Part 14

§ 165.13. =The German-Catholic Contribution to the Illumination.=--The Catholic church of Germany was also carried away with the current of “the Illumination,” which from the middle of the century had overrun Protestant Germany. While the exorcisms and cures of Father Gassner in Regensburg were securing signal triumphs to Catholicism, though these were of so dubious a kind that the bishops, the emperor, and finally even the curia, found it necessary to check the course of the miracle worker, =Weishaupt=, professor of canon law in Ingolstadt, founded, in A.D. 1776, the secret society of the =Illuminati=, which spread its deistic ideas of culture and human perfectibility through Catholic South Germany. Though inspired by deadly hatred of the Jesuits, Weishaupt imitated their methods, and so excited the suspicion of the Bavarian government, which, in A.D. 1785, suppressed the order and imprisoned and banished its leaders.--Catholic theology too was affected by the rationalistic movement. But that the power of the church to curse still survived was proved in the case of the Mainz professor, =Laurence Isenbiehl=, who applied the passage about Immanuel, in Isaiah vii. 14, not to the mother of Christ, but to the wife of the prophet, for which he was deposed in A.D. 1774, and on account of his defective knowledge of theology was sent back for two years to the seminary. When in A.D. 1778 he published a learned treatise on the same theme, he was put in prison. The pope too condemned his exposition as pestilential, and Isenbiehl “as a good Catholic” retracted. =Steinbühler=, a young jurist of Salzburg, having been sentenced to death in A.D. 1781 for some contemptuous words about the Catholic ceremonies, was pardoned, but soon after died from the ill-treatment he had received. The rationalistic movement got hold more and more of the Catholic universities. In Mainz, =Dr. Blau=, professor of dogmatics, promulgated with impunity the doctrine that in the course of centuries the church has often made mistakes. In the Austrian universities, under the protection of the Josephine edict, a whole series of Catholic theologians ventured to make cynically free criticisms, especially in the field of church history. At Bonn University, founded in A.D. 1786 by the Elector-archbishop of Cologne, there were teachers like =Hedderich=, who sportively described himself on the title page of a dissertation as “_jam quater Romæ damnatus_,” =Dereser=, previously a Carmelite monk, who followed Eichhorn in his exposition of the biblical miracles, and =Eulogius Schneider=, who, after having made Bonn too hot for him by his theological and poetical recklessness, threw himself into the French Revolution, for two years marched through Alsace with the guillotine as one of the most dreaded monsters, and finally, in A.D. 1794, was made to lay his own head on the block.--At the Austrian universities, under the protection of the tolerant Josephine legislation, a whole series of Catholic theologians, Royko, Wolff, Dannenmayr, Michl, etc., criticised, often with cynical plainness, the proceedings and condition of the Catholic church. To this class also, in the first stage of his remarkably changeful and eventful career, belongs Ign. Aur. =Fessler=. From 1773, a Capuchin in various cloisters, last of all in Vienna, he brought down upon himself the bitter hatred of his order by making secret reports to the emperor about the ongoings that prevailed in these convents. He escaped their enmity by his appointment, in 1784, as professor of the oriental languages and the Old Testament at Lemberg, but was in 1787 dismissed from this office on account of various charges against his life, teaching, and poetical writings. In Silesia, in 1791, he went over to the Protestant church, joined the freemasons, held at Berlin the post of a councillor in ecclesiastical and educational affairs for the newly won Catholic provinces of Poland, and, after losing this position in consequence of the events of the war of 1806, found employment in Russia in 1809; first, as professor of oriental languages at St. Petersburg, and afterwards, when opposed and persecuted there also on suspicion of entertaining atheistical views, as member of a legal commission in South Russia. Meanwhile having gradually moved from a deistical to a vague mystical standpoint, he was in 1819 made superintendent and president of the evangelical consistory at Saratov, with the title of an evangelical bishop, and after the abolition of that office in 1833 he became general superintendent at St. Petersburg, where he died in 1839. His romances and tragedies as well as his theological and religious writings are now forgotten, but his “Reminiscences of his Seventy Years’ Pilgrimage,” published in 1824, are still interesting, and his “History of Hungary,” in ten volumes, begun in 1812, is of permanent value.

