Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

“ BY ADOLPHE COHN
aques Bénigne Bossuet, sacred orator, historian, theologian, and controversialist, was born in Dijon, capital of the then Burgundy, on September 27th, 1627. There is no question but he is the greatest Catholic divine whom France ever knew, and one of the greatest, some say the greatest, of prose writers and orators of that country. His importance in the literary history of France is due, moreover, not simply to the high excellence of his productions, but fully as much to their representative character. ”

“ In France, Spain, Portugal, and a large part of Italy, all through the seventeenth century, the youth were trained in the maxim—the Prince is the State, and his pleasure is law. Bossuet, in his politics, did only faithfully express the political sentiments and convictions of his age, shared by the great body of Catholics as well as of non-Catholics. Rational liberty had few defenders, and they were excluded, like Fenelon, from the Court. ”

“ Quietism," the melancholy and fluctuating history of which may be best embraced under that of Fenelon. Bossuet, by his attitude, alike unjust and ungenerous, has left an indelible stain upon his otherwise brilliant reputation, while the man for whose condemnation he resorted to violence and intrigue con ducted himself with the meekness and charity of a saint. Attacked by a painful disorder, of which the premonitory symptoms appeared in 1696, the venerable prelate lingered on until the 12th of April 1704, when he died at Paris in his 77th year, amid the tokens of universal regret. ”

“ I have since examined the originals with a more discerning eye, and shall not hesitate to pronounce, that Bossuet is indeed a master of all the weapons of controversy. In the Exposition, a specious apology, the orator assumes, with consummate art, the tone of candour and simplicity; and the ten-horned monster is transformed, at his magic touch, into the milk-white hind, who must be loved as soon as she is seen. In the History, a bold and well-aimed attack, he displays, with a happy mixture of narrative and argument, the faults and follies, the changes and contradictions of our first reformers ”

“ The labor was in vain; the very loftiness of his genius, the extent and profundity of his views, rendered Bossuet unfit to get at the heart and mind of a boy who was timid, idle, and kept in fear by the king as well as by his governor. The dauphin was nineteen when his marriage restored Bossuet to the church and to the world; the king appointed him almoner to the dauphiness, and, before long, Bishop of Meaux. ”

“ It was a logical thing for him, as loyal Catholic, to do; and he did it with a beautiful grace of humility. The Protestant spirit, however, rebels on his behalf, and finds it difficult even to admire the manner in which was done by him a thing that seems so unfit to have been done by him at all. Bossuet did not long survive his inglorious triumph over so much sanctity of personal character, over so much difficult and beautiful height of doctrinal and practical instruction to virtue. Fénelon seems to have been [212] reported as preaching a funeral sermon on the dead prelate. ”

“ How as nothing are we when we are so near Him, and when the veil which conceals Him from us is about to lift!” [OEuvres de Fenelon, Lettres Spirituelles, xxv. 128.]
So many fires smouldering in the hearts, so many different struggles going on in the souls, that sought to manifest their personal and independent life have often caused forgetfulness of the great mass of the faithful who were neither Jansenists nor Quietists. Bossuet was the real head and the pride of the great Catholic church of France in the seventeenth century ”

“ The spirit of these compositions is fairly reflected in the most famous and often quoted of their phrases, the opening “Mes frères, Dieu seul est grand” of Massillon’s funeral discourse on Louis XIV.; and though panegyric is necessarily by no means absent, it is rarely carried beyond bounds. While Bossuet made himself chiefly remarkable in his sermons and in his writings by an almost Hebraic grandeur and rudeness, the more special characteristics of Christianity, largely alloyed with a Greek and Platonic Fénelon. ”

“ Fenelon died at Cambray, January 7, 1715, aged 64, some years after the death of Bossuet, his antagonist, and shortly before the death of his royal patron and persecutor, Louis XIV. The conscience of Christendom has already judged between the two parties. Never was the spirit of the good archbishop more powerful than now. Whilst ambitious ecclesiastics may honor more the name of Bossuet, the heart of France has embalmed in its affections the name of his victim, and our common humanity has incorporated him into its body. ”

“ In lending himself to these singular exercises and to these tournaments where his person and his gifts were challenged, treated as an intellectual virtuoso in the salons of the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Hôtel de Nevers, it does not appear that Bossuet was in consequence subjected to the slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a precocious genius so praised, caressed by the world, and remaining so perfectly exempt from all self-love and from all coquetry. ”

“ Has it not sometimes seemed as if ambitious prelacy had forgotten the purer example for the baser, and copied Bossuet's pride instead of Fenelon's charity? Nay, has not priestly assumption coveted the talons and forgotten the wings of the Eagle of Meaux and lost sight wholly of the Dove of Cambray? What government or ruler in Christendom would not be the better for a counsellor as eloquent and fearless as he who dared rebuke without reserve the great Louis of France in words like these:
"You do not love God; you do not even fear him but with a slave's fear ”

“ The lack of formal perfection which is sometimes noticeable in him is made up to a greater degree almost than in any other writer by the intense force and conviction of the speaker and the imposing majesty of his manner. It is pretty certain that most attempts to imitate Bossuet would result in a lamentable failure; and it is not a little significant that the only two Frenchmen who in prose have shown themselves occasionally his rivals, Michelet and Lamennais, are among the most unequal of writers. ”

“ He was a born logician, as Bossuet was a born priest, loving to dispute as much as the Bishop of Meaux loved to preach; not a serious man, but a bright man, ready, keen, acute, turning fools into ridicule, and pushing acknowledged doctrines into absurdity; not to bring out the truth as Socrates did, or furnish a sure foundation of knowledge, but to revolutionize and overturn. His spirit was like that of Lucien,--desiring to demolish, without substituting anything for the dogmas he had made ridiculous. ”

