The emergence of the Press in the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) gave to this medium a crucial role in aiming attention from scriptural and sacramental quarrels to practical morals, manners, and “charitable” labors for the application of natural scientific improvements. Nowhere was the connection of the quieting of religious controversy, the interest in a reform of behavior, and the importance of the Press more clear than in the work of the two periodicals, The Tatler and The Spectator, brought out by the joint effort of Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) in the years between 1709 and 1714. Readers of these journals were exposed, week after week, to social and behavioral commentaries, in the latter through representatives of the worlds of commerce, the army, the town, and the country gentry, presented by one Mr. Spectator, an observer of the London scene. Both periodicals served as models for manifold imitators on the European Continent, such as the Hamburg Patriot and Il Caffè of Milan.

What one finds in The Tatler, and even more in The Spectator, is the insistence upon the need for men of “common sense” to gather together without religious rancor and cooperatively undertake the truly gentlemanly---and therefore ipso facto “Christian”---business of bettering themselves and their surrounding societies. The fact that such journals would generally be read in public places like coffee houses emphasized still further the need for moral men to develop friendly manners, keep passions down, avoid grating on one another’s nerves, and thereby allow the very establishment in which one was thinking and speaking peacefully to survive and prosper.

A similar emphasis upon the prevention of divisive controversy and dedication to good-mannered cooperative ventures of obvious personal and social value could be found in the varied reading clubs and scientific-agricultural-commercial “patriotic” societies founded in Britain and Ireland in the late seventeenth century. Already promoted by Sir Francis Bacon, as noted above, these included the aforementioned Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, the Society for the Improvement of Husbandry, Agriculture, and Other Useful Arts of Dublin (1731), and, one might add, the Freemasons (1717) also.

Here, just as in cafés, the class distinctions operative outside such circles could temporarily be suspended for the good of all. Here, then, were truly God-blessed confraternities and sodalities, “religious orders” with a purpose. In such communities swords were beaten into plowshares through practical achievement. In such an environment, men could begin an honest and truly practical ascent of Mount Tabor. For, if the scientist and the practical entrepreneur whose discernible fruits could be weighed and measured and imitated with mathematical exactitude were not in union with God and His plan for the world, who was? Certainly not squabbling Protestant and Catholic polemicists! Did not Sir Isaac Newton, head of the Royal Society from 1703, and humble student of the laws of motion and their practical consequences, point the way to true service of the God who presided over nature’s mysteries and the men He commands us to love infinitely better than quibblers battling over the nature of the Eucharist?

Hence, in addition to a Prussian Pietist Christianity, we now have before us a similar British Christianity, shorn of doctrinal clarity, centered round practical moral achievement and friendly manners, and aimed at a common action of immediate, obvious, successful benefit to one’s neighbor. But, once again, both these forms of Christianity proved to be more susceptible to powerful secularizing tendencies than many of its original proponents had perhaps expected.¹⁰⁹

Prussian thinkers such as Christian Wolff (1679-1754) are instructive in tracing the path from a Christian-sounding discussion of life truly rooted in the supernatural to one that in fact draws its inspiration from nature and natural tools almost exclusively.¹¹⁰ Clearly, the more the world of God was shunned as the realm of the controversial, the more that the world of nature taught what was pleasing to the Almighty and deemed to be successful in His eyes on its terms alone. Moreover, as briefly indicated above, the reading of the meaning of nature and the teachings of natural experiences changed once Christian doctrine began to lose its hold on people. What was taken as common sense and natural law and virtue by a first generation that still knew Christian teaching but simply ceased to engage in theological dispute over its significance was no longer the same as that of a second generation lacking doctrinal formation and prohibited from seeking it under the penalty of being “divisive” and therefore “ungodly”. The commands of God that were learned from nature alone were then registered and carried out by groups or individuals who retained a strong conviction of divine guidance in their secular activities, regardless of whether or not these fit together with traditional Christian considerations of what was socially acceptable and good.

No appeal could readily be made in either case to any supernatural force transcending such powers, since God had already been consulted in a nature liberated from metaphysical considerations. Recourse to a divine message coming from beyond nature could, once again, axiomatically be dismissed as “divisive” and, hence, immoral—even un-Christian. The initial work of naturalizing the supernatural having been undertaken within a Christian idiom and in Christian circles, this bridge to the Enlightenment and its concerns could be completed without the sharp anti-clericalism emerging in circles influenced by the atheism of Spinoza. Besides, who, under its soothing influence, would know what traditional Christian considerations were anyway? For history, alongside doctrinal disputation, would also have been discarded or reinterpreted to rid the world of its potentially dangerous effects on the success-and-unity oriented personality and society.

In such an environment, whoever had the strongest feelings and the most powerful will to enforce them would become the voice of heaven in nature and of true “tradition” themselves. In Prussia, this led, in the first instance, to the victory of the will of the leaders of a bureaucratic State. But in Britain, it led to the dominance of another, quite different, but equally naturalist force. Why was this the case? The first necessary step to answering that question is to note that the already potentially naturalist outlook of men like Boyle and Newton did not win its influence over British opinion on its own. Its progress was undertaken in alliance with two other powerful and ultimately quite secularizing forces.¹¹¹

One of these was a group of fellow Protestants primarily stimulated by a loathing both of the Catholicizing measures of the Stuart Dynasty as well as Stuart admiration for Louis XIV and Bourbon Absolutism. A second, intersecting source of strength came from men of property who had begun their ascent to power with the massive transfer of lands that the “pragmatic” and highly political English Reformation had brought about in Britain. These men of property saw Catholicism and the stronger government that both the Stuarts and the Bourbons desired as a danger to their wealth and their freedom to use it as they deemed fit.

It was all three of these forces—the anti-Spinoza Boyle and Newton faction, the fervently anti-Catholic-Stuart-Bourbon cabal, and the self-interested economic elite—that converged to form that Whig oligarchy that made the triumph of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Protestant Succession of the Eighteenth Century possible. The philosophical and political underpinnings of this tripartite Whig Revolution were then elaborated through the work of John Locke (1632-1704). It was the entire “package” that gave substance to the Moderate, Enlightenment vision. And it is this outlook that would, in centuries to come, have the greatest success in contesting the concept of correction of nature and transformation in Christ. It is this outlook that would have the greatest success in inventing an “alternative good story” relating an “appropriate explanation” of dedication to “business as usual” that gave to such naturalism the seeming blessing of God as well as of man. Isocrates had been reincarnated in Britain.

Two crucial conduits for transmitting the outlook of this victorious Whig oligarchy outside of Britain were François-Marie Arouet (1694 –1778), better known by his pen name of Voltaire, and James Madison (1751-1836), the father of the American Constitution. Both men grasped the two central political dogmas supporting the oligarchs’ system: avoidance of spiritual conflict through the principle of religious tolerance, and the “checks and balances” that came along with a division of governmental powers designed to prevent the victory of an absolute monarchy.¹¹²

Although Madison’s precise religious beliefs, if any, are unclear to me, and Voltaire was definitely not a Christian, the first had no interest in a frontal assault on faith, and the latter was a firm enemy of atheism. The principle of religious tolerance, openly defined by Locke not just as politically useful teaching but even as the most important doctrine of Christianity in and of itself, was easily presented as a dogma that was friendly to pious people. Did it not allow an enormous space for public expression of belief? Perhaps. But that which made it attractive to an indifferent Madison and a Deist Voltaire was the effect that it had, in practice, on organized religion in countries like Britain and the United States, where there were many Christian denominations that could all become openly active under its aegis.¹¹³

Religious tolerance in these two lands made it impossible for any single Faith to take effective charge of the central public authority and guide it according to its wishes. In other words, while being seemingly faith-friendly, it promised the reduction of organized Christian religion to public impotence in a nation of many denominations. Madison, in discussing the benefits of the American Constitution in the Federalist Papers, also notes what the new federal machinery was designed to do should some “imbalance” in the system appear. At that point, it worked to “multiply factions”—i.e., to take a contemporary example, to encourage the formation of male and female, black and white, straight and gay Christian sects—and thus prevent the threatening domination of any given group—religious or otherwise. Under these conditions, the more materialist members of the oligarchy, along with those concerned primarily about peace and quiet rather than truth, could continue to thrive without worry about the future. A more Machiavellian anti-Catholic political principle presented under the guise of promoting free religious practice can hardly be imagined.¹¹⁴

Division of governmental powers providing checks and balances against arbitrary acts emerged as an historical reality out of the English experience of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Any effort to rule the kingdom without sufficient respect for the executive, legislative, or judicial “branches” of the government had repeatedly led to civil war and disaster. But a side effect of this English fact of life was a semi-paralysis of government necessarily requiring the limitation of the public sphere of activity. This created something of a vacuum in which strong-minded private groups and individuals could thrive more freely—and, ironically, act more arbitrarily—than under the system envisaged either by the Stuarts or the Bourbons. Hence, its value in the eyes of anti-Catholic Protestants and men concerned chiefly for the protection of their property. Hence, also, its merits in the minds of all the many more radical

Enlightenment thinkers whom police in other parts of Europe were vigorously persecuting at the very moment of the Whig triumph.¹¹⁵

In order to introduce the Radical Enlightenment back into the picture, let us begin by remembering that the Whig oligarchy responsible for the Glorious Revolution felt very shaky in its power and deeply threatened by the might of the Bourbon Family and its Stuart allies. These latter were living in exile in France, waiting for an opportunity to regain the throne in Britain. Fears that they might succeed help to explain Whig support for Dutch efforts to create a Grand Coalition against Louis XIV, as well as British willingness to revive this alliance whenever it was deemed necessary to do so in the future. Anxiety over the survival of the Whig experiment also underlay a readiness to contemplate the use of all tools and all allies in what was not just a military contest but a cultural war as well.

