ON March 12, in the year 1699, Pope Innocent XII. issued an Apostolic Constitution by which he condemned Archbishop Fénelon's Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints on the Interior Life, as containing propositions (of which twenty-three were expressly detailed), "temerarious, scandalous, ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, pernicious in practice, and even erroneous." The Pignatelli Pope is known to all students of English literature as the real hero of Browning's poem, The Ring and the Book, the man who fearlessly pronounces God's judgment on that human monster, Count Guido Franceschini, the murderer of his child-wife Pompilia. In Browning's poem the aged Pope records the popular estimate of himself as already, at the moment when he is called upon to pass judgment on the guilty Guido, "one of well-nigh decayed intelligence." True, he nobly belies that estimate by his part in the sordid drama of Arezzo as Browning pictures it, yet he is himself aware that he stands not "off the stage" indeed, but "close on the exit." Yet it was on the night of February [93] 21 , 1698, that he condemned the murderer. It was more than a year later, when the time of his exit was still nearer and in fact only a few months distant, that he condemned the man who, if never formally canonised and perhaps now never likely to be, deserved that honour more than very many who have been admitted to the roll of the Church's saints.

      Yet I do not wish to suggest that it was only because of some decay in Innocent XII.'s powers of judgment that Fénelon was condemned. There were certainly other reasons for that condemnation, less natural and pardonable. It was immediately the result of an intrigue, the motives of which were even more political than theological. But theological motives there were, the validity of which is not to be discredited beforehand by the two years of unworthy intrigue which were needed to give them effect. The truth is that in this judgment the Church was unconsciously yielding to the requirements of a definite, though I admit not then clearly realised, deflection of her interests and consequent policy. I must try, as briefly as I can, to indicate what I mean. Let me begin by drawing attention to a strange significance in the fact that in the last quarter of the seventeenth century we should have the first instance, so far as I know, of prayer, the very heart and centre of personal religion, being made the matter of an ecclesiastical decision. The inner life, the personal experience of a Divine intimacy with the soul, is the impregnable stronghold of [94] religious freedom. Every great historical religion has been forced to admit and to honour that fact. But none has admitted it more ungrudgingly, and honoured it with a fuller sense of its importance for the depth and reality of religion itself, than Christianity. We have seen, in the course of our enquiry, how, so long as Christendom continued to be a spontaneous unity, the saint, the specially holy person, fulfilled in it the rôle of a kind of court of final appeal. Official authority recognised, and even on occasion required, the guidance of a purely spiritual authority higher in kind than itself. All the institutional elements of religion were fully aware of their merely instrumental character. And not only so, but they were most ready to admit that their instrumentality was in some sort dispensable, that there were occasions when God communicated directly with the soul and wrought in it greater effects than were wont to come through the ordinary course of their functioning. There has, indeed, always been in the Church of the West much liberty of prophesying. It has gone even to excessive lengths in giving a kind of official sanction to all sorts of strange revelations, if only behind them there was the guarantee of a conspicuously holy life.

