Part 2

It is assured that the late cardinal Passionei, who detested these fathers, (for which he might have good reasons) pushed his hatred against them so far, as not to admit into his fine and numerous library any writer of the society. I regret this, for the sake both of the library and of the master; the one lost a number of good books by it; and the other, so philosophical, as we are assured, in other respects, was not at all so on this occasion. If any thing can console the Jesuits, it is that the same cardinal, so sworn an enemy of all their works, had the misfortune to countenance and extol the rhapsodies of that same Abraham Chaumeix, whose very name now is become ridiculous, and who is at present turned down to his proper place, after having been quoted and celebrated as a kind of father of the church[4].

The society owes to the form of its institution (so decried in other respects) this variety of talents which distinguish it. They reject no sort of abilities, and require no other condition, in order to be admitted among its members, but a capacity of being useful. To engage our liberty, we must pay every where, even among the Mendicants. The Jesuits know nothing of this paltry interest; they receive with pleasure and gratuitously every person from whom they hope to draw any good; nobody is useless among them; of those from whom they expect the least, they make, according to their own expression, _missionaries_ for the villages, or _martyrs_ for the Indies. They have not even disdained very great personages, little worthy of the titles which they bore when they made themselves Jesuits, as a Charles of Lorrain, and several others: their names have served at least as a decoration to the order, if they were good for nothing else: we may call them the _honoraries_ of the society.

Two other reasons seem to have contributed to give the Jesuits, above all the other orders, the advantage of a greater number of men estimable for their talents and their works: the first is the duration of their noviciate, and the law which permits them not to bind themselves by the last vows before the age of thirty-three. The superiours have the more time to know their subjects, to judge of them, and to direct them towards the object for which they are most proper: these subjects moreover, being engaged at a mature age, after a long probation, and all the time necessary for reflexion, are less exposed to disgust and to repentance, more attached to the society, and more disposed to employ their talents for its glory, and for their own, which comes only afterward.

A second reason of the superiority of the Jesuits over the other orders, in respect to the sciences and knowledge, is, that they have sufficient time for resigning themselves up to study, enjoying in this point as much liberty as can possibly be enjoyed in a regular community, not being subjected, as the other orders are, to the minute practices of devotion, and to offices which absorb the greatest part of the day. If it were not known that hatred makes arms of every thing, we should have some difficulty to believe, that during their great and fatal law-suit, it was gravely objected to them as a crime, in some of the Jansenist pamphlets, that they did not assemble together so often as other monks, to say, in common, matins and prayers; as if a religious society (the first duty of which is to be useful) had nothing better to do than to chant over heavily bad Latin several hours in the day. It will be said perhaps, that religious orders are instituted only for prayer: be it so; but in that case let the religious shut themselves up in their houses, in order to pray there quite at their ease, and let them be hindered from meddling in any thing else.

This suppression of praying and chanting, among the Jesuits, before it became a subject of reproach against them, had been matter of pleasantry, agreeably to the genius of our nation: “The Jesuits,” said they, “cannot sing, for birds of prey never do: they are,” said they again, “a set of folks who get up at four in the morning, in order to repeat together the litanies at eight in the evening.” The Jesuits had the good sense to laugh the first at these French witticisms, and to make no change in their manner of living; they thought it more serviceable and more honourable to them, to have Petaus and Bourdaloues, than triflers and chanters.

It must be confessed nevertheless, that in the sciences and the arts, two kinds have been but feebly cultivated by the Jesuits: these are French poetry and philosophy. The best of their French poets is beneath mediocrity; yet French poetry requires, in order to excel in it, a delicacy of feeling and taste, which cannot be acquired but by frequenting the world much more than a religious ought to permit himself to do. This school of urbanity and delicacy is perhaps the only thing that was wanting to the Jesuit Le Moine to make him a poet of the first rank; for that Jesuit, according to the judgement given of him by one of our greatest masters, had, in other respects, an imagination that was prodigious[5]. If it be asked why the Jesuits have not had French poets, we must ask why the universities have not had more of them, and why so many modern Latin poets, taken throughout the several communities, and throughout all conditions, have not been able to succeed in making two tolerable French lines in verse.