Foreign policy goals thus dictated the British government’s encouragement of the spread of freemasonic lodges on the Continent.¹¹⁶ Yes, early modern Freemasonry held out an appeal to a variety of groups, Stuart supporters included. Nevertheless, the Whig oligarchy managed to dominate it, ultimately using the lodges for everything from anti-French propaganda to outright spying. Unfortunately, from the Whig standpoint, they attracted to membership therein not simply anti-Catholic Protestants and men of property worried about Bourbon absolutism. They also drew proponents of the Radical Enlightenment into their ranks as well. For perhaps the most passionate anti-Catholic and anti-absolutist continental adversaries of Louis XIV were those atheist followers of Spinoza most detested by the Protestant ecumenists of the coalition that made the Glorious Revolution. And the political vision of these atheists was one that also called for a naturalist and democratic transformation of the whole of European society that would go far beyond anything to be found in the Whig program.

Under the cover of lodges, such radicals, highly useful for British Whig anti-Bourbon purposes, propagated their full religious and political beliefs, whether their moderate comrades were aware of it or not. The same, by the way, was true of radicals operating under other “covers”, such as that of the Encyclopedia, whose editors, Denis Diderot (1713-1784) in particular, paid lip service to the glory of Newton and Locke while relentlessly spreading substantive atheist and anti-oligarchic democratic arguments. In doing so, they not only worked against the initial Whig spirit but also actually drew a number of the moderates themselves down their own radical pathway.¹¹⁷

There were many purely logical reasons why they could be successful in this latter enterprise. The “moderate” John Locke’s direct association with radicals in Holland before the Glorious Revolution is well documented, and his philosophy openly posits a Christianity possessing the most modest of doctrinal contents. In fact, it provides clear tools for the dismantling of all doctrine whatsoever. Also, one cannot help but feel that Locke’s natural universe is merely a slightly cleaned up version of the “war of all against all” posited by Thomas Hobbes; a basically similar, totally depraved battlefield that nevertheless seeks to avoid ending its jungle chaos by submission to the kind of absolute ruler that was detested by the Whig Oligarchy. In secularized Protestant fashion, Locke, too, carries out the work of reducing man to the individual, the individual to his freedom, his freedom to lack of obstacles to fulfilling his passions, and his only hope for keeping his life and property under these circumstances to the check and balance or interests as reflected in the Whig Constitution. Moreover, a Newtonian universe did not really need a personal God to function, as the next generation of Newtonians, Voltaire prominent among them, realized. Deism was sufficient to make the same argument for that “pinch” of mystery indicating the dependency of nature on some sort of Creator.¹¹⁸

In any case, attacks on the Enlightenment after the 1750’s often failed to make any distinction between moderates and radicals, leading the former to a defense of the latter even if only as a tactical strategy. This defense was carried out in the urban salon society that the defenders of the Moderate Enlightenment, the so-called philosophes, made their second home. It was also conducted through satirical journals, by means of which “public opinion” might be created and then “obeyed”; through the capture, by some of the chief Enlightenment representatives, of control of the prestigious French Academy; and, last but not least, by seizing and embellishing the image of Progress and Hope coming from the New World through the success of the American Revolution. In sum, the upshot was that radicals in the Republic of Letters learned how to use the Moderate Enlightenment even as the Moderate Enlightenment continued using them. A price in disillusionment and bitterness was soon to be paid in blood by the members of both factions for their real but often unwitting cooperation. But, then again, heads must roll in the construction of any truly solid death camp worthy of the name anyway.¹¹⁹

A Moderate Enlightenment vision, frozen according to the desires of the initial Whig alliance, was threatened from another direction as well as that taken by the “mainstream” radicals—one that worked to dismiss the intellectual solidity of the practical guidance gained from experimental knowledge of the world around us. The chief figures responsible for announcing this threat to the moderate world were the Scottish historian and philosopher, David Hume (1711-1776), and the multifaceted French-speaking Swiss, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), both of whom were well acquainted with one another’s devastatingly critical labors.¹²⁰

Hume demonstrated that experimental knowledge coming from the outside universe was unreliable as a source of intellectual certainty of all kinds, including scientific laws, as they were popularly understood, such as Newtonian “laws of motion”. Why? Because that knowledge could only really be knowledge of what had been observed to happen historically. Once a man proceeded from the data of an experiment or an outside observation to the formulation of a law, applicable everywhere and at all times, he made a connection between data and universal result that he had in no way tested through experimentation and thereby proven to be true. In fact, the only reason he thought he could make such a law was that faith, habit, and custom told him that he could do so. Hume concluded that we operate, “scientifically”—and morally—only on the basis of such customary, faith-filled, historically explicable habits. Their supposedly universal, God-rooted truth is non-existent. Rousseau, in effect, agreed with him, to the degree that he considered any “truth” built upon an individual’s acceptance of what was taught to him “from the outside looking in” to be totally unnatural and insincere in character, about which much more anon.

Hume’s vision placed the scientific and moral universe in danger of total dissolution. What could be done to prevent this? The answer came from two sources once again, the first being the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Lack of moral certainty for a man of Kant’s Pietist heritage would be an especially abhorrent condition, given that he had already jettisoned the hunt for security through doctrinal agreement. With traditional theological and philosophical tools taken out of the hands of the law and order loving man, and the ground of moral action in the common sense behavior of one’s peaceable kingdom dismissed as the product of mere habit and custom, what would be left to block existential Angst and disorder?

Kant’s answer was to turn inward for absolute certainty. What a man needed to do to deal with Hume’s critique was to undertake a kind of internal retreat through which he stripped himself free of every “law” regarding the world outside him that he could not see binding him, personally, along with all other human persons, to the same line of conduct. Solely those principles and laws that he admitted applied equally to him as well as to everyone else were to be retained as solid. This labor, which could only be accomplished through a determined cultivation of the most honest and persistent sincerity, free of all hypocritical self-interested considerations, would yield unshakeable knowledge of how God and nature demand that we must act with reference to our environment. That knowledge would be accurate, even if the honest, inward scrutiny that forged it might not be able to tell us precisely what the “logos” of our environment really and essentially was all about. In other words, Kant provided as a basis for certainty a kind of Spinoza-like vision in reverse. Instead of turning things spiritual into another form of matter, he offered the possibility of dissolving the world of matter into a function of our “sincere”, internal, spiritual conviction.

Kant’s method could end simply with the enslavement of all of nature and all of our fellow men to the honestly and sincerely perceived will of any given, strong, individual personality who had convinced himself that he had done everything he possibly could do to avoid mere custom or outright hypocrisy in reaching his bedrock conclusions concerning life. This possibility can readily be seen in the writings of the second thinker who tried to deal with the disorder caused by uncertainties regarding “outside” knowledge. Our second “law and order” man, deeply admired by Immanuel Kant---who actually kept a portrait of him in his home, the sole painting that he permitted to be hung therein---was none other than the figure who had brought up the problem alongside Hume in the first place: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau, perhaps the most readable and influential of eighteenth century political and social theorists, followed the Enlightenment injunction to found all judgments upon an honest observation of nature and nature alone. Unlike those philosophes who observed in nature the reign of objective mathematical and scientific laws, however, his studies revealed a universe inhabited by energetically “feeling” individuals whose real character could never be uncovered by books or laboratory experiments detached from inner passions. Rousseau insisted that anyone wishing to join him in becoming a true observer of life had to begin by examining himself inwardly, to see if he were honestly speaking and acting in line with his spontaneous nature, however passionate and non rational this might prove to be. Such an investigation, as with Kant, required an abandonment of all the masks, pretensions, and hypocrisies that men embraced in order to “fit with the program” dictated by tyrannical, external, passion-challenged forces operating in the name of objective Reason. Hypocrites did what they did in order to achieve what the world called “success”. Once an individual broke through his chains, abandoned reference to outside standards for his personal behavior, and got in touch with his real self, he became “natural”---and, through nature’s innate value, correspondingly “virtuous”.

Virtue, for Rousseau, was, in consequence, not something built through the repetition of the petty, daily, “good” actions praised by the outside world. Rather, one attained it by entering into the ontological state of being a liberated “natural man”. Rousseau reached this natural, virtuous condition through his Confessions (published posthumously, 1782). Here, he revealed to the world all his deepest, passionate, non-rational feelings and their effect on his actions, without consideration for the effect such disclosure might have upon public opinion and his own personal fame and fortune. Having thus accepted his natural self, he became virtuous, and need not be ashamed of deeds that others thought to be reprehensible; deeds that would, indeed, still be truly blameworthy if done by men seeking praise from the artificial, outside, “objective” world. Once virtuous, Rousseau could permit himself no rationalist post-mortem on the validity of his deeply felt goodness. All “looking back” amounted to a renewed embrace of the unjustifiable rules of a soul-killing artifice and duplicity.

Moreover, natural virtue transformed Rousseau into Everyman. Nature possessed integrity. It was all of one piece, honest and good, and could not help but speak with a single voice. Therefore, others who sincerely stripped themselves of the obstacles standing in the way of expression of their spontaneous natural feeling would inevitably be indistinguishable from, and united fraternally with Rousseau. It is this indistinguishable character that ensures that the various lovers in his widely-read Nouvelle Héloise (1761) are actually only loving themselves in other people, and the teacher in his enormously influential educational treatise, the Emile (1761), can be said by Rousseau to both ensure the child’s self-fulfillment and yet remake him totally in the tutor’s image at one and the same time.

