps were redrawn and a large number of dioceses suppressed.
Monasteries were virtually abolished, including those—Cluny, Citeaux, Clairvaux, all of them in a decayed state—that had played so formative a role in the history of the Church. Nuns were not required to take the oath, but their convents were officially disbanded. Some nuns were reduced to begging, but many communities existed as best they could, serving as clandestine centers of Catholic life. There was a concerted attack on clerical celibacy, partly on the grounds that priests had an obligation to produce children for France, partly because celibacy was recognized as a major source of the priestly charism. Many clergy soon married.
Education was secularized to the point where in time even former priests and religious were barred from teaching, so there would be no danger of inculcating “counterrevolutionary” ideas in the young. The Sorbonne—most of whose faculty having refused the oath—was closed.
The government also extended religious toleration, making non-Catholics fully equal to Catholics. Marriage was defined as a civil contract regulated by the government, and divorce was allowed for the first time.
The Civil Constitution, which Talleyrand later admitted was a mistake, split the nation, forcing people to choose between the rapidly evolving Revolution and their religious loyalties. Half the clergy—Trappists, Carthusians, and Capuchins in particular as well as 153 of the 160 bishops—refused to take the oath and were deprived of their offices. Thirty thousand of them, including most bishops, fled the country.
The other half took the oath, including Loménie de Brienne, Talleyrand, and Grégoire, who succeeded Talleyrand as president of the Assembly. A new group of “constitutional bishops” were named, including Grégoire, with Talleyrand presiding at their consecrations in order to provide apostolic succession. But in many places, the “constitutional clergy” were treated as intruders by their parishioners and even met with violence. Where acceptable priests were not available, lay people without access to the sacraments kept their faith alive through organized pious devotions.
Emery remained at his post after St. Sulpice was closed. He attempted to provide moral guidance to the clergy as to what might or might not be acceptable under the oath, advice that offended royalists by treating the revolutionary government as entitled to obedience from its subjects.
Vendée
In the Vendée region in the west, massive armed rebellion against the new revolutionary government broke out, plunging the area into a decade of civil war and terrorism in which 250,000 people perished. The uprising was initially provoked by the new policy of compulsory conscription of men into the army, but it also had deep religious roots. Although at first the clergy did not support the rebellion, they were soon among its leaders, as the rebellious armies marched into battle under banners of the Sacred Heart, singing hymns, sometimes with chaplains carrying the Blessed Sacrament. The Vendée rebels themselves sometimes committed brutal atrocities, but, in the first modern act of what could be called deliberate genocide, the revolutionary government set out virtually to exterminate the people of the Vendée, including mass drownings when individual executions proved too slow.
Attack on the Monarchy
The attack on the monarchy and the attack on the Church were intimately linked, since the king’s authority was said to be divinely conferred. At Rheims, revolutionaries destroyed the vial of holy oil—claimed to have originally been sent from Heaven—that for centuries had been used to anoint each new king.
In 1792, fearing that a conforming priest would not respect the seal of the confessional, the king demanded to go to confession to a priest who had not taken the oath. When this was refused, he and the royal family attempted to flee the kingdom, only to be caught, brought back to Paris, and imprisoned.
The aristocrats and clergy who had fled the kingdom raised the alarm in various European courts, especially Austria, the home of the French queen, Marie Antoinette. Louis’ unsuccessful flight, along with the approach of foreign armies determined to restore him to power, allowed the more radical revolutionaries, under the dominance of the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre (d. 1794), to demand absolute loyalty and to turn all disagreement into treason.
The Radical Revolution
Especially in Paris, popular radicalism was both spontaneous and organized, some of it financed by the duke of Orleans, who hoped to destabilize the monarchy so that he could become king. This radicalism was centered in the Jacobin Clubs—named for an abandoned monastery where they met—which roused the “little people” to action in the streets and enforced revolutionary orthodoxy. The club included priests, one of whom, the “red priest” Jacques Roux (d. 1794), led demands for economic equality.
The Terror
In the Reign of Terror, innumerable suspicious persons, including any priest who had not taken the oath, were systematically rounded up, some immediately killed by mobs, others subjected to speedy trials at the hands of revolutionary tribunals and carted off to the guillotine, which was the new, “efficient” instrument of mass execution.