Philosophy (I mean the true, for school-learning is nothing but the dregs and refuse of it) has not shone with greater lustre among the Jesuits; but has it been more brilliant among the other orders? It is almost impossible that a member of any community should become a great philosopher: the spirit of a society, of a monastick society in particular, and more perhaps than any other, the domineering spirit of the Jesuits, that of a servile devotion to their superiors, are so many fetters to reason, repugnant to that freedom of thinking which is so necessary to philosophy. Malebranche is the only philosopher of eminence that ever belonged to a regular congregation; but that congregation was composed of free-men; and, besides, Malebranche is perhaps less a great philosopher, than an excellent philosophic writer.

If any order (by the by) could have hoped to dispute with the Jesuits the pre-eminence in the sciences and in literature, and perhaps to have borne away the palm from them, it is this congregation of the Oratory, of which Malebranche was a most distinguished member. The freedom enjoyed there, without being ever hampered by vows, the permission of thinking differently from their superiors, and of employing their talents according to their own pleasure, this was what furnished the congregation of the Oratory with excellent preachers, profound scholars, men illustrious in every way. Accordingly the Jesuits were very sensible what they had to fear from such rivals. They persecuted them; and the members of the Oratory had the folly to expose a weak side to them by becoming Jansenists[6]. By this means they furnished a pretext to the attacks of their enemies, and have had the grief to see the decay of their congregation brought about by their own fault. They have indeed just now collected a few tattered remains from the plunder of the Jesuits; but these remains will hardly ever be able to replace what they have lost. We ought, besides, to do them the justice to own, that they testified not any eagerness to profit by the ruin of their adversaries: the society in its misfortune experienced, on the part of the Oratory, a moderation of which they had never given them the example. But be this moderation counterfeit or sincere, it is difficult to persuade one’s-self that the Oratory will ever recover with lustre the blows which have been given it by the Jesuits: the varnish of Jansenism with which it is still stained, and which renders it at least suspected by the greater part of the bishops, the almost general prejudice of the public, and of the greater part of the magistrates, against all communities, of whatever kind they be, and, above all, the philosophic spirit which makes every day great progress, seems to forebode the end of this, and of other fraternities.

If the culture of the sciences and of letters has contributed to render the society commendable, and intrigue to make it powerful, another circumstance has not a little served to render it formidable to its enemies: and that is the union of all its members for the good of the common cause. In other societies, the interests and reciprocal hatred of individuals almost always hurt the good of the corps; but among the Jesuits it is quite otherwise. Not that in this society the individuals love each other better than elsewhere; perhaps they even hate one another more, being by their very constitutions spies and informers, from their birth, upon each other: yet attack a single person among them, you are sure of having the whole society for your enemy. Thus heretofore the Senate and Roman people, often divided among themselves by intestin dissensions, united at the bare name of the Carthaginians or of Mithridates. There is not a Jesuit who may not say, like the wicked spirit in scripture, “My name is Legion.” Never did republican love his country as every Jesuit loves his society: the very lowest of its members interests himself in its glory, of which he thinks some rays reflect upon himself: there is not (if I may presume to say so) even to their brother the apothecary, or the cook, one among them who is not proud and jealous of it. They are all at once put in action by this single spring, which one man directs at his pleasure; and it is not without reason that they have been defined “a naked sword, the hilt of which is at Rome.” The love which they have for their society, subsists even in almost all those who have left it: whether it be a real attachment founded upon gratitude, or a policy founded on interest or on fear, there is hardly an ex-Jesuit who preserves not his connexions with his old brethren; and who, even tho’ he has reason to complain of them, does not shew himself attached to their interests, and ready to defend them against their enemies. For the rest, this attachment of the Jesuits to their society, can be nothing but the effect of that pride which it inspires them with, and not at all of the advantages which it procures for each of its members. Independently of the little confidence and real friendship which they have one for the other, and the severe life which they lead within their houses, individuals, whatever merit they may have, are not at all considered in the corps, but in proportion to the talent which they have for intrigue: modest merit, or such as is confined to the labour of the closet, is there unknown, little considered, sometimes persecuted, if unfortunately the pressing interest of the society demand it. We have seen in these late times the fathers Brumoi and Bougeant, the last of the Jesuits who had any true and solid merit, die of chagrin under the weight of the persecutions which their fraternity were obliged to make them suffer: these two men, who were greater philosophers, and more enlightened, than their state in life seemed to permit, were sacrificed by the society to the clamours which they had excited; the one by approving a work, in which the regent of the kingdom (who had been dead about twenty years before) was indirectly attacked; the other, by a philosophical joke on “the language of beasts,” for which they obliged him to make reparation, by confining him to the college of la Flêche, and charging him with the _making_ of a catechism, which brought him down to the grave, overwhelmed with disgust and vexation. A hundred years before, Petau, the famous Petau, had like to have experienced fate very nearly similar, for having pretended, that before the council of Nice the church was not fully determined on the divinity of the word[7]. He died in the college of the Jesuits at Paris, abandoned and in want of every thing. It seems as if the device of the society had been that of the ancient Romans; _Salus populi suprema lex esto_[8].