Conversely, anyone who was not Rousseau-like, anyone who criticized Everyman’s feelings and spontaneous actions, anyone who failed to pity him in his trials, revealed himself as being unnatural. He could thus be neither free, nor virtuous, nor truthful. In fact, he could not even be labeled human, and did not deserve any fraternal consideration whatsoever. Carol Blum describes the situation well in commenting on Rousseau’s discussion of himself as the “spectator-animal” contemplating the suffering of one such pointless being.¹²¹

The Spectator animal was denied pleasurable pity in regarding the suffering animal because the suffering animal was evil and hence unworthy of sympathy. Since Rousseau knew that mankind was, like him, good, he was forced to the awful but inevitable realization that the creatures who treated him so heartlessly were not really people at all, that the key to the mystery was that ‘my contemporaries were but mechanical beings in regard to me who acted only by impulsion and whose actions I could calculate only by the laws of movement’. He was now really alone, the only human being left amid a throng of automatons; the human race existed solely in him.

Rousseau was convinced that the non-virtuous and non-human world around him was stubbornly hostile to the effort to perfect it. The duty of Everyman-Rousseau was to transform that world into him himself, or cause it to disappear before it would do him any further damage. Once again, the question of a possible initial flaw undermining the value of his entire argument could not even be imagined; the sincere, virtuous, liberated Everyman was necessarily free from error. No discussion concerning the ground and justification of this underlying truth was permissible. It was self-evident—a given! Doubt regarding his position would in effect mean allowing the sham world of the hypocrite to influence him once more.

A critique of his obvious rejection of the doctrine of Original Sin and the need for correction and transformation in Christ through Faith and Reason, such as that offered by Archbishop Christophe Beaumont (1703-1781) of Paris, had no meaning whatsoever in the Rousseauian universe. It simply proved that the prelate, by belief and profession a slave of an “outside” supernatural religion, was not thinking internally and naturally. He was, in fact, not really human. Logically speaking, he was one of the suffering animals for whom no sympathy could be felt. He could therefore logically be eliminated, along with the whole of the corrective and transforming vision that the supporters of the full message of the Word in history “unnaturally” promoted.¹²²

Rousseau’s vision was used to radicalize and vulgarize the polite society of the salons created by men like Voltaire, every aspect of which could be dismissed by his followers as artificial and hypocritical as well. It would develop into the cult surrounding him and his activities that became so vibrant in the 1780’s and 1790’s. This cult, open and disguised, was destined to a long history extremely detrimental to the complete teaching of the Incarnation. In the short run, it proved to be an immense boon to every failed writer, artist, and purveyor of pornography in the European world. For once one was certain of his inner sincerity and virtue, all that he did was self-evidently true, good, and beautiful, and all that stood in his way the hypocrisy of hopelessly obscene men and societies. Revolutionary France was to experience the wretched effects of the blasphemous, pornographic, and violent type of journalism the cult of Rousseau engendered in politically important and highly volatile newspapers such as Jacques Hébert’s (1757-1794) Père Duchesne.¹²³

One final, exceedingly important general point must be made to prefigure Rousseau’s future impact upon Catholicism. Although totally earth-bound in his approach, his emphasis on the overriding importance of non-rational feeling and passion in human life does give his “natural world” a certain unpredictably mysterious glow. Rousseau’s “nature” is indefinable and fueled by seemingly superhuman feelings that continually shock and awe. Hence, while no one, in the long run, could view the mechanical-minded naturalism of his Spinoza-inspired Radical Enlightenment comrades as being somehow “spiritual”, many people have been led to see Rousseauian naturalism in precisely this light. It gives an “appropriate explanation” of things soulful and helps to tell a good story about one’s spiritual self-worth. Instead of being viewed as merely a wilder version of the same earth-bound vision shared by all philosophes, it has therefore often been depicted as somehow open to sacral influences that the mathematician and scientist cannot allow. Many enthusiasts have even gone so far as to limit the very definition of the spiritual to the kind of phenomena that Rousseau praises, equating the presence of God and of God’s blessing only with the existence of strong feelings, and the vital, energetic, conquering action they release. It was vital action of this sort that allowed Rousseau himself to storm heaven and demand from God an afterlife: since, as he said, it would personally make him terribly sad to discover that there were none.

Anyone succumbing to such a temptation actually blocks himself off entirely from access to what orthodox Catholics believe to be the real source of the spiritual: supernatural truths and supernatural grace coming from outside of limited, created nature and the human persons inhabiting it. Anyone falling victim to this kind of “spirituality” refuses to permit God to be what the adjective supernatural indicates that He is: above His handiwork. He will not allow God to be God. He thereby also loses all ability to see that his flights of deeply felt enthusiasm may be caused merely by madness or adolescent hormonal activity; and that what they require is correction and transformation in Christ rather than indulgence, praise, and unwarranted divinization.

E. Naturalism and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo

Naturalism—whether in the form of varied declarations of the independence of Creation from the Creator or a definition of nature as a realm that is in and of itself godly—is essentially hostile to belief in the vital influence of a qualitatively different supernatural teaching and grace in a universe of flesh and blood. In its most radical form, it makes its hatred of the Word Incarnate obvious; in its more moderate expressions, it permits a continued life for a “god” and for a “Christianity” reformed so as to reflect what are really only natural activities, ideas, and passions. Development of the doctrine of total depravity, Pietist efforts to control doctrinal dispute among Protestants, and both the Radical as well as the Moderate, Whig Enlightenment, all, in varied ways and with varying degrees of consciousness, effectively promoted the dominance of this naturalist vision by the middle to the end of the eighteenth century.

Always anti-Catholic, the victory of any given naturalist perspective opens the door to endless further seizures of nature and redefinition of its meaning to satisfy the particular desires of whoever or whatever happens to be the strongest and most willful earthbound element of a given society at the moment. Those who see naturalism as a hopeful tool for building a happier world are doomed to discover that it becomes the key to satisfying the arbitrary demands of the brute forces that the preachers of totally depravity unleash to wreak havoc in a world that could actually be corrected and transformed---in Christ.

Naturalist rhetoric drills into the western consciousness the teaching that Catholicism lacks all comprehension of that temporal order that it, in truth, has been the only force fully to understand, coordinate, exalt, and deeply love. Catholic supporters of the Word—who really do believe in the value of Reason, freedom, and the ordered development of a nature touched by the hand of God—are refused a hearing as obscurantist men of faith, while the worshippers of mere words—who build a society in which all these goods are deconstructed and destroyed—are identified as their unquestionable defenders. This twisting of reality has proven to have a bafflingly effective influence over a credulous public that actually itself suffers immensely from the naturalist project. For, even when iced in a sugary language of Progress and Goodness and Happiness and Freedom, naturalism, in practice, will always lead to that death camp ruled by willfulness and brute force constructed through the doctrine of total depravity. And this is as true in “moderate” American revolutionary hands as it was in those of their “sensible” British Whig ancestors and under the custody of the only superficially different model presented by a statist and Pietist Prussia: ¹²⁴

In light of the demonstrated connections and affinities between Lutheran Pietism and Anglo-American Puritanism it should be evident that these psychocultural tensions, which have haunted German history in perhaps an archetypal way, are endemic in the very nature of modernity itself. Although the Prusso-German path toward modernization was characterized by an unusual degree of primacy given the collective state power, its deeper significance will elude us if we fail to focus on the Promethean lust for material power that serves as the deepest common drive behind all modern Western cultures. Thus, when we look upon such figures as August Hermann Francke and Frederick William I, we should not simply dismiss them as embodying something alien, but rather see them as possible reflections of ourselves.

F. Catholic Doctrinal and Pastoral Achilles Heels

The years of the brewing battle for control over the definition of nature were filled with as much bitter bickering over doctrine and practice inside the Catholic community as outside its walls. One can begin tackling this question of internal Catholic division by noting two crucially important points. First of all, Trent deliberated under the pressure of almost constant ecclesiastical, political, and military crises, preventing it from discussing many matters as fully as a good number of the best Council Fathers would have liked. In fact, such crises forced them to drop the treatment of certain “hot” topics entirely. Secondly, Trent was bound, both by tradition as well as by prudential considerations of time and energy, to a general policy of focusing only upon the immediate contested issues that had led to the contemporary rebellion against the Church. In responding to them, it sought to avoid broader doctrinal disputes among different legitimate schools of theology still happily flourishing inside the anti-Protestant Catholic camp.¹²⁵

It follows that much of what the Council of Trent defined dogmatically and decreed pastorally was limited and incomplete. Furthermore, some of the decrees and anathemas regarding such subjects were dependent upon introductory texts for explanation, and canonists denied these the same doctrinal weight as the rest of the document concerned. Dogmatic theologians were aware that every line of the council’s decrees had to be scrutinized carefully to separate out what was de fide and what was as yet not. Trent’s theological decisions and practical strategies were thus open to a much greater refinement and explanation. Hence, the warning of the great Jesuit papal theologian at the council, Alfonso Salmerón (1515-1585), about the need for humility in claiming dogmatic certainty in realms which were intricate and as yet unclear. Speaking specifically of the Jesuit educational program, Salmerón counseled: ¹²⁶

I think that we must not draw up lists of propositions that we might not be able to defend. This has been done, but it has not yielded good results. Still, if one would truly like to make a catalogue of this type, it would have to contain the smallest number of propositions possible, so that no one could claim that we desire to condemn before the fact opinions and theses that the Church has not absolutely banned.

Unfortunately, this advice was not generally followed. Struggle after struggle characterized Catholic life in the centuries after Trent, leading to the often unedifying and uncharitable controversies and displays of bitterness noted above. Although it is very difficult to separate such disputes clinically from one another, one can identify three distinct factors at play in the poisonous conflicts that raged in the years after Trent: 1) a clash of universal and particular authorities in defining Catholic teaching and guiding daily Catholic life, reflected in the ecclesiological problem both of the relationship of the Roman Pontiff to the local bishops, clergy, laity, and State authorities of distinct nations, as well as that of all these latter authorities among themselves; 2) the quarrel over the precise role of grace, nature, and free will in the work of salvation; and, 3) the battle of speculative, positive, pastoral, and natural theology. In completing this discussion, we will easily be able to grasp the progression of internal ills from unfortunate Achilles Heels to active Catholic cooperation, alongside Protestant forces, in offering droit de cité inside the Christian camp to the supporters of the Radical and Whig Enlightenment and the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo—to them, to their fraudulent naturalist rhetoric, to their Black Legends regarding the supposed evils of the full message of the Word Incarnate in history, and to their alternative good stories concerning Christ’s “true” meaning.