Loyal Catholics were accused merely of the crime of “fanaticism”. Approximately five thousand priests were imprisoned at one time or another, many of whom never emerged alive. In contrast to the concern for efficiency symbolized by the guillotine, many died of disease while crammed into rotting ships. Nuns who continued to live in communities were subjected to mob violence and sometimes arrested, with sixteen Carmelites guillotined one by one as they chanted the Veni Creator (“Come, Creator Spirit”).8Lay people who were conspicuously devout or who harbored priests were also sometimes sentenced to death.
The king and queen were publicly executed, as was their daughter Elizabeth, who had once aspired to be a nun, while the Dauphin (crown prince) probably died in prison. A majority of the clerical members of the Assembly, all of whom had taken the oath, voted for the death of the royal family. But Talleyrand, whose uncanny ability to anticipate the course of events made him the most famous survivor in history, fled the country, and soon the Terror began to entrap revolutionaries who were considered deviant in some way.
“Dechristianization”
Even clergy who had taken the oath were now forbidden to exercise their ministries, and all churches were closed or converted to secular uses like stables. Most had their images defaced, and a few (notably the great abbey of Cluny) were razed completely. The tolerance granted Protestants and Jews was short-lived, as the revolutionary government soon forbade all religious practices except those cults created by the state itself.
Some ex-clergy, often claiming that they had been seduced into the priesthood while too young to understand, themselves became ruthless agents of repression. Eight “constitutional bishops” perished on the scaffold, and Loménie de Brienne committed suicide in prison. But Grégoire boldly continued to wear his episcopal robes and spoke out against the persecution of religion.
Refugee clergy and religious found themselves rebuffed or only grudgingly received in Catholic countries that feared the growing military power of France. In Italy, some Jansenist bishops were even sympathetic to the Revolution, and Francis II of Austria (1792-1835) thought the Civil Constitution compatible with Josephinism. Spain, where exiled French clergy set up a seminary, was more hospitable and, ironically, many refugees found a kindly welcome in England, where Catholics had only very recently been granted minimal official toleration. During the 1790s, there were seven thousand exiled priests in England, as compared to only three hundred natives.
Although there was an inevitable surge of atheism, Robespierre himself opposed irreligion and tried to purge atheists, because he considered Deism essential to forging a completely new moral order, even a new species of man. The Revolution attempted to establish an entirely new religion, making use of words like catechism, martyr, gospel, and missionary in ways connected with political orthodoxy. There was a new calendar, beginning with the year One, according to which Sundays were forbidden to be observed in any special way and fish could not be sold on Friday. New feasts and rituals were decreed, such as that of the Supreme Being.
The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris became the Temple of Reason, with an actress enthroned on the altar as a goddess, and the church of the Madeleine (Magdalen) was given the pagan name the Pantheon (“all the gods”) and made a burial place for national heroes. Saints’ names for children were abolished, especially in favor of classical pagan names like Brutus.
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”
Compulsory optimism was at the heart of the new creed, with the doctrine of Original Sin considered one of Christianity’s major errors. The Revolution promised the achievement of a perfect society and a perfect mankind.
Where the Gospel was not rejected altogether, it was said to teach the social equality of all men, something the Revolution was at last achieving. The revolutionary slogan “Liberty Equality, Fraternity” set in motion a fanatical drive to destroy all social ranks and was itself a major cause of the suppression of liberty. (Paradoxically, religious orders had to be forcibly suppressed because their vow of obedience was considered an intolerable infringement on liberty.)
The Directory
As some revolutionaries saw that even they were not safe from Robespierre’s ruthlessness, he himself became the target of a coup and perished on the guillotine in 1794. The Terror then subsided under a new government called the Directory. At first, limited religious toleration was restored, including the right to conduct schools, and the constitutional church, which satisfied few people, was left to fend for itself, without official status. But after a few years there was renewed repression, and when a French general was killed in Rome by a papal soldier, the French army took Pius VI prisoner and brought him to France, where he soon died.