To all these means of augmenting their consideration and their credit, they join another no less efficacious: this is the regularity of their conduct and manners. Their discipline on this point is as severe as it is prudent; and whatever calumny may have published concerning it, it must be confessed, that no religious order gives less handle in this respect. Even those among them who have taught the most monstrous doctrine, who have written on the most obscene subjects, have led the most edifying and the most exemplary lives. It was at the feet of the crucifix that the pious Sanchez wrote his abominable and disgusting work: and it has been said, in particular, of Escobar, equally known by the austerity of his manners, and the looseness of his doctrines, that he purchased heaven very dear for himself, but bestowed it at an easy rate upon others.

We have seen what success the Jesuits had the art to procure themselves at the court of France: their progress was nearly the same in almost all the other courts: at the beginning of the present century there was not in Europe a catholic prince, of whose conscience they were not the directors, and from whom they had not obtained the most signal favours; in all parts their enemies raged, and in all parts they made a jest of their enemies.

They confined not their ambition to Europe; perpetually full of the project of governing, and of governing by religion, they sent to the Indies, and to China, missionaries, who carried thither christianity for the people, and the profane sciences for the princes, for the grandees, and for the more enlightened persons, whom by these means they might render favourable to them.

Let us stop here a moment, and examine more particularly, by what kind of learning and doctrine the Jesuits were able to make such great progress among the Christians, and among those who were not so.

The religion which we profess turns upon two points; its tenets and its morality. Among its tenets are the Trinity, the Redemption, the Real Presence, &c. which, in appearing to confound the human understanding, present to its belief only truths that are speculative in themselves: these sorts of truths, how obscure soever they seem to reason, and how much submission soever they require from it, are not those which meet with the most opposition from the multitude: naturally inclined to the marvellous, they are disposed to adopt blindly the most absurd errors in this kind, and much more the truths which are only incomprehensible, provided they oppose not their inclinations. The Jesuits therefore preached those truths in all their exactness; they knew well that they risked not much. But there are other tenets, as those of Predestination and of Grace, which border on practical religion, and which, preached in all their rigour to minds that are unprepared, would be little adapted to make proselytes. We must take great care, said the wise and pious Fleury, not to propose at once to infidels, those articles of our belief, which might shock them too much. Suppose a missionary should come and say abruptly to savages, “My children, I make known to you a God, whom you cannot serve worthily, without his special grace, which he has resolved from all eternity to give, or to refuse you.” “Very well,” the savages would say to him, “we will wait for that grace, and till it come we will remain in our present faith.” What success would the Jesuits have had, had they proceeded in this manner? Let us suppose that a Jansenist had been in their place, to preach his incomprehensible doctrine (which he calls nevertheless modestly the doctrine of St. Augustine and St. Paul) he would soon have been either abandoned as a madman, or driven away by the people with stones. The Jesuits conducted themselves much more dexterously; they proved, according to the saying of their enemies, the truth of that maxim of scripture, that the children of darkness act with more prudence in their affairs than the children of light: they preached to the people they wanted to convert that Pelagianism of which they make profession, and which is much more accommodated to the weakness and vanity of human nature; but they not only preached in a manner better suited to humanity than the Jansenists would have done; they preached also more artfully than would Pelagius himself. The heresy of that monk did not meet with the success it might have had, because it stuck half way. Pelagius, while he restored to freedom her rights, imposed on her severe ties, by the morality which he recommended to practice: this morality was that of the Christian religion in all its austerity, the renouncing of one’s-self, a penitence the most rigorous, and an eternal warfare against the passions. The Jesuits perceived that these painful duties were not made for the common run of mankind, and it was the multitude they wanted to attract to them. After having softened what the doctrines of Predestination and Grace have too harsh in appearance, they did the same with what the ties imposed by Christianity have too difficult. Great personages, for the most part, are, by the fault of their education, superstitious, ignorant, and given up to their passions. The Jesuits permitted them to have mistresses, provided they displayed a zeal for religion, and an attachment to its outward forms, which are no more than a kind of amusement when the passions are satisfied, and which serve besides, to consciences that are but ill enlightened, by way of a quieter, or, if you will, a palliative in their hours of remorse. They followed pretty nearly the same plan with regard to all those whom they directed, and succeeded in making, by these means, a great number of partisans. The Jesuitical spirit, in the manner of teaching religion, is pretty well described in the definition which the Abbé Boileau gave of these fathers: “They are (said he) a people who lengthen the creed, and shorten the decalogue.”