      Nor did the sixteenth-century breach in Christendom put an immediate term to that state of affairs. It was too much an ingrained religious habit and attitude to disappear lightly. Both in the Reform and in the Counter-Reform it persisted [95] in slightly different guise, alongside another movement in both towards the exaltation of official authority. The mystical type of religion which centres in the prayer-life continued to flourish, especially in Rome and in Lutheranism. In Calvinism, indeed, owing to the rigour of its external discipline, mysticism was much less at home, and was forced to find its opportunity in creating independent sects like the Quakers and Moravians. It is, however, with the Churches which remained true to the Roman obedience that we are now principally concerned. There, as we have seen, the Spanish Church, if it produced the Society which became, and indeed was by intention from the beginning, the great bulwark of official authority, produced also the Reformed Carmelites under S. Teresa and S. John of the Cross, and innumerable mystics of the same type, like S. Peter of Alcantara, Louis of Grenada, John of Avila, and Louis of Leon. And this latter seems to me the more characteristically Spanish type of religion and the more permanently influential upon the religious life of the later Roman Church as a whole. At the beginning of the seventeenth century it appeared in France, with the natural French modifications of what I may describe as a greater religious politesse, in S. Francis de Sales and his disciple S. Jeanne de Chantal. S. Francis, who died in 1622 at the age of fifty-five, exercised a quite incalculable influence upon French religion during the whole of the seventeenth century. "He brought back devotion" [96] says Bossuet, "to the secular world: but do not suppose," he continues, "that he disguised it to make it more agreeable to the eyes of the worldly. He brought it clothed in its natural dress, with its cross, its thorns, and its sufferings." Or, again, there is as evidence of the charm of his religious influence over his own and the next succeeding generations that fine and evidently heart-felt saying of S. Vincent de Paul: "The Bishop of Geneva was the Gospel talking to us." One noteworthy result of the influence of S. Francis and his introduction of the interior life into the secular world was the great vogue in seventeenth-century France of the spiritual director, the reinforcement and indeed practical supersession of the purely official function of the confessional by the more intimate guidance of souls through spiritual direction.

      S. Francis, then, may be said to have translated the spiritual dialect of S. John of the Cross into French. Religion in the sternness, the aloofness, the almost harsh detachment, native to the spiritual habit of the Spaniard, without losing any of its essential quality, takes on the charm, the winningness, the irresistible sympathy which are the peculiar heritage of the French genius. No, what S. Francis did at the beginning of the century, Fénelon did towards its close for another Spaniard. I am well aware that no Roman Catholic theologian who has a special reverence for Fénelon will easily tolerate any attempt to derive any aspect of his teaching from [97] the Molinistic doctrines which were condemned in 1687 by Pope Innocent XI. with such circumstances of ignominy and reprobation. Nor do I forget that no theologian of the time laid so sure a finger upon what was most certainly erroneous in the condemned propositions attributed to Molinos as did Fénelon. Yet outsiders like ourselves are not compelled by deference to the decisions of an alien authority to shirk the full force of the facts as they stand. And the facts are these. Of the sixty-eight propositions condemned by Innocent XI. as Molinism, not one of those which may be justly regarded as antinomian or immoral in tendency is to be found in any published work of Molinos. The works which were published by him, the Spiritual Guide in 1675 and the Brief Tractate in 1681, were approved by five theologians, four of whom were Consultors of the Holy Office. The five were the Archbishop of Reggio, the Minister-General of the Franciscans, two successive Generals of the Carmelites, and a distinguished Jesuit theologian of the Roman College. Further, Molinos was admitted to the friendship of Innocent XI. himself, and was the close friend and confidant of the deeply devout Cardinal Petrucci, Bishop of Jesi, and of innumerable other spiritually-minded persons in Rome. And again, when two Jesuit theologians of eminence first impugned the orthodoxy of the writings of Molinos and Petrucci, even though their criticism was marked by much moderation, it was their censure and not the object of it which [98] was condemned absoluté (without reservations) by a decree of the Holy Office. Finally, the Spiritual Guide is there for all to read, and to any reader who is at all familiar with the earlier mystics, and especially with the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, it discloses the fact that the author continually but reiterates, sometimes in hardly different language, the most characteristic teaching of S. Teresa, S. John of the Cross, S. Peter of Alcantara, S. Francis de Sales, and S. Jeanne de Chantal. It can be read in English, translated by the late Mrs. Arthur Lyttleton, and furnished by her with an introduction which certainly leaves nothing to be desired in the way of appreciation and of personal gratitude for the spiritual assistance she has found in it. Now, it is not possible to enter here upon any enquiry as to the reasons for the sudden and dramatic change by which the most popular religious figure in Rome became, without any change in his teaching or attitude, the object of its condemnation. It may, however, be permitted to quote for what it may be worth the contemporary explanation of our own Bishop Burnet, who was in Rome during the trial of Molinos. He says that the chief motives behind the indictment of Molinistic Quietism were to be found in the fact that, though the Quietists "were observed to become more strict in their lives, more retired and serious in their mental devotions, yet they were not so assiduous at Mass, not so earnest to procure Masses to be said for their friends; [99] nor so frequently either at Confession or in processions, so that the trade of those that live by these things was sensibly sunk." And perhaps I may conclude this bald account of a strange and painful episode in ecclesiastical history by quoting the judgment on the whole matter of one whose knowledge is almost unparalleled in its range and its closeness to detailed fact, and whose critical temper is impartial in the highest degree and sharpened to the finest edge of conscientiousness--I mean the Roman Catholic scholar, Baron Friedrich von Hügel: "The cruel injustice of many details and processes of the movement against the Quietists--a movement which soon had much of the character of a popular scare and panic, in reaction against a previous in part heedless enthusiasm--is beyond dispute or justification."