The Age of Napoleon
By now, no one in France could command real authority, and civic order was precarious. The Directory was weak, and a successful military commander, Napoleon Bonaparte (d. 1821), organized yet another government—the Consulate—which he dominated. In this, he was aided by Sieyès, who had been repelled by the Terror, and by Talleyrand, who returned from exile after the fall of Robespierre. Napoleon was essentially a Deist and an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution, but he was also a realist who sought power above all and who tried to avoid the mistakes of the Directory, including its unpopular repression of religion.
An Uneasy Truce
Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) was elected at Venice, because Napoleon’s troops occupied Rome. Extraordinary for the time, the new pope had once stated that democracy could bring benefits to mankind. In 1801, the master papal diplomat Cardinal Ercole Consalvi (d. 1824) succeeded in negotiating a concordat (“agreement”) with Napoleon, a pragmatic settlement that sought to protect the interests of the Church as far as possible, without necessarily conceding legitimacy to the regime. (Originating in the Middle Ages, the concordat was a strategy that the Holy See would increasingly employ over the next century and a half.)
Both those Catholics who refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Revolution and those hard-core revolutionaries who wanted to crush the Church felt betrayed by the 1801 agreement. But the Pope and the First Counsel each saw advantages—for Napoleon, the end of religious strife in France and papal recognition of his legitimacy; for Pius, limited toleration for the Church and the defeat of both Gallicanism and the powerful prince-bishops of Germany, since by the terms of the Concordat the papacy alone represented the Church.
The constitutional church thus came to an end, with more than half its bishops submitting to the Pope and the rest either resigning or being deposed. But the Pope also had to agree to the resignation of those few remaining bishops who had originally rejected the Civil Constitution. The government would nominate new bishops, subject to papal ratification, and bishops would appoint lower clergy approved by the government. The diocesan boundaries drawn up under the constitution remained, and all bishops were to take an oath of loyalty to the state in which they swore to refrain from participating in any action “harmful to the public peace”.
Renewed Persecution
But, as has often been the case over the centuries, in the end papal diplomacy failed to save the Church from a determined secular power. In 1804, Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor of the French (1804-1815). Pius VII came to Paris to preside at the coronation, but Napoleon, not wishing to appear to receive his authority from the Church, placed the crown on his own head. (The legend that at the last moment he snatched the crown from the Pope’s hands appears to be untrue.)
Soon the emperor began to interpret the Concordat in increasingly restrictive ways and to press the papacy into an alliance against France’s enemies. When Pius continued to act independently, Napoleon seized the Papal States and brought the Pope forcibly to France, where he was bullied into making concessions that he soon repudiated. Pius then began rejecting imperial nominees for bishoprics.
Napoleon proclaimed his son King of Rome and made it clear that he intended to control the papacy as an arm of imperial policy. Along the way, Talleyrand once again fled France, and, bravely, the aged Emery was virtually alone in confronting the emperor to his face.
Wherever French armies were successful, Napoleon, who redrew the entire map of Europe, placed his relatives or close associates in power and imposed the principles of the Revolution, including restrictions on the Church and the seizure of church lands. He abolished the Holy Roman Empire, which became merely “Austria”, and unintentionally helped restore the integrity of the German hierarchy by abolishing the prince-bishoprics, thereby allowing the bishops to exercise better their primary duties as spiritual leaders.
During the Napoleonic occupation, the Spanish cortes, the chief legislative body of the kingdom, abolished the Inquisition and introduced other religious reforms, even though clergy made up a significant minority of the delegates. But on the whole, the Spanish, who now gave a name to the ancient tactic of “guerilla” fighting (“little warfare”), resisted Napoleon most fiercely, partly motivated by their Catholicism and often led by their priests, a large number of whom were arrested, killed, or deported.
The Fall of Napoleon
When Napoleon was defeated by the combined European powers in 1814, the Pope was able to return to Rome, only to be seized again when Napoleon regained his throne the following year. The aged Pope was released for the last time after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. But, alone among the European heads of state, Pius was willing to receive Napoleon’s mother and other relatives as refugees, and he interceded to try to make the conditions of Napoleon’s exile less severe.