§ 165.14. =The French Contribution to the Illumination.=--The age of Louis XIV., with the morals of its Jesuit confessors, the lust, bigotry, and hypocrisy of its court, its dragonnades and Bastille polemic against revivals of a living Christianity among Huguenots, mystics, and Jansenists, its prophets of the Cevennes and Jansenist convulsionists, etc., called forth a spirit of freethinking to which Catholicism, Jansenism, and Protestantism appeared equally ridiculous and absurd. This movement was essentially different from English deism. The principle of the English movement was _common sense_, the universal moral consciousness in man, with the powerful weapon of rational criticism, maintaining the existence of an ideal and moral element in men, and holding by the more general principles of religion. French naturalism, on the other hand, was a philosophy of the _esprit_, that essentially French lightheartedness which laughed away everything of an ideal sort with scorn and wit. Yet there was an intimate relationship between the two. The philosophy of common sense came to France, and was there travestied into a philosophy _d’esprit_. The organ of this French philosophy was the “_Encyclopédie_” of Diderot and D’Alembert, and its most brilliant contributors, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau. =Montesquieu=, A.D. 1689-1755, whose “_Esprit des Lois_” in two years passed through twenty-two editions, wrote the “_Lettres Persanes_,” in which with biting wit he ridiculed the political, social, and ecclesiastical condition of France. =Helvetius=, A.D. 1715-1771, had his book, “_De l’Esprit_,” burnt in A.D. 1759 by order of parliament, and was made to retract, but this only increased his influence. =Voltaire=, A.D. 1694-1778, although treating in his writings of philosophical and theological matters, gives only a hash of English deism spiced with frivolous wit, showing the same tendency in his historical and poetical works, giving a certain eloquence to the commonest and filthiest subjects, as in his “_Pucelle_” and “_Candide_.” He obtained, however, an immense influence that extended far past his own days. To the same class belongs =Jean Jacques Rousseau=, A.D. 1712-1778, belonging to the Roman Catholic church only as a pervert for seventeen years in the middle of his life. Of a nobler nature than Voltaire, he yet often sank into deep immorality, as he tells without reserve, but also without any hearty penitence, in his _Confessions_. His whole life was taken up with the conflict for his ideals of freedom, nature, human rights, and human happiness. In his “_Contrat Social_” of A.D. 1762, he commends a return to the natural condition of the savage as the ideal end of man’s endeavour. His “_Emile_” of A.D. 1761 is of epoch-making importance in the history of education, and in it he eloquently sets forth his ideal of a natural education of children, while he sent all his own (natural) children to a foundling hospital.--The physician =De la Mettrie=, who died at the court of Frederick the Great in A.D. 1751, carried materialism to its most extreme consequences, and the German-Frenchman Baron =Holbach=, A.D. 1723-1789, wrote the “_Système de la Nature_,” which in two years passed through eighteen editions.[495]

§ 165.15. These seeds bore fruit in the =French Revolution=. Voltaire’s cry “_Écrasez l’infame_,” was directed against the church of the Inquisition, the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the dragonnades, and Diderot had exclaimed that the world’s salvation could only come when the last king had been strangled with the entrails of the last priest. The constitutional National Assembly, A.D. 1789-1791, wished to set aside, not the faith of the people, but only the hierarchy, and to save the state from a financial crisis by the goods of the church. All cloisters were suppressed and their property sold. The number of bishops was reduced to one half, all ecclesiastical offices without a pastoral sphere were abolished, the clergy elected by the people paid by the state, and liberty of belief recognised as an inalienable right of man. The legislative National Assembly, A.D. 1791, 1792, made all the clergy take an oath to the constitution on pain of deposition. The pope forbad it under the same threat. Then arose a schism. Some 40,000 priests who refused the oath mostly quitted the country. Avignon (§ 110, 4) had been incorporated in the French territory. The terrorist National Convention, A.D. 1792-1795, which brought the king to the scaffold on January 21st, A.D. 1793, and the queen on October 16th, prohibited all Christian customs, on 5th October abolished the Christian reckoning of time, and on November 7th Christianity itself, laid waste 2,000 churches and converted _Notre Dame_ into a _Temple de la Raison_, where a ballet-dancer represented the goddess of reason. Stirred up by the fanatical baron, “Anacharsis” Cloots, “the apostle of human freedom and the personal enemy of Jesus Christ,” the Archbishop Gobel, now in his sixtieth year, came forward, proclaiming his whole past life a fraud, and owning no other religion than that of freedom. On the other hand, the noble Bishop Gregoire of Blois, the first priest to support the constitution, who voted for the abolition of royalty, but not the execution of the king, was not driven by the terrorism of the convention, of which he was a member, from a bold and open profession of Christianity, appearing in his clerical dress and unweariedly protesting against the vandalism of the Assembly. Robespierre[496] himself said, “_Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer_,” passed in A.D. 1794 the resolution, _Le peuple français reconnait l’Être suprême et l’immortalité de l’âme_, and issued an order to celebrate the _fête de l’Être suprême_. The Directory, A.D. 1795-1799, restored indeed Christian worship, but favoured the deistical sect of the =Theophilanthropists=, whose high-swelling phrases soon called forth public scorn, while in A.D. 1802 the first consul banished their worship from all churches. But meanwhile, in A.D. 1798, in order to nullify the opposition of the pope, French armies had overrun Italy and proclaimed the Church States a Roman Republic. =Pius VI.= was taken prisoner to France, and died in A.D. 1799 at Valence under the rough treatment of the French, without having in the least compromised himself or his office.[497]