      Now, no one will question the direct influence of Molinos or of the group of mystics whose doctrine was shaped by the movement inaugurated by him--Petrucci, Falconi, Malaval--upon the famous Mme. Guyon; and it was Mme. Guyon, as everybody knows, who drew Fénelon into the Quietist controversy. It was in 1687 that Molinism was condemned. It was in 1688 that Mme. Guyon, just forty years old and already the author of her famous book, The Short and Very Easy Way of Prayer, first came into contact with Fénelon. She was at that moment in the highest possible favour with all that was most devout in the great world of Paris. She became [100] for a time the chosen spiritual guide of that little devout court which Mme. de Maintenon maintained at Marly as a spiritual refuge from the worldliness and distractions of the great Court of her husband, Louis XIV. For some five years, indeed up till the year 1693, her influence in devout circles seems to have been unchallenged. Then suddenly, as in the case of Molinos, the storm burst. The scrupulous and somewhat conventional piety of Mme. de Maintenon was alarmed by what seemed to her excessive and immoderate in the new type of devotion which was spreading everywhere, especially in her own religious foundation of St. Cyr. And her alarms were accentuated when she found that her own spiritual director, Godet de Marais, the Bishop of Chartres, a theologian of some eminence, was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the doctrine involved in the new devotion. Bossuet's aid was invoked by Mme. Guyon herself and at Fénelon's suggestion for an examination of her writings. After a long process, into the details of which I need not enter, certain positions which were considered dangerous in The Short Way of Prayer were condemned at the famous Conference of Issy. Mme. Guyon, while denying that what was erroneous in these positions was to be found in her writings, nevertheless made her submission, and the affair might have seemed at an end. But that was far from being the case. One of those who had taken part in the Conference of Issy was Fénelon. He had the more [101] readily assented to the decisions of that Conference because he honestly held that there was something excessive and blameworthy in the form of Mme. Guyon's statements, and also because its decisions were couched in positive rather than negative terms, were formally an assertion of true and authorised doctrine and only by implication a condemnation of what might be erroneous in Mme. Guyon's teaching. But on further reflection he felt that loyalty both to his friend and to the truth as he perceived it demanded that he should establish more clearly the traditional Christian doctrine about prayer to which Mme. Guyon's writings, with whatever pardonable excess, had witnessed. To this end he published, in 1697, his Maxims of the Saints, to which Bossuet replied in his treatise on the states of prayer. Reply and counter-reply followed over a space of two years, throughout which time a process to procure Fénelon's condemnation was being pushed at Rome by Bossuet's agents. Till the last moment the affair was in doubt, the Pope himself being personally friendly to Fénelon and assured of the essential orthodoxy of his doctrine, and always eager to effect, if possible, some compromise which might avert an open condemnation. One of Bossuet's agents, the Abbé Phélipeaux, testifies that on March 4, 1699, eight days only before the brief was issued, the Pope was "so irresolute and terrified that he sent him [Phélipeaux] to the President of the Holy Office to entreat him to consider seriously, [102] as in the presence of God, to what he was committing the Roman Church." Unnecessary to say the pathetic appeal of the aged pontiff had no effect, and Phélipeaux, writing to Bossuet, does not conceal his amusement at the old man's scruples of conscience any more than his exaltation at the firm stand of the Holy office which he himself, by long-continued intrigue and misrepresentation, had done so much to inspire. Yet Innocent II.'s scruples were well founded. In condemning Fénelon, the Roman Church was almost wantonly breaking with its most uniform and most respectable, nay, its most sublime, tradition--the tradition of its mystics, its unbroken tradition as to the nature, the motive, and the perfection of prayer. The condemnation