G. Universal and Particular Tendencies, Ecclesiastical and Regal

There can never be a sound Christendom without a sound ecclesiology. Alas, providing this firm foundation for growth has always proven to be immensely difficult, for political and sociological reasons as much as theological and philosophical ones. In any case, debate over one major aspect of ecclesiology, the relationship of pope and bishops, was lively at the Council of Trent.¹ Bubbling under the surface and sometimes erupting violently since its first session, this debate really reached its peak in the third sitting of 1562-1563. Discussion over the so-called “Constitution of the Church” was complex, but basically three-sided in character.

Pope Pius IV (1559-1565), pro-Roman bishops —the so-called zelanti, mostly Italians—and certain theologians, among whom were a number of Jesuits who represented a reform-minded militancy in union with the Holy See, wished to have Trent confirm the decrees on papal primacy passed at the fifteenth century “unification” Council of Florence. Their chief opponents were the French delegates at Trent, who did not accept the validity of Florence. Despite the abandonment by the Valois Monarchy of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, and its justification of royal involvement in ecclesiastical affairs on the basis of a Concordat negotiated directly with the Papacy under Leo X in 1517 instead, French bishops continued to look to the Councils of Constance and Basel for their primary inspiration. These, the reader will remember, affirmed the superiority of councils, weakened papal ability to guide individual churches, and thus gave support to those episcopal prerogatives and local concerns that in France were referred to as the “Gallican liberties”. A Church organized under such standard operating procedures, the Gallicans argued, was one that more closely imitated the model of Apostolic Christianity, which, they insisted, was the proper source to plumb in resolving all problems involving teaching and reform.

Meanwhile, Spanish bishops, as militant in their concern for the defense and spread of the Faith as any of the sons of St. Ignatius or St. Remy, accepted papal primacy, rejected the “divinization” of the early Church—whose description by the French they considered to be another “good story” rather than a source of real substantive knowledge—but nevertheless demanded a more precise definition of the dignity of the episcopal state as such. Thus, however much they might admit that the individual bishop owed his jurisdiction to Rome as well as a filial obedience to papal doctrinal leadership, the Spanish maintained that his role as a successor to the Apostles placed him under a personal divine obligation to carry out his responsibilities to the full. This direct grant of apostolic authority required his firm opposition to many current, corrupt, papal curial practices. Hence, a conscientious bishop would have to oppose the widespread provision of dioceses to men who worked in Rome and never actually administered their Sees. He would have to oppose the granting of so many exemptions to individuals and religious orders that governance by a resident ordinary became frustrating and almost impossible. In fact, the Spanish bishops, as an episcopal “college” participating in the Council of Trent, felt called upon by their apostolic authority and filial responsibilities to reform the papal court itself and eliminate such abuses. From the standpoint of the zelanti, this meant conciliarism in reality if not in theory.

Papal-episcopal relations proved to be so divisive that Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509-1580) and a group of leaders of the various “nations” at the Council concluded that the only way to deal with the matter was, as suggested above, to drop it from consideration entirely. Still, with the outright conciliarist view somewhat muffled through the aid of the leader of the French delegation, Cardinal Charles de Guise (1524-1574), bits and pieces of all three divergent ecclesiological positions made their appearance in one specific canon/decree or another in the months from July to December of 1563. Special prerogatives of the Holy See were alluded to, though the Council Fathers did, indeed, lay down reform guidelines for the papal court itself. Detailed reform was left for elaboration after the council’s closure at the local level, but provision for the presence of papal legates at provincial synods seemed to guarantee continued guidance from an internationally minded papacy. Nevertheless, anyone studying Trent in depth can see that the papal-episcopal question had merely been calmed and not satisfactorily clarified. Hence the regular clashes involving “national” churches, individual bishops, and Rome from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and these on issues ranging from the teaching authority of popes and councils through to purely pastoral matters.

But papal-episcopal tensions were not the only ones disturbing the ecclesiastical horizon. One also had to contend with the conflict of ordinaries and regular clergy already alluded to above.² Complaining of both the exaggeratedly competitive spirit and inner weaknesses of a number of religious orders, bishops secured certain conciliar statements strengthening episcopal rights to guide them. The post-conciliar regular clergy knew that local bishops who did not appreciate obstacles to the governance of their dioceses from its varied and all-too-independent modus operandi and goals were carefully watching it. This was true not only with respect to new orders like the Society of Jesus, which could understandably be viewed by bishops as a suspicious special agent of the Papacy, but also all the other religious societies with organization and purposes transcending diocesan boundaries.

Such religious, as we have already seen in discussing heated thirteenth century battles involving the Franciscans and Dominicans, often found themselves at loggerheads not only with the secular clergy of the dioceses in which they operated but with one another as well. Animosity arose from a number of motives, ranging from simple, sinful, human envy to solid pastoral disagreements. But the reality of secular hostility toward the regular clergy did not guarantee an alliance of the ordinary diocesan priests with their own bishops. Developments in the Kingdom of France in particular will later illustrate just how bitter the relationship of these “lower” and “higher” orders of clerks inside a given diocese could be. And, once again, that bitterness involved disputes on everything from teaching to pastoral methodology and practical daily parish routine.

Many bishops simply wanted to emphasize the intrinsic dignity of the episcopal office and the necessity of nuance in local applications of universal principles without in any sense wishing to reject general ecclesiastical guidelines altogether. Whatever their desires, they gained support in their traditional quarrels regarding the plenitude of papal power from the various already existing or budding European nation-states. Their concerns therefore often reflected that long-gestating national parochialism, noted in the course of the last two chapters, which conflicted with the international vision represented by the Papacy and its closest allies. Local governments of all types supported these concerns with reference to certain “rights” that had been claimed by the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdoms of France and England since the Middle Ages: the “rights” giving clout to what was broadly referred to as “regalism”.³

Regalism as a specific term may be new to the readers of this work, but the substance of its claims cannot in any way be surprising. All that the word signifies is a State’s insistence on the right to exercise what are deemed to be an “obviously” legitimate royal guidance of religion and Church activity, wherever a given authority’s writ might run. Despite the nominal connection of regalism with monarchy, and ultimately with the imperial powers exercised by the ancient Roman Caesars, we have already repeatedly seen that its principles were evoked not only by emperors and kings but also by powerful medieval and Renaissance republics and municipal councils. Men like Marsilius of Padua taught a regalism that invaded the entirety of the sacred sphere. Ockham’s version, though more religious sounding, was close behind that of Marsilius in its secular effects. So was that of John Wycliffe. Generally speaking, its Tridentine Catholic manifestations never openly preached or reached any quite so radical vision, which ultimately resolved the struggle of Church and State by effectively obliterating the former.

The Hapsburgs were the direct heirs of the imperial Catholic regalist tradition, applying it according to the specific customs of the many and varied lands over which they ruled, making appeal to its claims in Austria, Spain, Portugal, the New World, and the Far East. In their southern Italian territories, they traced their rights back to papal concessions granted to the Norman rulers of the eleventh century by some of the greatest of the medieval reformers themselves. Valois and Bourbon Kings of France both followed Hapsburg imperial lead, and even surpassed them in their pretensions. So did the rulers of the Venetian Republic, and occasionally even with a very pronounced Marsiglian and Ockhamite verve.⁴

By the seventeenth century, Catholic regalian rights throughout Europe were justified with reference to a kaleidoscope of “traditional” principles: the “unquestionable” laws of republican and imperial Rome; medieval legalism; the gamut of influences, united through the heretical monism of Marsilius of Padua in the Defensor Pacis, but hidden under an exterior show of loyalty to the Primitive Apostolic Church; extorted canonical agreements; patriotism; the need to achieve and preserve “glory”; and that almost indefinable concept called “Reason of State”. “Natural theology” and “common sense” would soon be added to this impressive, intellectual, regalist arsenal. In other words, regalism was justified with reference to practically everything that could allow “nature as is” to go about satisfying its “business as usual” demands without worrying about correction and transformation in Christ. As usual, those of its supporters who nevertheless wished to be respected as Catholic once again often claimed that “true Christianity” itself opposed any invasive corrective and transforming mission, marshaling spiritual arguments to form an “appropriate explanation” of their passionately felt desire to be left entirely alone by a supernatural—but impotent—God.

While the State, qua State, always has to be considered as a friend of the Christian mission, regalism must unfailingly be counted among one of the unquestionable foes of the full message of the Word in history. Always strongly secularist in its practical tendencies, its Tridentine Catholic manifestation also more and more reflected a powerful parochial passion to dictate laws to universal Christendom; a desire to swallow up the religious whole in the more secular-minded part. The difficulty lay in the fact that regalist lands also still did give legitimate and positive State support to the Catholic Faith. Hence, they easily seduced many honest believers into thinking that each and every one of their actions was necessarily a Catholic-friendly one. After all, how could the Most Christian King or His Catholic Majesty possible do anything hostile to a world shaped by the Word? Was the adjective alone not proof positive of their purity of Faith and action? How could one call them Christian and Catholic if they were not precisely that? That, indeed, was the appropriate question to pose, but the proper spirit to answer it correctly often was lacking to the loyal Catholic subject who was a regalist patriot.

