April 1978 Print

Kent Emery, Jr.

Since the French Revolution, open warfare between the forces of liberalism and the forces of tradition has afflicted the Church. The liberal Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops aptly delineates the terms of conflict facing the Church after the initial wave of Revolution had subsided:

Two problems called for solution, one concerning the nature and another the origin of that crisis which has caused so much upheaval. First, was the Revolution a movement intrinsically perverse, tainting the legitimate order of the world, a sacrilegious rebellion on the part of man against the whole divine content of an age-old tradition? Or, as its supporters maintained, did it mark the promotion of certain fundamental human values hitherto despised—Justice and Liberty? Second, was it a fortuitous incident, a rupture brought about by the conspiracy of a few evil minds, or a gigantic phenomenon whose causes must be sought in a remote past...? Conceptions of the order to be rebuilt would naturally depend on the answers to those two questions. If the Revolution were a satanic enterprise, a revolt of man against God, there of course could be no thought of accepting any of its principles. But if it were the result of an evolution extending over almost a thousand years, it would be absurd to treat it as null and void. (The Church in an Age of Revolution, 1789-1870 [Garden City, 1967], pp. 160-161).

Through the reign of St. Pius X, the Popes answered these questions unambiguously. The Revolution was satanic, a revolt of man against God, and thus null and void. In the twentieth century, as the events of 1789 receded further into the past, Church authorities, although not confirming the principles of revolution, were more tolerant of their espousal and application to the social order. Thus, where the initial hurricane failed, gradual erosion succeeded. In Vatican II, Catholic liberalism won a total victory, a victory now being solidified in the policies of Paul VI.

After the calamities of the Revolution and the tyranny of Napoleon, Europe grew weary of the new ideas and their false promise. The Hapsburg minister Metterich and other diplomats attempted to re-establish social order on the principles of legitimacy and hierarchy. As a consequence, monarchs regained authority in many countries. In 1814, the Bourbon Louis XVIII assumed in France both the throne and the ancient title, The Most Christian King. Louis XVIII, and his successor Charles X, recognized Catholicism as the State religion.

The restoration of the monarchy enabled French Catholics once again to teach and live their Faith freely, and to revive religious orders and other Catholic institutions. Relations between the Church and the temporal order in France were not perfect, as they seldom are anywhere. The monarchy and its ministers tended to view the Church as an instrument of temporal order, ignoring the Church's role as a guide to supernatural ends that far transcend natural ones. This attitude, of course, is not novel. Throughout its history, the Church has confronted it in dealing with temporal rulers. Moreover, the French episcopacy was largely Gallican as before, claiming as much independence from Roman authority as possible. Finally, the laity was influenced by such spiritual and temporal rule. Catholics tend to express their piety in isolation from the day-to-day business of the world.

Generally, nevertheless, Rome was happy with the restoration. The restored temporal order was not inimical to the supernatural; grace and Revelation were not debarred from the public forum. Given the freedom to teach and live, the Church could rely on grace and the creation of new saints to clarify the minds and mollify the hearts of men, not least those who possessed legitimate, God-bestowed authority. If Rome was generally satisfied, however, other impatient spirits in the Church were not. The most influential of these was the brilliant journalist, Robert Felicité de Lamennais (1782-1854).

Lamennais almost perfectly represents the romantic reaction to the philosophes of the Enlightenment. The philosophes had loosed reason from its mediaeval moorings in Faith, and had conceived morality without grace. These conceptions were doomed to fail, for the cosmos is far larger than man's capacity to understand. Furthermore, the malicious horrors of the Revolution dashed the belief that human evil was solely the result of inadequate education. Whilst reacting to Enlightenment platitudes, however, romantics threw out baby and bath. Rather than putting reason in its proper place subordinate to Faith, they rejected reason altogether. But if they spurned reason, most romantics did not neglect religion. They celebrated religion insofar that they considered it irrational, emerging, like other noble sentiments, from the well of emotional experience. The romantics thus founded religion on the most infirm ground, human sentiment. Their good intentions have paved for many the road to hell.

As a child Lamennais already exhibited the romantic habit of melancholy. He withdrew from his family and peers, preferring the solitude of his uncle's library. There he read "voraciously and indiscriminately." Whereas he came to despise the philosophes, he was captivated by the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Lamennais's undisciplined mind, like others in his generation, did not see that Rousseau's Pelagian optimism was the same as the philosophes' although translated to a different sphere of human psychology. Thus, in order to remedy the Enlightenment disease, Lamennais imbibed poison.

Lamennais's distaste for the arrogance of human reason, the result if not the intent of Descartes's philosophic exercises, was just. In fairness, it must be said that Descartes's speculations were not rooted in irreligion. The saintly and mystical founder of the French Oratory, Pierre de Berulle (1575-1629), had encouraged Descartes's efforts, hoping that they would affirm God's transcendence in His dealings with men. In his proof of God's existence Descartes followed an ancient tradition of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Bonaventure. A later Oratorian, Malebranche, developed from Cartesian principles a thoroughly Christian if thoroughly vulnerable metaphysics. Descartes's philosophy, none the less, is wounded mortally by a fallacious general principle. He did not understand, as mediaeval scholastics did, that the acquisitions of human reason were the effect of collective effort guided by Revelation, in other words, of tradition. Descartes thought wrongly that one could construct a true vision of the world from his own individual reason and intuition. This idea had frightful consequences, for it led to pure intellectual subjectivity and perverse conclusions among impious men (See E. Gilson , La Liberte chez Descartes et la theologie [Paris, 1913]; God and Philosophy [New Haven, 1941]; Henri Gouhier, La Pensée religieuse de Descartes [Paris, 1924]; Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers [1929, rp. N.Y., 1970]).