§ 165.16. =The Pseudo-Catholics.=

1. =The Abrahamites or Bohemian Deists.= When Joseph II. issued his edict of toleration in A.D. 1781, a sect which had hitherto kept itself secret under the mask of Catholicism made its appearance in the Bohemian province of Pardubitz. The Abrahamites were descended from the old Hussites, and professed to follow the faith of Abraham before his circumcision. Their fundamental doctrine was deistic monotheism, and of the Bible they accepted only the ten commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. But as they would neither attend the Jewish synagogue nor the churches of any existing Christian sect, the emperor refused them religious toleration, drove them from their homes, and settled them in A.D. 1783 on the eastern frontiers. Many of them, in consequence of persecution, returned to the Catholic church, and even those who remained steadfast did not transmit their faith to their children.

§ 165.17.

2. =The Frankists.=--Jacob Leibowicz, the son of a Jewish rabbi in Galicia, attached himself in Turkey, where he assumed the name of =Frank=, to the Jewish sect of the Sabbatarians, who, repudiating the Talmud, adopted the cabbalistic book Sohar as the source of their more profound religious teaching. Afterwards in Podolia, which was then still Polish, he was esteemed among his numerous adherents as a Messiah sent of God. Bitterly hated by the rabbinical Jews, and accused of indulging in vile orgies in their assemblies, many of those Soharists were thrown into prison at the instigation of Bishop Dembowski of Kaminetz. But when they turned and accused their opponents of most serious crimes against Christendom, and, at Frank’s suggestion, pointing out what they alleged to be an identity between the book Sohar and the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and incarnation, made it known that they were inclined to become converts, they won the favour of the bishop. He arranged a disputation between the two parties, pronounced the Talmudists beaten, confiscated all available copies of the Talmud, dragged them through the streets tied to the tail of a horse, and then burnt them. Dembowski, however, died soon after in A.D. 1757, and the cathedral chapter expelled the Soharists from Kaminetz. They appealed to King Augustus III. and to Archbishop Lubienski of Lemberg, renewing their profession of faith in the Trinity, and promising to be subject to the pope. In a disputation with the Talmudists lasting three days they sought to prove that the Talmudists used Christian blood in their services, which afterwards led to the death of five of the Jews thus accused. By Frank’s advice, who took part neither in this nor in the former disputation, but was the secret leader of the whole movement, they now formally applied for admission into the Catholic church, and their leader now entered Lemberg in great state. They actually submitted to be thus driven by him, and 1,000 of his adherents were baptized at Lemberg. Frank was baptized at Warsaw under the name of =Joseph=, the king himself acting as sponsor. In all Catholic journals this event was celebrated as a signal triumph for the Catholic church. But Frank among his own disciples continued to play the _rôle_ of a miracle-working Messiah. Hence in A.D. 1760 the Inquisition stepped in. Some of his followers were imprisoned, others banished, and he himself as a heresiarch condemned to confinement for life with hard labour, from which after thirteen years he was liberated on the first partition of Poland in A.D. 1772, through the favour of Catherine II., who employed him as secret political agent. Feeling that his life was insecure in Poland, he went to Moravia, and at Brünn reorganized his numerous and attached followers into a well-knit society, by which he was revered as the incarnation of the Deity, and his beautiful daughter Eva, brought up by her noble godmother, as “the divine Emuna.” How he was permitted, under the protection of the Catholic church, to continue here for sixteen years, playing the _rôle_ of a Messiah, and to amass such wealth as enabled him to purchase, in A.D. 1788, from the impoverished prince of Homburg-Birstein his castle at Offenbach, with all the privileges attached to it, is an insoluble mystery. He now called himself Baron von Frank, formed with his followers from Moravia and Poland a brilliant establishment, which outwardly adhered to the Roman Catholic church, although he very seldom attended the Catholic services. Frank died in A.D. 1791, and was buried with great pomp, but without the presence of the Catholic clergy. His daughter Eva was able to maintain the extravagant establishment of her father for twenty-six years, when the debt resting on the castle reached three million florins. At last, in A.D. 1817, the long-threatened catastrophe occurred. Eva died suddenly, and a coffin said to contain her body was actually with all decorum laid in the grave.