A number of bishops at Trent were clearly troubled by regalism and its claims. Some of the French, to take the most significant example, were as eager to be as free from royal controls of the episcopacy—cemented through the aforementioned Concordat—as they were to be liberated from papal domination. The fact that there were general problems here that needed to be clarified led many Council Fathers to press for discussion of a “reform of the princes”. Indeed, Cardinal Morone, who presided, as papal legate, in the council’s last nine months, actually used the threat of such a debate to convince the great powers to come to terms on whatever ecclesiological issues might yet be satisfactorily resolved.

In short, papal and conciliar awareness of the urgency of marking out the special needs and autonomy of the sacred sphere in the reform of Christendom was placed in vivid contrast to local State conviction that regalist political concerns, treated as though they were spiritual matters, should dominate religious as well as secular discussion. Nevertheless, State involvement and, with it, the broader issue of parochial, corporate, and individual lay interests in the life of a universal, clerical-guided, and much more self-aware Church, ultimately were barely examined at all. Particular interests thus remained very strong everywhere, although, by definition different according to nation and local area.

Moreover, the decision not to tread on State toes at Trent also meant that the whole question of extra-European missionary activity, and the possible subordination of the evangelization and spiritual interests of indigenous peoples to secular purposes was left untouched. This was because control over the day-to-day affairs of worldwide missions had been given to Portugal and Spain before Trent even met. What this signified was that any clash of interests involving the Papacy, religious orders, and European nations that took place in missionary lands did so under the particular conditions created by the regalist policies of Spanish and Portuguese monarchies and their potential appeal to judgments based on the “higher principle” of Reason of State. All these tensions then played their role in external battles against Islam, political relationships with China and Japan, and internal colonial religious concerns, both European and native.⁵

Regalist governments of all types, monarchical and republican, those that felt threatened by the Hapsburg Dynasty—the traditional defender of the idea of an international European order—and the Hapsburgs themselves, generally become more and more convinced that a Faith with international political aims was a phenomenon “too hot to handle” for the “business as usual” concerns of any reigning family. A dynasty that brought either Catholic or Protestant issues into international disputes seemed inevitably to risk arousing a dangerous rebelliousness from whichever opposing religious force suffered from its choice of favorites. Hence, one notices an increasing dynastic abandonment of any serious reference to religion, along with a shift to a justification of interstate policies on the basis of power political considerations alone. A secularized view of interstate relations grew ever stronger as the Thirty Years War intensified. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the development of European affairs in the century and a half thereafter, marked the slow but definitive withdrawal of dynasties from commitment to an international Christendom unified in faith and ultimate existential purpose.

Despite this obvious secularization of international affairs, and the theoretical abandonment of the concept of a Christendom open to the corrective and transforming influence of the Word in history that it entailed, it was in the very nature of a traditional regalist government still to seek religious approval of its a-religious international political game. In consequence, Catholic subjects of Most Christian Kings found themselves pressed to accept as religiously licit actions all manner of evils designed to raise dead reformers from their graves: State interference in papal elections for the sake of obtaining pro-regalist pontiffs; the appointment of still more regalist-friendly cardinals; and the interruption of “dangerous” communications from Rome, delivered through nuncios, papal-friendly religious orders, and the print media, that placed obstacles in the path of willful governmental activity. Moreover, the same twisted “catholicization” of secularism could be noted more and more in internal politics as well, as public religious support was demanded for the centralizing and militarist measures deemed necessary for the maintenance of a given nation’s peace, prosperity, European-wide political position, and indefinable “glory”.

All this was noticeable everywhere, beginning with the many lands composing what was still, anachronistically, called the Holy Roman Empire. That Empire, after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, was divided into hundreds of what were, for all serious purposes, basically independent jurisdictions. Although the Hapsburg Emperor retained an honorary superiority over this myriad of local authorities, his power was really centered in territories directly under his control, such as Austria. The Papacy and local episcopacy had to take account of his regalist wishes there, and those of the various other princes and municipal councils elsewhere. A number of imperial bishops were, of course, princes in their own right, but these entertained regalist temptations that were often as strong as their counterparts in the laity. They were thus apt to act with respect to their local churches more with an eye to the interests of their secular crown rather than to those of their religious mitre.⁶

It is hard to imagine the sixteenth century French Monarchy possessing yet more power to interfere in the life of the Church while still remaining in any sense Roman Catholic. Emperor in his own land, the font of law—a truth symbolized by the ceremony of the lit de justice, when the king rose from the “bed of justice” to proclaim his final judgment on a given disputed subject--and possessor, since the Concordat of 1515, of all major church appointments, the King of France was viewed by some as the “Vicar of Christ in his kingdom”, “just like, in fact, a God in bodily form”, and even a “‘new secularized version of the hypostatic union’”.⁷ The dreams of Philip the Fair and his legalists seemed more than realized in the Catholic France of Tridentine Christendom.

Not that this vision remained unquestioned. There was a “Catholic First” position that came to the fore during the Wars of Religion and remained alive in the program of the dévot party discussed in the previous chapter. Dévots continued to promote the subordination of the State to Catholic faith and morality, often within the context of a demand for wholehearted acceptance of the reforms of the Council of Trent and a greater respect for the power of the Papacy. Interestingly enough, even many Gallican thinkers quite openly insisted that the French Catholic community only delegated the exercise and use of its political power to the monarch, while always retaining its ultimate property and ownership. This meant that if a king abused his ministry, he could be deposed and replaced by another. Such ideas, which grew stronger in Catholic ranks with increased Valois religious vacillation, became most powerful from the beginning of the War of the Three Henries (1584-1589)—Henry III, Henry of Guise, Henry of Navarre--and the formation of the Catholic League down to the victory of the Bourbon Family in 1589.⁸

With that victory, under Henry IV (1589-1610) and his successors, there came a new lease on life for the concept of a semi-divine kingship:⁹

By 1625 the Bishop of Chartres, Léonore d’Estampes, ventured the opinion that ‘there is no one who does not hold and believe that {the King of France} is in no way mortal but instead something very like the Deity and similar to him’; while just a few years later the future member of the French Academy, Guez de Balzac, commended the Roman practice of emperor worship as worthy of emulation, maintaining that Louis XIII in particular was so saintly that he had never lost the innocence vouchsafed to him by baptism….Richelieu’s notorious politics of ‘reason of state’ presupposed this divinization, and made sense in the cardinal-minister’s own mind only on the assumption of France’s special relation to God and the sacrosanctity of French kingship.

Revival of the vision of sacred kingship worked together with that particular interpretation of Gallicanism that subordinated the Church to the wishes of the monarchy rather than to those of local French bishops. Bourbon kings, like their Valois predecessors, possessed the right granted them by the Concordat to name practically every ordinary in the country, the pope retaining only the power of a subsequent confirmation of royal choices. Despite relying on the Concordat for this authority, however, reform measures stemming from the fifteenth-century Councils of Constance and Basel continued to be considered as legally binding before the royal French courts, the parlements. This meant that French individuals and corporations opposed to any given Tridentine-inspired ecclesiastical action could make what was referred to as an appel comme d’abus, an “appeal due to an abuse”, from Church to State authorities, thereby seeking a final judgment about a religious matter from the civil tribunals alone. Strong monarchs like Louis XIV (1643-1715) worked vigorously to make certain that such courts clearly understood their role as agents of the royal will and that they shaped whatever religious judgments they pronounced accordingly.¹⁰

Consequently, influence over the monarch was essential to bringing the French Church into the international Tridentine reform camp. None of the specific desires of the various dévot groups--reintroducing sound diocesan and monastic discipline, establishing colleges and seminaries, improving the miserable condition of the peasantry, and assuring a Catholic-friendly European harmony--could be achieved without backing from the king, along with the parlements judging in his name and according to his will. It was for this reason that pro-Tridentine bishops undertook a political campaign on behalf of reform, culminating in the petition of the clerical representatives at the Estates-General of 1614 to accept the decrees of the Council officially, en bloc, once and for all.¹¹

Concern for the integrity of monarchical power created a regalist party backed by a variety of individuals and groups that did not appreciate the dévot political agenda. This included certain Huguenots, whose voices could only effectively be heard in court and judicial circles; monks receiving support for a life of prayer which they had no intention of carrying out; ordinary people opposing reform because it struck against what were actually long-entrenched superstitious practices masquerading as religious activity, such as the sacrifice of bulls to the Mother of God in times of agricultural distress; skeptics calling upon the heritage of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592); and libertines supported by Louis XIII’s brother, Gaston d’Orleans (1608-1660). Dramatists were also called upon for aid, with men like Molière (1622-1673) satirizing the dévot movement and depicting the religious-minded layman shaped through its influence as a pretentious hypocrite, both in Tartuffe (1664) as well as in his other influential and highly entertaining works.

It was the apparent Ultramontanism of many of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century dévots, along with the Roman-backed Tridentine reforms that they vigorously supported, which sparked most of the effective French opposition to their victory. One cannot be surprised that it was in the name of Gallicanism that the parlements criticized the nuncios---whom the dévots saw to be crucial links with the Holy See---as being merely “agents of a foreign court”. It was also in the name of ancient local liberties that the doctrine of an indirect papal power over law, one that flowed from Innocent III’s classic understanding of the need for the Church to have a palpable means of correcting error and sin, was openly reviled. Regalists attacked the Jesuit teachers promoting it as villains engaged in a subversive, educational affront to French sovereignty that could possibly even lead to regicide.