was not easily obtained, and it is hardly possible to believe that it was obtained on the merits of the actual questions then submitted to the judgment of the Holy Office. No, there were deeper questions at issue to procure that condemnation--questions which could not be produced in any court, questions whose importance had hardly yet emerged into full consciousness in the Church's mind, questions which were as yet only silently at war in her own constitution. Already at the end of that seventeenth century the Church was beginning to be haunted by the dangers of her own ancient freedom, to be coerced by an inner necessity which she could not escape into asserting and buttressing her authority by any and every means. She had begun to suspect [103] even every free movement of her own inner life, however ancient and however necessary to her true spiritual character and function, as a possible challenge and menace to her official authority. Bishop Burnet was, no doubt, a not very sympathetic witness. We may even admit that he was a very prejudiced one where the Roman Church was concerned. But his shrewd observation at the time of the Molinos trial was probably not very wide of the mark. In all these condemnations with which we have been dealing, the Church was just beginning to yield to a fear which in the old days of her more vigorous life she could never have entertained--the fear that her authority was being endangered by her own inner spiritual freedom. The first symptoms of old age were creeping in upon her, and old age tends normally to become at once the fear of life and the fear of losing it. It shrinks from the further adventure of living, and it hardens itself instinctively against every threat of dissolution. It distrusts freedom, it accentuates bare authority.

      I would not, however, be understood to assert simply that there was no excuse for the intervention of authority in these high matters. In proportion, indeed, to their importance was the necessity imposed upon sufficient authority of safeguarding their adequate statement. And that the statement of them contained in the mystical writers was often excessive and perhaps erroneous few modern persons would be inclined to deny. But what does need saying, almost [104] without qualification, is that the defects of statement to be found in the new mystical doctrine arose for the most part out of the beliefs which were shared with the mystical writers by those who judged them; and, further, that those same defects appear in the writings of the earlier mystics which had been fully approved by the Church. Let me indicate more fully what I mean by such defects. In most mystical writers there are to be found continually accounts of immediate Divine revelations to them which they regard as simply miraculous. So altogether fantastic and bizarre are some of these stories that the ordinary man yields to his initial prejudice against the abnormal and refuses them all further credence or even consideration. They seem to him the confessions of the insane. Now, this conception of the simply miraculous character of those phenomena was shared in alike by those who had experience of them and by the official Church, or at least was generally accepted by the official Church without demur or reproval. And to some degree both the mystics and the official Church were right here as against the ordinary sceptical intelligence. The experiences to which I refer were by no means marks of insanity. They were often the vehicles of a quite extraordinarily sane and profound realisation of the Divine will. What could be more fundamentally sane than the wisdom of, say, S. Teresa or S. Catherine of Siena--a wisdom applied most fruitfully to practical affairs and yet derived, so at least these [105] saints were most fully assured, from revelations of a miraculous character? S. Catherine, for instance, held conversations with her Divine Lover for many years before the vision in which our Lord placed the ring of mystical espousal upon her finger. Yet she was never free from the fear that these communications might be a ruse of the enemy, and here is how her Lord gave her assurance in the matter. "I will teach thee," said the Voice she heard in her heart, "how to distinguish My visions from the visions of the enemy. My vision begins with terror, but always, as it grows, gives greater