§ 166. THE ORIENTAL CHURCHES.

The oppressed condition of the orthodox church in the Ottoman empire continued unchanged. It had a more vigorous development in Russia, where its ascendency was unchallenged. Although the Russian church, from the time of its obtaining an independent patriarchate at Moscow, in A.D. 1589, was constitutionally emancipated from the mother church of Constantinople, it yet continued in close religious affinity with it. This was intensified by the adoption of the common confession, drawn up shortly before by Peter Mogilas (§ 152, 3). The patriarchal constitution in Russia, however, was but short-lived, for Peter I., in 1702, after the death of the Patriarch Hadrian, abolished the patriarchate, arrogated to himself as emperor the highest ecclesiastical office, and in A.D. 1721 constituted “the Holy Synod,” to which, under the supervision of a procurator guarding the rights of the state, he assigned the supreme direction of spiritual and ecclesiastical affairs. To these proposals the Patriarch of Constantinople gave his approval. In this reform of the church constitution Theophanes Procopowicz, Metropolitan of Novgorod, was the emperor’s right hand.--The monophysite church of Abyssinia was again during this period the scene of Christological controversies.

§ 166.1. =The Russian State Church.=--From the time of the liturgical reformation of the Patriarch Nikon (§ 163, 10) a new and peculiar =service of song= took the place of the old unison style that had previously prevailed in the Russian church. Without instrumental accompaniment, it was sustained simply by powerful male voices, and was executed, at least in the chief cities, with musical taste and charming simplicity. Among the =theologians=, the above-named Procopowicz, who died in A.D. 1736, occupied a prominent position. His “Handbook of Dogmatics,” without departing from the doctrines of his church, is characterized by learning, clearness of exposition, and moderation. From the middle of the century, however, especially among the superior clergy, there crept in a Protestant tendency, which indeed held quite firmly by the old theology of the œcumenical synods of the Greek Church, but set aside or laid little stress upon later doctrinal developments. Even the celebrated and widely used catechism, drawn up originally for the use of the Grand-duke Paul Petrovich, by his tutor, the learned Platón, afterwards Metropolitan of Moscow, was not quite free from this tendency. It found yet more decided expression in the dogmatic handbook of Theophylact, archimandrite of Moscow, published in A.D. 1773.--Continuation, § 206, 1.

§ 166.2. =Russian Sects.=--To the sects of the seventeenth century (§ 163, 10) are to be added spiritualistic gnostics of the eighteenth, in which we find a blending of western ideas with the old oriental mysticism. Among those were the =Malakanen=, or consumers of milk, because, in spite of the orthodox prohibition, they used milk during the fasts. They rejected all anointings, even chrism and priestly consecration, and acknowledged only spiritual anointing by the doctrine of Christ. They also volatilized the idea of baptism and the Lord’s supper into that of a merely spiritual cleansing and nourishing by the word of the gospel. Otherwise they led a quiet and honourable life. More important still in regard to numbers and influence were the =Duchoborzen=. Although belonging exclusively to the peasant class, they had a richly developed theological system of a speculative character, with a notable blending of theosophy, mysticism, Protestantism, and rationalism. They idealized the doctrine of the sacraments after the style of the Quakers, would have no special places of worship or an ordained clergy, refused to take oaths or engage in military service, and led peaceable and useful lives. They made their first appearance in Moscow in the beginning of the eighteenth century under Peter the Great, and spread through other cities of Old Russia.--Continuation, § 210, 3.

§ 166.3. =The Abyssinian Church= (§§ 64, 1; 73, 2).--About the middle of the century a monk appeared, proclaiming that, besides the commonly admitted twofold birth of Christ, the eternal generation of the Father and the temporal birth of the Virgin Mary, there was a third birth through anointing with the Holy Spirit in the baptism in Jordan. He thus convulsed the whole Abyssinian church, which for centuries had been in a state of spiritual lethargy. The _abuna_ with the majority of his church held by the old doctrine, but the new also found many adherents. The split thus occasioned has continued till the present time, and has played no unimportant part in the politico-dynastic struggles of the last ten years (§ 184, 9).

II. The Protestant Churches.

§ 167. THE LUTHERAN CHURCH BEFORE “THE ILLUMINATION.”