This latter argument was particularly powerful in France, given the murder of Henry IV in 1610 by François Ravaillac (1578-1610), who feared the long-term protestantizing effect of the king’s toleration of the Huguenots through the Edict of Nantes. The conviction, real or alleged, that the dévot cause was somehow implicated in that assassination, and thereby intrinsically dangerous to the State, is well captured in the petition of the commons at the Estates-General of 1614. That document successfully criticized the clerical call for legal sanction for the decrees of Trent and demanded an official assertion of that full independence of French political life from outside spiritual control already defended by Jean Bodin (1530-1596) in the midst of the Religious Wars in 1576.¹²

But {this position} did not officially surface until the Third Estate demanded that it be recognized as a ‘fundamental law of the realm’ by the Estates General of 1614. Drafted by a parlementary barrister…the proposition specified that ‘as {the king} is recognized as Sovereign in his State, not holding his Crown from anyone but God, there is no Power on earth, whether Spiritual or Temporal, which has the least right over his realm, such as would take it away from the sacred persons of our Kings’, and went on to anathematize the admissibility of any deposition or assassination. The proposition did not become a fundamental law at the time due to the resistance of the nobility and the clergy. Cardinal du Perron, the main spokesman for the clergy’s delegation, found it outrageous that a French king might have the right to convert, say, to Mohammedanism without fear of deposition or resistance.

Perhaps the most effective of the opponents of the dévot camp were those who employed the two powerful words bon français—good Frenchman—in order to describe their position. While sharing the same basic vision, a bon français no longer claimed to try to stand above the Catholic-Huguenot battle, as Bodin’s so-called politique faction might have done. Catholicism had re-asserted itself much too strongly for such an approach to be successful by the early 1600’s. Instead, he argued that while seeking to do the right Catholic thing, he simply wished to do this without detriment to France. The problem was that such an outlook could, and did, expand to encompass the idea that the right Catholic thing to do, and the benefit of France itself, must be understood and guided not by the pope, nor even by the Gallican bishops, nor, least of all, by individual conscience, but, once again, with reference to that nebulous principle called “Reason of State”, as interpreted by a monarch somehow mystically protected in his judgments through the grace of Almighty God.

In other words, in making a powerful appeal to patriotism, the bon français implicitly criticized a Catholic who did not accept his claims as being a mauvais français. He then confused the issue still further by obscuring the question of whether his opponent’s lack of patriotism was ascribed merely to political miscalculation or to the desire to submit the State to the corrective and transforming message of the Word, as interpreted by the Papacy and dévot prelates. Whatever the case, a heavy dose of Gallican disdain for external papal involvement in the affairs of France was part and parcel of the whole bon français position, as was a dislike of independent internal Catholic influence as well.

Battle was joined between the dévot and bon français parties over the issue of French internal policy and religious war in the period from 1618-1648.¹³ The dévots believed that France should dedicate whatever military energy it possessed to the elimination of Protestant fortified places still existing within the country by the terms of the Edict of Nantes, move to suppress the scandal of public Huguenot worship entirely, and turn its attention to needed internal reforms, especially in agriculture, on behalf of the wretched rural population. They also believed that France should be at least neutral, if not positively friendly towards the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs in the Thirty Years War. After all, the result of their victory would mean the definitive international triumph of Catholicism over Protestant heresy.

For a bon français, internal reform and the plight of the peasantry were of little interest, while the Huguenots were of concern only insofar as the fortified places they commanded did indeed continue to pose a threat to domestic security. The real question, to his mind, was whether or not the power and glory of the Hapsburg Family might surpass and eclipse that of the Bourbon Dynasty and France. The bon français therefore supported war against Spain and Austria and, in consequence, alliance with the very Protestant powers which the dévots wished to see crushed. A pamphlet war in the 1620’s saw the dévot True or Friendly Word of Messieurs the Princes and the Admonitio ad regem pitted against tracts such as the Discourse of the Princes and States of Christendom, On the Progress and Conquests of the King of Spain and House of Austria, and the Parallel of St. Louis and Louis XIII. It flared up again in the middle of the 1630’s with the appearance of Bishop Cornelius Jansenius’ (1585-1638) Mars Gallicus, which vigorously attacked French aggression. This was challenged in works like How the Piety of the French Differs from that of the Spaniards within a Profession of the Same Religion, and Gallican Vindications.

After taming the internal Huguenot military threat in the 1620’s, France experienced a complete bon français victory. Their triumph was symbolized by the defeat at the hands of Cardinal Armand-Jean de Plessis de Richelieu (1585-1642) of Michel de Marillac and his allies on what has come to be known as the Day of Dupes (November 10, 1630). As a result of this political coup, which assured the cardinal’s role as the king’s chief minister, France entered the war against Spain and Austria. She won the power and glory that “Reason of State” demanded. She also found herself, by the end of that conflict, racked by the internal revolt of the Frondes, subject to major agricultural and commercial turmoil, and prey to the kind of intense suffering so poignantly described by the dévot circles around St. Vincent de Paul.

It is no surprise that the French dévots were bewildered by the fullness of their defeat, for the Universal Church herself had seemed to unite with the State against them. Pope Urban VIII (1623-1644), while condemning the principle of Reason of State in theory, himself frequently acted in practice during the Thirty Years War as though Protestant defeat were indeed secondary in importance to humbling Hapsburg power. A dévot might be forgiven for wondering if politics and patriotism did perhaps operate by special mystical rules that were different from those applying to private individuals. And even the most vigorous member of that party had to admit that the personal piety of the French monarchs seemed assurance enough that a Catholic spirit would somehow triumph over the theoretical confusion in the long run.¹⁴

Many French sons of St. Ignatius themselves “courted the court”, so wreaking havoc with Ignatius’s central principles as to grant France a unique exemption from the basic principles of an internationally minded Jesuit Catholicism. ¹⁵ Much to the scandal of members of the Society outside the country, a number of their French colleagues therefore toned down their Ultramontanism in favor of the royalist manifestation of Gallicanism. Fr. François de La Chaise (1624-1709), the King’s chaplain, openly took sides with the monarchy in matters relating to everything from Bourbon claims to ecclesiastical privileges inside France to demands for extraterritoriality within the boundaries of the city of Rome. But the Jesuits were not alone in breaking dévot ranks. De Bérulle of the frequently anti-Society Oratorians also willingly contributed to a bon français pamphlet.¹⁶

One of the main authors of the bon français approach, Cardinal Richelieu, illustrates the peculiar complexity of the French situation as much as anyone else. Tied early in his career with the work of de Bérulle, and always very supportive of practical Tridentine reform on a diocesan level, he, nevertheless, was willing to ally France with Moslems against fellow Catholics and press for the creation of a French Patriarchate with quasi-papal powers. The “words” bon français, Reason of State, and dynastic glory always took precedence in his mind over the corrective and transforming message of the Word Incarnate—or, perhaps better stated, were totally merged together with it in one “believing” but highly politicized whole.¹⁷

As usual, however, enormous problems emerged in this particular squadron of the budding Grand Coalition of the Status Quo as well as in all the others. The Gallican Articles of 1682 claimed to defend local French Church rights but, in fact, emphasized the elevation of royal authority above that of bishops as much as it did over that of the pope. This truth was clarified by Louis XIV’s disavowal in 1693 of the more episcopal friendly aspects of the document when courting papal Rome anew. Theological propaganda aside, French bishops were viewed as being “free” only in union with the king in any possible disagreements with Rome. They were definitely not free to press a conciliarist argument that could also be turned against the monarchy. Louis sought to reconcile the bishops for their loss of real independence by compensating them with measure after measure tightening the local ordinary’s control over his diocesan clergy and depriving the latter of any deliberative voice whatsoever in running the Gallican Church. Such actions aroused a great deal of resentment that would eventually be aimed equally against both the episcopacy and the monarchy.

Meanwhile, more troubles for the future were brewing in consequence of the exaltation of the king’s power in every other realm of political and social life. Gallican institutions that cherished their mission to guard traditional prerogatives against the pretensions of both the French Monarchy and the Roman Papacy, forces ranging from the nobility to the various parlements and the entire judicial community that gained its living through them, were brought to heel. Meetings of the Estates General ceased. Intendants replaced existing officials in provincial areas. Lits de justices, appealing to the ultimate legal authority of the king, were used to register acts and prevent petitioning against them, two functions formerly handled and encouraged by the parlements. All this was presented as a crucial battle against continuing vestiges of feudal anarchy. The peace, order, and glory that it guaranteed were then celebrated in an ever more elaborate pageantry emphasizing the sacred and civil power of the Sun King at his hunting lodge of Versailles—his new governmental center, far away from the unwanted pressures of a corporate society, exerted so formidably in the former capital of Paris.¹⁸

In sum, a rather bizarre number of approaches to regalism had grown up in France by the end of the 1600’s. Most truly serious Ultramontanists would always be dead set against it. Nevertheless, some, like many French Jesuits, supported regalism inside France because they felt that the king was Catholicism’s best friend in that country. Principled Gallicans always approved of regalism insofar as it meant a defense of French national rights from Roman papal interference. On the other hand, many members of this party were upset with a Gallican vision used to pursue purely secularizing goals, or one that involved a divinization of the monarchy that simultaneously crushed the episcopacy, the local clergy, and other national institutions. Parlements might be happy to see a royal defense of French rights vis-à-vis Rome but embittered by their own exclusion from effective influence over national life. All of these groups invented “appropriate theological justifications” for their particular positions, because all still believed that France was the Eldest Daughter of the Church and could not operate without a rhetorical cover story “suitable” to a Catholic vision of life—even if the final tale, whatever its particular content, were actually destructive to the corrective and transforming message of the Word Incarnate in history.

Much more openly indicative of the chilling direction down which thought regarding the independence of the State from Christ was traveling was the situation in the Republic of Venice.¹⁹ Venice had always had a different history from much of the rest of Latin Europe. Proving the extent of this distinction was one of the main stimuli to Venetian historiography—and mythmaking—in the first place. Particular circumstances had indeed kept the Republic out of the Carolingian-Western Roman imperial sphere of influence. Its historians extrapolated from this truth the fantasy that Venice had remained separate from the original imperium as well. Nothing Roman, her most potent propagandists argued, could, in consequence, ever legitimately be allowed to exercise an “unhistorical” control over Venice. This included the Roman Church, many of whose medieval demands for correcting and transforming a flawed nature had, in fact, effectively been kept at bay over the course of the past five hundred years, allowing the Republic to practice a pronounced form of regalist and secular minded politics.