“ Bossuet's individual distinction is, that he was a great man as well as a great orator; Bourdaloue's, that he was priest-and-preacher simply; Massillon's, that his sermons, regarded quite independently of their subject, their matter, their occasion, regarded merely as masterpieces of pure and classic style, became at once, and permanently became, a part of French literature.
The greatness of Bossuet is an article in the French national creed. No Frenchman disputes it; no Frenchman, indeed, but proclaims it. Protestant agrees with Catholic, infidel with Christian, at least in this. ”

“ In 1671 he was appointed bishop of Tulle; eight years later he was transferred to the larger diocese of Agen. He still continued, however, to preach regularly at court, being especially in request for funeral orations. A panegyric on Turenne, delivered in 1675, is considered his masterpiece. His style is strongly tinged with préciosité; and his chief surviving interest is as a glaring example of the evils from which Bossuet delivered the French pulpit. During his later years he devoted himself entirely to his pastoral duties at Agen, where he died in 1703. ”

“ Bossuet can only be thought of as the high-priest of authority and common-sense; but Fénelon has been made by turns into a sentimentalist, a mystical saint, an 18th-century philosophe, an ultramontane churchman and a hysterical hypocrite. ”

“ The critic characterizes his subject broadly by his most commanding traits:
The simple idea of order, of authority, of unity, of the continual government of Providence, Bossuet, among the moderns, has grasped more completely than any other man, and he applies it on all occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an irrefutable deduction. Bossuet is the Hebrew genius, expanded, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the gains of the human intelligence, but acknowledging something of sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely at the point where its light ceases. ”

“ It seems hardly possible that one of the greatest intellects of a period so near us could have been so doubly deceived. Yet Bossuet, the glory of the French Church, one of the keenest and strongest of thinkers, not only mingled Scripture with astronomy, and opposed the Copernican theory, but also mingled Scripture with political economy, and denounced the lending of money at interest. ”

“ Something was said upon the subject of Jansenism, indeed, as they walked along; and Bossuet replied, smiling,--
"Heaven forbid that those discussions should be renewed! I abhor controversy, and always avoid it, except when driven to it. I am anxious indeed, most anxious, that all men should see and renounce errors, and especially anxious, as I am in duty bound, when those errors are of such a nature as to affect their eternal salvation. But very little good, I doubt, has ever been done by controversy, though certainly still less by persecution ”

“ Another reason is that Dr Kenney is the author of a volume which contains a readable digest of Claude’s Pamphlet on the Persecution in France, and of the controversy between Bossuet and the Huguenots, in which Archbishop Wake so ably and gallantly wielded his pen. ”

“ Bossuet no doubt is more of a speaker than a writer. His excellence lies in the wonderful survey, and grasp of the subject (qualities which make his favourite literary nickname of the 'Eagle of Meaux' more than usually appropriate) , in the contagious enthusiasm and energy with which he attacks his point, in his inexhaustible metaphors and comparisons. He has not the unfailing charm of Malebranche, nor that which belongs in a less degree, and with more mannerism, to Fénelon; he is very unequal, and small blemishes of style abound in him. ”

“ Purely as a master of prose Bossuet stands in the first rank. His style is broad, massive, and luminous; and the great bulk of his writing is remarkable more for its measured strength than for its ornament. Yet at times the warm spirit of the artist, glowing through the well-ordered phrases, diffuses an extraordinary splendour. When, in his Méditations sur l'Evangile or his Elévations sur les Mystères, Bossuet unrolls the narratives of the Bible or meditates upon the mysteries of his religion, his language takes on the colours of poetry and soars on the steady wings of an exalted imagination. ”

“ In 1627, four years after Pascal, and, like him, in a family of the long robe, was born, at Dijon, his only rival in that great art of writing prose which established the superiority of the French language. At sixteen, Bossuet preached his first sermon in the drawing-room of Madame de Rambouillet, and the great Conde was pleased to attend his theological examinations. He was already famous at court as a preacher and a polemist when the king gave him the title of Bishop of Condom, almost immediately inviting him to become preceptor to the dauphin. ”

“ About the same time Fenelon, engaged upon the missions in Poitou, being as much convinced as the Bishop of Meaux of a sovereign’s rights over the conscience of the faithful, as well as of the terrible danger of hypocrisy, wrote to Bossuet, telling him that he had demanded the withdrawal of the troops in all the districts he was visiting: “It is no light matter to change the sentiments of a whole people. ”

“ But French literature was certainly the gainer by the appointment of Bossuet to the post of tutor to the Prince. Three of his most remarkable works--his 'Discourse upon Universal History,' his 'Policy according to the Holy Writ,' and his 'Treatise on the Knowledge of God and Man'--were written especially for the Dauphin, and read by him as textbooks a long time before their publication. The opening sentence of the 'Discourse' tells us clearly the author's purpose: "Were history useless to other men, it would still be necessary to have it studied by princes." ”

“ BOSSUET AND THE PREACHERS—FÉNELON
I
"A man set under authority"—these words, better than any other, define Bossuet. Above him was God, represented in things spiritual by the Catholic Church, in things temporal by the French monarchy; below him were the faithful confided to his charge, and those who would lead the faithful astray from the path of obedience and tradition. Duty to what was above him, duty to those placed under him, made up the whole of Bossuet's life. To maintain, to defend, to extend the tradition he had received, was the first of duties. ”

“ Bossuet is even a more striking instance of a mind equally capable of the deepest philosophy and of the sublimest poetry, had the circumstances of his life given him a more definite impulse in either direction. ”