confidence; it begins with some bitterness, but always grows the more sweet. In the vision of the enemy the contrary happens, for in the beginning it seems to bring some gladness, confidence, or sweetness, but, as it proceeds, fear and bitterness grow continuously in the soul of whoso beholds it. Even so are My ways different from his ways. The way of penance and of My Commandments seemeth harsh and difficult in the beginning; but the more one walks therein, the more does it become easy and sweet; whereas the way of the vices appears in the beginning right delightful, but in its course becomes ever more bitter and more ruinous. But I will give thee another sign, more infallible and more certain. Be assured that, since I am Truth, there ever results from My visions a greater knowledge of truth in the soul; and, because the knowledge of truth is most necessary to her about Me and about [106] herself--that is, that she should know Me and know herself, from which knowledge it ever follows that she despises herself and honours Me, which is the proper office of humility--it is inevitable that from My visions the soul will become more humble, knowing herself better and despising her own vileness. In the visions of the enemy, the opposite happens; for, since he is the father of lies, and king over all the children of pride, and cannot give save what he has, from his visions there ever results in the soul a certain self-esteem or presumption on herself, which is the proper office of pride, and she remains swollen and puffed up. Thou, then, by ever examining thyself diligently, wilt be able to consider whence the vision has come, whether from the truth or from the lie; for truth always makes the soul humble, but the lie makes her proud." There is a whole treatise of moral theology of the rarest quality, and a quite extraordinarily true and illuminating knowledge of the human soul, given in that inner experience of S. Catherine. That it came to her as the revelation of a moment, as a Divine locution heard at a definite moment of time and in a definite place, is, the accident of her special apprehension of it. What matters to us is not that, but its essential truth. We honour the mystics; not because of their abnormal mode of receiving Divine truth, but because they did so often receive it in an unmistakably fuller and richer degree and of a rarer quality than do we ordinary people. And just because the truth [107] which they apprehend as to the soul and God and their living relations with each other is of this altogether higher and richer quality, we are compelled to regard it as given to them by a Divine inspiration which we must speak of as supernatural. But by supernatural we mean not a supersession and replacement of natural human processes, but an infinitely larger and fuller penetration of them by Divine power. And, again, when a speak of those who have attained to such truths as inspired, we do not mean that they have suspended, as it were, all natural effort of their own to seek God and allowed His Spirit to energise their inert and merely expectant faculties, but rather that it is because they seek Him more constantly and earnestly and with an intensified spiritual action that they are able to receive the universal movements of His Spirit towards us men with an infinitely greater fulness. The one conception of inspiration and revelation may be called miraculous, and it was common to all Christians till quite recently. The other, which a more accurate psychology forces upon us, we may call, in contradistinction to the miraculous, supernatural. And it is interesting to find that Baron von Hügel, in a recent address to members of the University of Oxford on "Christianity and the Supernatural," claims that in the controversy between Bossuet and Fénelon on the states of prayer, in which, of course, Bossuet was charging upon Fénelon the guilt of excessive statement, it was Bossuet who was really guilty and [108] Fénelon who was free from guilt in that regard. "Fénelon," he said, "towards the end, insisted against Bossuet (who found downright miracle in the more advanced states of prayer and of self-surrender) that the entire spiritual life, from its rudimentary beginnings up to its very highest grades and developments, was for him (Fénelon) essentially and increasingly supernatural, but at no point essentially miraculous."