I cannot help remarking, on this occasion, one singular contradiction of the human mind in matters of religion. The Jansenists are at once what it seems impossible to be at the same time, Predestinarians in opinion, and Rigorists in morality: they say to man, “You have great duties to fulfill, but you can do nothing of yourself; and whatever you do, what human virtues soever you practise, every one of your actions will be A NEW CRIME; at least unless God sanctify you by his grace, which you will not obtain if you are not predestined to it gratuitously and before the foreknowledge of your merits.” It must be confessed, that this doctrine is mild, adapted to consolation, and above all consistent! But in these sorts of matters, the business is not to be consistent and reasonable; it is the temper of the person who dogmatises, and not logic, that dictates to him what he is to preach. The Jansenist, unpitying in his nature, is equally so, both in his doctrines and in the morality which he teaches; he is little embarrassed that the one is contrary to the other: the nature of the God that he preaches (and who, happily for us, is only his own) is to be harsh as himself, both in what he would have us do, and in what he wills that we should believe. What would be thought of a monarch, who should say to one of his subjects, “You have irons on your legs, and you have not the power to take them off; however I now inform you, that if you walk not presently, both for a long time, and very upright, on the brink of the precipice on which you now stand, you shall be condemned to eternal punishment[9]?” Such is the God of the Jansenists; such is their theology in its original and primitive purity. Pelagius, in his error, was more reasonable. He said to man, “You can do every thing; but you have a great deal to do.” This doctrine was less shocking to reason; but, however, very incommodious and irksome. The Jesuits have, if we may say so, beat down Pelagius’s price: they have said to Christians, “You can do every thing, and God requires but little of you.” This is the way in which we must speak to carnal people; and especially to the great of the age, whenever we would have them listen to us.

These are not the only cautions which they have taken; for they have thought of every thing. They have had (indeed in small number) severe casuists and directors; compared with the small number of those, who thro’ temper or scruple wanted to impose, in all its rigour, the yoke of the gospel. By this means, making themselves, to use the expression, “all to all,” according to a saying of scripture (the sense of which indeed they wrested a little) on one side they procured to themselves friends of every kind; and on the other they refuted, or thought they refuted, before-hand, the objection which might be made to them, of teaching universally looseness of morals, and of having made it the uniform doctrine of their society. This kind of complete assortment, designed to satisfy all tastes, is pretty well described in the following well-known lines of Despréaux:

Si Bourdaloue un peu sévère Nous dit, craignez la volupté, Escobar, lui dit-on, mon père, Nous la permet pour la santé.

It must also be observed, that most of those Jesuits, who were so severe in their writings, or in their sermons, were less so towards their penitents. It has been said of Bourdaloue himself, that if he required too much in the pulpit, he abated it in the confessional chair: a new stroke of policy, well understood on the part of the Jesuits, in as much as speculative severity suits persons of rigid morals, and practical condescension attracts the multitude.

In China they employed still other methods: they rendered light to the people the yoke which they came to impose on them, by permitting them to mingle with the practical duties of Christianity, some ceremonies of the religion of the country; to which the multitude, every where superstitious and tumultuous, was too firmly attached.