Lamennais seems to have discerned this consequential weakness in rationalist thought. Therefore, in order to overcome rationalist individualism, Lamennais turned to tradition. In doing so, however, he conceived a new, irrational, and tyrannical notion of tradition. Significantly, Lamennais's contemporary in England, John Henry Newman, another romantic reactionary, developed a similar (but more tortuous) understanding. Indeed, Newman so saw himself in Lamennais, that when the latter's thought was eventually condemned, he felt constrained to separate himself, tepidly and ineffectually, from the French thinker (H. L. Weatherby, Cardinal Newman in His Age [Nashville, 1973], pp. 254-257). In our day, with more subtlety, theologians such as Yves Congar continue to expound a romantic traditionalism. Worse, Vatican II virtually sanctioned the new idea of tradition. Not surprisingly, therefore, it holds sway among most establishment theologians.

After several years of internal struggle, Felicité de Lamennais was ordained priest in 1817. In the same year he published the first volume of his Essai sur l'indifférence en matière de religion, wherein he castigated the idea that society could be conducted without the continual, governing influence of religion, particularly Catholic religion. This work brought Lamennais instant fame. He was hailed, inappropriately, as a new Pascal or Bossuet. Subsequent volumes to the Essai, however, cast suspicion on Lamennais's virtue as Catholic apologist.

In these later volumes, Lamennais attempted to give some philosophic foundation to the mostly historical observations of his first volume. Reacting to Cartesian rationalism, Lamennais argued that certitude cannot be achieved by individual human reason. Certitude, rather, is the product of the historical consensus of mankind, what Lamennais called common sense. Such certitude is found, not only in the tradition of the Church, but in the overall tradition of mankind. "The true religion," Lamennais says, "is that which can put forth on its own behalf the greatest number of witnesses." This religion is Catholicism (Cath. Enc., VIII, 762-763). Conscious or not of the implications, Lamennais proposed a democratic, majoritarian, and positivistic understanding of tradition. His facts, of course, are doubtful: is it true that Catholicism can claim the greatest number of witnesses? When one realises the doubtfulness of this fact, and still maintains the principle, he will eventually posit a world religion based on a common denominator of belief. This Lamennais did at the end of his career, outside the Church. This also seems to be the tacit principle of the Secretariat of Christian (and Religious) Unity.

We have already suggested similarities between Lamennais's and Newman's understanding of tradition. Both believe that dogma develops, not as the result of Faith relentlessly seeking understanding, but in response, negative or positive, to a vague spirit of the times. This interpretation accords with a deep distrust of the intellect, evident in other prejudices Lamennais shares with his romantic counterpart in England. Like Newman, Lamennais was unimpressed by all but one (the majoritarian) of Thomas Aquinas's philosophic demonstrations for the existence of God. He dismissed Thomas's strongest arguments based on movement, contingency, and order of the created world. It was easy for Lamennais's critics to point out that if individual human reason could not produce certitude, a plethora of human reasoners could not. Lamennais, however, was impervious to such criticisms, for in speaking of the consensus of tradition, he was not really speaking of reason at all. In reality, he believed that the purported universal testimony of mankind was founded on a general sentiment, a general will. Lamennais defined tradition in the terms of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau's superficially benign, democratic ideas ultimately lead to tyranny. Some authority, individual or oligarchic, and of necessity "prophetic," must interpret and enforce the general will. On this point Lamennais was not remiss. In the terminology of the day he was ultramontane, conferring on the Pope absolute authority. Lamennais's intrepid hatred of French Gallican bishops helped him reach this conclusion. As we should suspect, Lamennais did not conceive papal authority hierarchically, but democratically. For Lamennais, the Pope was "the expression of the universal will of man, the trustee of the entire human race" (Daniel-Rops, p. 222). Anyone who has read Jean Guitton's encomium of Paul VI will be aware how strong this sentiment is in the breast of the supreme pontiff now reigning. On the other hand, Lamennais was stunned when the Popes of his day refused the authority he conferred upon them in the terms in which he offered it.

Before he left the Church, Lamennais carried his notion of papal power to its conclusions. In effect, the Pope possessed no real authority since he was subject to the movements and evolution of the general will, "extending over almost a thousand years," or, in the cant of our day, to the "signs of the times." Newman, thinking in the same fashion, was reluctantly confident that Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors could not finally impede the irrepressible spirit of the age (Weatherby, pp. 1-10, 256-257).

Lamennais advanced a specious traditionalism and papalism which has inspired Catholic liberals ever since. The Popes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, accurately judged Lamennais's ideas and their issue. Thus, they repeatedly condemned the idea that the existence of God could not be demonstrated by human reason. The truth that it could was solemnly defined in Vatican Council I. St. Pius X stressed this point in his various frontal attacks on modernism. So did Leo XIII when he established the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas as the touchstone of orthodoxy (Aeterni Patris, 1879). Finally, not only the intellectual pride of the Enlightenment, but papal mystagoguery like that taught by Lamennais was rejected in the first Vatican Council's declaration on Papal Infallibility.

In future articles I shall trace the further career of Lamennais's thought as he applied it to the life of the Church in his day. Lamennais, indeed, encapsulates the inevitable course of Catholic liberalism from its faulty premises to its pernicious conclusions. Whereas many Catholic liberals, like Newman, withdrew by acts of piety and will from the implications of their own thought, Lamennais did not. To their glory or damnation, Frenchmen are not afflicted by the hobgoblin of an inconsistent mind.