      What I want specially to insist on is that in all this controversy there was no ultimate disagreement as to the nature and perfection of prayer. Bossuet admitted as fully as Fénelon himself that prayer was essentially what S. Thomas had described it, an "ascensio mentis in Deum." Indeed, I cannot remember in all Christian literature a more scathing condemnation of the popular degradation of prayer into a blasphemous and superstitious attempt--I am not going beyond Bossuet's own characterisation of it--to make God the instrument of our own interested desires, than is contained in a sermon of his on devotion to the Blessed Virgin. And, again, he admits as freely as does Fénelon that the perfection of prayer is to be found in those extraordinary states experienced by the mystics in which the soul seems so to be absorbed into the Divine will as to lose all sense of separateness of desire and purpose. Where difference did really arise between them was in the question of the motive of prayer. That was the nerve of the Bossuet-Fénelon controversy. And here again, [109] remember, what was nominally in dispute was the question of interpretation. Good Catholic theologians both of them, they accepted fully the tradition of the elders and contended only as to how that tradition might most correctly be interpreted. They were, no doubt, more or less consciously deceiving themselves there, for even in interpreting others we necessarily betray our own predilictions. And it certainly was so in this case. Bossuet was the last person in the world to reduce or accommodate Christian doctrine. But he was, after all, the theologian of common sense. He had the French seriousness, but he had also the French distrust of enthusiasm, and he was utterly free from the sentimentality which in the French nature so often takes the place of enthusiasm. If, theologically, Bossuet was far from Jansenism, he had much of the spiritual temper of the Jansenist. To him the motive of prayer on which Fénelon insisted as not only the highest but the only ultimately worthy motive seemed a mere illusion. That motive was the pure, disinterested love of God, such love as could transcend, and in its perfection must transcend, even the desire of our own salvation. Now here there can be no doubt that Fénelon was more correctly interpreting the real tradition of the saints. Bossuet's argument from the very beginning of his instruction on the states of prayer, in spite of its extraordinary acuteness and force, labours under a difficulty which he can never successfully evade or [110] overcome. The weight of tradition is against him. He has continually to admit that it is only by benign interpretation that the actual words of those whose authority in this matter the Church had consecrated can now be accepted. It is a strange rôle to which this most redoubtable champion of tradition finds himself condemned--that of continually explaining away the clearest statements of tradition. Whether Bossuet was right or not in his contention that we cannot love God save in so far as we love our own salvation, that we cannot desire God's will to be done save in so far as we directly and consciously conceive of that will as implying our own salvation, it is at least quite certain that he is not supported by the authorities he is compelled to accept and professes to interpret. It is useless for him to labour, as he does continually, the point that the Divine will necessarily includes our salvation. None of the saints or the mystics ever denied it, because it is undeniable. Nor did they deny that ordinarily the desire of our own salvation enters into our every thought of God, our every prayer to God. But, at the same time, they asserted, and asserted out of the experience of their own souls striving to be and to remain true to God, that love is not love unless it is completely disinterested, that to love God is to love His will for its own sake; to love it because, however it may affect us, it is the supreme and utterly satisfying good; to love it therefore, as it were, independently and in complete forgetfulness of [111] our phenomenal selves and of all the immediate instincts, prejudices, requirements of those selves. It was, they asserted, in that transcendence of self, however difficult to attain, that one became aware of real communion with God. That disinterested desire that the Divine will should prevail was the only wholly pure motive of prayer, and could in some sort be recognised as a motive even by the simplest soul. And with the saints that pure love of God which utterly transcended the thought of self was no mere devotion to some shadowy ideal of perfection, even if Divine. It could be warm with the love of all creatures. If it could transcend the conscious thought of one's own salvation, it could embrace also the passionate desire for the salvation of others, the self-offering for their sake. "How could I be content, Lord," cries S. Catherine of Siena, "if any one of those who have been created in Thy image and likeness, even as I, should perish and be taken out of my hands? I would not in any wise that even one should be lost of my brethren, who are bound to me by nature and by grace. Better were it for me that all should be saved, and I alone (saving ever Thy charity) should sustain the pains of Hell, than that I should be in Paradise, and all they perish damned: for greater honour and glory of Thy name would it be." The expression may seem to us fantastic, but the substance of the thought and feeling is abundantly real, and true to our highest spiritual instincts. Fénelon felt the reality, and dared not [112] conceal his witness to it. He recognised the love "that seeketh not its own" as alone worthy to be offered to God and alone worthy of man at his best to offer. Bossuet instinctively shrank from such experience as fantastic and unreal, and thereby proclaimed himself the lesser soul. [113]

[PCT 91-113]