The Word-friendly fervor flamed by the Tridentine reform movement thus proved to be both perplexing and difficult for a government like that of Venice to accept. It faced the Republic with a reinvigorated Papacy on the one hand and many zealous bishops on the other, both forces eager to maintain an international Catholic Christendom critical of parochial interests. With the Roman Church awakened from her dogmatic slumber and dedicated to the work of correction and transformation in Christ, local regalists warned that Venice was being seduced into a Roman ecclesiastical imperium threatening subversion of the original intent of her foundation vision. Since the rhetoric of religion was as important to the Republic as it was to other contemporary states, they felt obliged to reassert that what this foundation vision taught regarding Church and State was as pious as it was politically sound.

Regalist fears came to a head through one of the most important crises of the Catholic Reformation era: the Venetian Interdict, which began in April of 1606 and continued until April of 1607. On the one hand, this involved practical economic matters and power-political relationships that the Church may not have judged correctly. Nevertheless, it also represented a cause célèbre engaging much of the European continent in a debate on the relationship of man, changeable nature, and the unchanging God. And in this conflict, a Church that had rediscovered her proper mission was indeed on the side of the angels.

A basic outline of the history of the Venetian Interdict can be sketched quickly. Venice and the Papacy, which often quarreled over jurisdictional questions, clashed especially harshly over a number of such matters in the years 1602-1605. Laws that, in effect, legitimized lay confiscation of lands that had been leased from the Church (1602), prohibited the construction of church buildings without State permission (1603) and ended transfers of property from secular to ecclesiastical hands (1605) followed swiftly, one upon the other. Meanwhile, two clerics, Scipione Saraceno, a canon of Vicenza, and Abbot Brandolino of Nervesa, accused of crimes ranging from mockery of the symbols of state authority to sorcery and murder, were arrested by the Republic to be tried in secular rather than ecclesiastical courts. Marsilius of Padua would have been edified—and prepared for coming papal retribution.

And, indeed, Pope Paul V (1605-1621) put Venice on warning that failure to change her behavior would bring a sentence of excommunication upon her leaders and the laying of an interdict upon the entire Republic. Warnings came to naught. In April of 1606, therefore, the Papal threat became a reality. There then took place a battle of great bitterness for the obedience of the clergy and the laity within the Republic, in the midst of which the bulk of the churches were kept functioning by the government and especially pro-papal forces like the Jesuits were expelled. A Venetian protest of the interdict, similar to that of the Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century, sought to interest all secular authorities throughout Europe in the plight of the Republic. It cited papal actions as an example of unjust Church interference in the life of the State with general negative repercussions for everyone. Protestants, especially among the English and the Dutch, became excited over the new possibilities this fight might offer for penetrating the Italian peninsula. French Gallicans were enticed into the fray. Rome weighed the prospects for a military solution that would inevitably drag the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs into the brouhaha.

The long-term justice of papal concern over the Venetian actions—and, with it, a sign of the Holy See’s renewed commitment to taking the full message of the Incarnation seriously-- stands out when one examines the spirit behind Venice’s struggle with Rome. Even a superficial glance at much of the Venetian writing in defense of the Republic reveals an outlook that the Church was obliged to combat and can be proud to have resisted. In fact, men like Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine (1542-1621) and Cesare Baronius (1538-1607), who were uncomfortable with a number of the specific political and legal aspects of the interdict controversy, were in the forefront of the battle against the monstrous intellectual errors at play alongside them.

Who were the spokesmen for this unacceptable Venetian spirit? One cannot aspire here to a complete listing of every name of significance. Let it suffice to say that the main figures of importance were men appreciated by or directly connected in one way or another with a political faction called the Giovani--the “Young Turks” we would say--which managed to gain control of the Republic in 1582. The Giovani were men with deep intellectual roots, highly conscious of the distinct historical position of Venice in the life of the West, and very eager for their city to overcome her commercial, agricultural, and strategic problems and survive.

Reference should be made specifically to the names of Paolo Paruta (1540-1598), author of Political Discourses and a work On the Perfection of the Political Life; Enrico Davila (1576-1631), known for his History of the Civil Wars in France; Leonardo Donà (1536-1612), Doge from 1606 onwards, for whom service to the State was an act of religious commitment evoking from him a vow of celibacy; Giovanni Marsilio (d. 1612), an ex-Jesuit and bridge between the realms of politics and theology; and Fulgenzio Micanzio (1570-1654), a Franciscan who served as spiritual consultant to the Republic after the death of the most famous of all those involved in the battle: Paolo Sarpi (1553-1623).

Sarpi, a Servite friar who came to epitomize the revolt in the eyes of Rome and who was excommunicated along with Marsilio and Micanzio, was counselor to the government from 1606 onwards. His Treatise on Benefices, History of the Interdict, History of the Council of Trent, and Thoughts cannot be overlooked by the student either of the Venetian Interdict, the general history of the black legends and alternative good stories cultivated by rhetoricians opposing the substantive message of the Word, or the complete development of modern secular culture based on the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. This is testified to by no less an enemy of Christianity than Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), who considered Sarpi, along with Davila, Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540), as the bright lights in the recent flowering of historiography. It is also confirmed by the fact that a copy of his book on the Council of Trent was one of the works cherished by the spiritual head of the Pilgrim community on the Mayflower bound for the New World and the stimulation of that City on a Hill mentality that would guide the future American Empire.²⁰

A full treatment of the arguments of the Venetian spokesmen for “nature as is” can be found—and presented, I might add, in a more favorable light—in William Bouwsma’s work on Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty. Briefly stated, without untangling the specific positions of each of the different thinkers mentioned above, what one finds therein is a high-minded appeal to spiritual principles and the State’s role in defending them, combined with a view of the universe as the realm of irrationality, sin, and lust for power. All was accompanied by a haughty indifference to the contradictions and consequences of this confusion of ideas very much reminiscent of the whole of the Zeitgeist of the new death camp era. The entire vision was seasoned with an equally familiar disdain for everything Roman, both religious and secular. Let us explore this outlook and its dangers beginning with that anti-Roman bias.

Rome’s “aggression” offended the Giovani for three reasons, the first of which stemmed from their unshakeable conviction that the State was the sole instrument created by God to act in the secular realm in the name of things spiritual. The State ruled by Divine Right. Rome, by emphasizing the rights of the supernatural order in the natural sphere was therefore sacrilegiously invading the space of God’s State in an innovative fashion. The reader knows by now that Rome was merely reiterating what any number of Church thinkers, especially from the time of St. Maximus the Confessor onwards, had stressed; a concept that Pope St. Gregory VII tied to the ancient canonical tradition that had been suppressed by bad political customs over the course of what we call Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Hence, the Giovani had not only a pre-Tridentine but also a pre-Gregorian understanding of the State’s spiritual role in the life of Christendom.

Constantine would have understood their second objection against a reinvigorated Rome, because this involved a flip on the familiar ancient complaint of the rhetoricians against the Socratics.The earthly realm, the Giovani insisted, was the sphere of constant flux and change, the sort of condition best described by history—the discipline they held to be most suited to demonstrating Venice’s unique position in the West and the unchanging demands of her foundation vision. God wanted His one spiritual agent, the State, to examine the changing reality around it, different for different societies, and to use all the tools necessary to move people to do what was required to survive in their midst. His Divine Will was united with the State in all that it demanded of its citizens.

Now, however, the Giovani protested, the Church, descending from her proper field of action into another, unsuitable one, was claiming that the realm of flux had to be guided by theological and metaphysical constructs—ideological principles, we would say, if we wished to give the same negative feel to the argument that the Venetians did. Rome, to take but one example, wanted individual States’ foreign policies to be conducted with an eye to the overall interest of Christianity and Christendom, a demand that could embroil Venice in wars against the Turks. For Venice, however, a foreign policy that aimed strictly at practical issues concerning her survival and growth might lead to commerce with the Moslems rather than crusades. Moreover, the Church wanted such practical economic interests to be guided by broad Catholic moral aims rather than by the laws of agricultural and industrial advantage alone. To the Giovani, this was a hideous mistake. Great truths, they claimed, were beyond human definition and application to the natural world, and any institution that sought to intervene in the secular realm in their name was venturing into the theater of the absurd.

For Sarpi, such a critique even extended to the dogmatic activity of the Church, since theology required the use of natural, human language, which was unsuitable for an accurate expression of divine truths. Given this argument, it is difficult to see how Christianity could ever mean anything for him other than the observable spiritual life of distinct, changeable, local “churches”, incapable of any serious advancement down the path of doctrinal formulation. Indeed, it is hard to see how Sarpi and some of the other Giovani could permit anyone even to use history as a model for their action, since to do so would be to turn an historical argument into an intellectual guideline attempting to explain and shape pure “flux”. The State, the direct agent of God in natural life, must merely act, commanded by nothing rational or architectonic. Discrete moments of life and reaction to them were the stuff of its existence. And, once again, obedience to State decisions was obedience to the will of God.

It might have been more difficult for a Constantine to understand the third motivation for the anti-papal attitude of the Giovani, since this centered round a variation of the recent Protestant doctrine of total depravity. Simply put, Rome offended them by acting as though the earth could be transformed ad majorem Dei gloriam. Such a transformation was obviously an utter impossibility. The world was the realm of sin, with the lust for power the specific stimulus to all human endeavors. Lust for power was identified as the special distinguishing impulse behind Roman action throughout her history, the popes merely devoting themselves to the continuation of the old imperial aggression under ecclesiastical pretenses. In fact, the whole Tridentine reform effort, the entire enterprise of transformation of the world in Christ, the thrust of the growing interest in dogma and its application to daily life, was one enormous fraudulent mask for building Roman power. It was therefore the duty of the intelligent man to uncover this lust for power behind every papal action; to “deconstruct” the Holy See’s seemingly principled moves to reveal its sin-saturated reality and act accordingly. It was this that Sarpi did particularly skillfully, after the interdict was lifted, in his History of the Council of Trent.

