however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom
rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé
Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L'indifférence en
matière de religion (4 vols. 1818-24), resorting to the old Catholic
device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against
unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses and
the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he proceeded
in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of the consensus
universalis, the authority of the majority, the least reflective and
the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a kind of corporate
wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he marched straight
into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a confirmation
of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which claimed to
put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the thesis
was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.
Damiron, writing his Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en
France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than
reassuring, commenting on the "strange skepticism" of Lamennais as
to the human reason. [1968] For himself, he takes up the parable of
Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had
now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of
when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. "In
this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the
Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall
be Christians and something more." The theologian of the future will
be half-physicist, half-philosopher. "We shall study God through
nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary
to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our
natural lights." Christianity has been a useful discipline; but "our
education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers;
and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from
science." [1969] "Prayer is good, doubtless," but it "has only a
mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment." [1970] All
this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not
to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured
to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under
the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment
of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne's, the
expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but
surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to
prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity
that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among
the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in
particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering
ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant
till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven;
and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.
Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur
l'état de l'église had been suppressed by Napoleon's police; in 1814
he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught
mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims; and in the
Hundred Days of 1815 he took flight to London. His mind was always at
work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need of a conviction;
with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize; with indifference
he could not; but when the indifference was by his own account the
result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same fashion as
the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason. Yet
the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic
was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he
came more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very
well to flout the individual reason in the name of the universal;
but to give mankind a total infallibility was not the way to satisfy
a pope or a Church which claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824
he was well received by the pope; but when in 1830 he began to write
Liberal articles in the journal L'Avenir, in which he collaborated with
Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence
was quickly taken, and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais
and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Rome to plead
their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way home in 1832
received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.
Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with
his friends to his and his brother's estate in Brittany, and began
his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed
mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between
the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his
determination to place himself "as a writer outside of the Church and
Catholicism," declaring that "outside of Catholicism, outside faith,
there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place
myself (je me renferme) in this sphere." [1971] Still he claimed to
be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine "fidelity in obedience
with liberty in science." [1972] In January of 1834, however, he had
ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d'un Croyant,
published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned
as infidelity.
Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published
an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true
papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an
Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else,
he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising
in 1831-32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as
little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to
a year's imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement
(1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never
changed: "I have gone on, that is all." But he had in effect changed
from a Catholic to a pantheist; [1973] and in 1848, as a member of
the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by
"an affectation of impiety." [1974] On his deathbed he refused to
receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried
without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and
with no cross on his grave.
Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais
never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always
emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour
as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter of
the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the
unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher's mother, who did not stick
at libelling her son's wife in order to get him put under clerical
control. [1975] It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out
of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have
qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such
a temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and
social grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France,
whatever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.