Needless to say, such an idea means that the State, the lion-tamer in a jungle of endless irrational conflict that ceaselessly changed its precise form, must logically exhibit that same sinful, mindless lust for power reflected in the actions of the Papacy. Still, if the State insisted upon its Divine Right to obedience, cut off all discussion of higher principles, and relied on the kind of terror that Sarpi had absolutely no qualms about encouraging to enforce its will, it could easily prevent “deconstruction” of its own hypocritical posturing as God’s agent in the world and full recognition of the depth and the extent of the evils that it perpetrated.

Mentioning this point brings us to a final underlying contradiction. According to the Giovani, no universal ideas were to be allowed a role in shaping the life of states with their different histories and varying problems. Politics was to be the realm of the “pragmatic”. But it was clear that the pragmatically minded Giovani were devoted to their political conclusions with a religious fervor. Many of them spoke of their Republic as though she had sprung fully formed out of the supernatural wisdom of her Founding Fathers, with universally applicable practical lessons for a world desperately in need of enlightenment. Hence, they were teaching pragmatism as dogma. A contradiction, indeed, but it should be clear by this time that we have entered an era in which consistency itself was to be dismissed as the “hobgoblin of little minds”.

In any case, after a year of terrible turmoil, a French Cardinal, Francois de Joyeuse (1562-1615), building upon the strong, mutual—and anti-Spanish—friendship of Venice and his own kingdom, negotiated a settlement (April 21, 1607). Rome let the censures drop, Venice abandoned her protest, and the Republic promised to hand the clerical criminals whose immunity it had violated over to the King of France, who might, if he so wished, give them up to the pope for judgment.

Already beforehand, Cardinals Baronius and Roberto Bellarmine, two of the greatest contemporary defenders of Church authority, had expressed their objections to imposing an interdict against Venice. Almost everyone since them has agreed that doing so was a prudential mistake and an embarrassing failure on the practical level. Not only did Paul V underestimate the extent to which seventeenth-century clergy and laity might cavalierly disdain commands that would have made even hostile medieval peoples tremble, but he also could be accused of a dreamer’s indifference to Venice’s serious economic concerns about land usage and political fears for her survival in a Hapsburg-dominated Italy. Not only did he pick a weapon, the interdict, which had the historical reputation of striking at the innocent as well as the guilty, but he also used it against Venice while sparing a Hapsburg Spain that terrified Rome just as much as the Republic; a Hapsburg Spain that men like Baronius judged to be considerably more guilty in these jurisdictional matters. No wonder that other states frightened by the Spaniards had reason to be aroused to sympathy for Venice in a crisis that damaged overall papal prestige.

Even the settlement of the issue proved to be an embarrassment for the Papacy. The Republic forbade celebration of the reconciliation and the seeking of absolution for canonical penalties incurred by violating the interdict, insisting that it was apologizing for nothing and changing nothing in its behavior. Venice made it clear that its compromise in the matter of the criminal clerics was a one-time event, in no way prejudicial to its future jurisdictional demands. In short, the Venetian Interdict seriously called into question the good sense and effectiveness of Rome, and some of the greatest minds in the Catholic world could have said, “I told you so”.

But there was real glory amidst prudential error in this whole episode. The real glory of the Church and her apologists in the Venetian Interdict controversy was their recognition of the essential flaw lying behind the vision of the Giovani: the recipe for the triumph of the will, the glorification of the will to power--the “right to choose”--of the strong over the weak, without having to be called to account for their action; a triumph of the will and a glorification of the will to power that was brilliantly argued for the benefit not of a monarchy nor of a military dictatorship but of a republic. Both the Roman Church and her apologists had the acuity to “deconstruct the deconstructors”, to show where a true cynicism with universal implications for the destruction of Faith and Reason had taken root. This was no mean accomplishment, and must always be imitated by a Bride of Christ true to the corrective and transforming mission of the Word—in our own all too similar time and with respect to the American Republic as well.

Not every Tridentine prelate and apologist in the seventeenth century was so perceptive. It was difficult for them to understand that radicals working in the service of “words” rather than for the cause of the Word were radically subverting the meaning of the spiritual role that they all agreed the State possessed. Indeed, their opponents may themselves not have seen all the consequences of their thought either. Whatever the case may be, the bulk of the Catholic attacks on Venice were centered on the particular facts of the jurisdictional battle, which involved issues that did indeed touch upon legitimate Venetian political and economic fears, and on which the Church might, in fairness, have compromised in 1606-1607. The more serious matters were very much ignored or left in the background. A deeper meditation on the full message of the Word in history, building upon what the best of Catholic apologists were saying, would have been much more suitable for defense against the growing strength of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.

H. Grace, Free Will, and Nature

Protestantism had brought the question of man’s justification and, with it, the relationship of faith, grace, and free will onto the center of the sixteenth century stage. In doing so, it had also called attention to the tremendous and differing implications for a general understanding of the role of nature in the work of salvation that flowed from the way in which this question was resolved. Trent, while teaching that both grace and free will played a role in man’s justification, had not by any means found the attempt to specify their exact contributions in the work of salvation a simple or straightforward one. Various schools of thought, with their particular emphases and nuances, skirmished with one another in studying and reworking the original sketches of decrees written by men like Girolamo Seripando (1492-1563), General of the Augustinian Hermits at the time of the first sitting, and Cardinal-Legate at the last. Council Fathers lined up for or against efforts to keep the doors to reconciliation with the Protestants still open by building a decree on justification from the work of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini at Regensburg in 1541, the last major bilateral attempt to heal the split in Western Christendom. “Double-justification” had been the theme at that colloquy—a first reconciliation by faith being followed up by a second one that called attention to man’s personal contribution to his own salvation.

The decrees related to justification ultimately passed at Trent reflected the frustrations, compromises, and limitations of many a heated discussion. Although, as noted above, they did emphasize the work of both grace and free will, they finally did so not in the context of a theory of double justification criticized as being redundant but as a single act of cooperation of man and God. Traditional positions were reiterated as far as they could be co-opted by the terms of a new debate, but so much so that some of the Council Fathers thought that the controversy of the relationship of free will and grace had been left as unresolved as it was before Trent. Others were worried that anti-Protestant preoccupations had so triumphed as to leave the erroneous impression that freedom actually counted more than grace and faith in the Catholic vision. All this means that the post-conciliar era was to witness a hunt for further clarity on the grace-free will issue, demonstrating in the process that a misplaced zeal could degenerate into heresy, creating fervent believers whose vehemence transformed them into arrogant, self-righteous Machiavellians.²¹

Let us now place this particular doctrinal problem in its more specific historical context, with reference to the long and bitter Catholic controversy surrounding the work of the Jesuits. After Trent, the Society of Jesus proved to be crucial to the project of evangelization in Protestant territories as well as in mission countries. It was thereby directly associated in many people’s minds with the council and the Catholic Reform in and of themselves. But the Jesuits, who claimed to be followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, opted for a clarification of the teaching of Trent that emphasized the importance of free will in a way that Dominican Thomists, not to mention non-Thomist Augustinians, found to be excessive.²²

Jesuits tied their theological approach together with devotional practices, spiritual direction, and missionary methods open to objections from their opponents along the same lines: namely, that they were more friendly to nature and human freedom than they ought to be. Franciscans soon joined in the chorus of complaint as well. Dominicans, Augustinians, and Franciscans felt that should the Jesuit approach remain uncontested, they might find themselves accused of being crypto-Protestants. They therefore perceived the need to assail the Society’s free will position as one tending towards Pelagianism, if not actually Pelagian pure and simple.

A first, intense, and instructive post-conciliar skirmish over the grace-free will issue involved three figures active in Hapsburg lands. One, Michel Baius (1513-1589), was a Frenchman who taught in the Lowlands at the University of Louvain. Two others were Spaniards: the Jesuit, Luis de Molina (1535-1600), author of the Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis (1588) and an Appendix ad Concordiam (1589), and his Dominican Thomist opponent, Domingo Bañez (1528-1604). This initial confrontation established much of the serious intellectual framework within which Catholics would fight the future world war over the meaning and value of nature and freedom in relation to supernatural grace. It also gave a foretaste of the role to be played in the conflict both by the Lowlands and the non-theological rivalries of Jesuits and other religious orders. Finally, it once again demonstrated Rome’s difficulties in resolving the grace and free will dilemma left nearly intact by Trent. For, although much of Baius’ work was definitely reproved, a long series of nerve-wracking debates during the reigns of Clement VIII (1592-1605) and Pope Paul V (1605-1621) led to a standoff, with both Bañez’ and Molina’s views being accepted as Catholic in character.²³

A second stimulus concerned a broad set of developments in the Netherlands, a new country that had an immensely symbolic importance as a Protestant federation that had conducted a lengthy but ultimately triumphant revolt against the power of Catholic Spain. Whatever was done or discussed in the politically and militarily successful Netherlands stood as a constant challenge to Tridentine Catholic effectiveness in all realms. Some viewed the Dutch challenge as a spur to further commitment to the Baroque path. Others considered it a call to a review of post-conciliar developments to reevaluate their Catholicity as well as their pastoral effectiveness.

Nowhere was this more the case than in the Catholic regions of the Lowlands, whether those subject to Protestant Dutch rule or others still under the control of the Catholic Kings of Spain in neighboring Belgium. If the Dutch Republic adopted secularist policies, if a Calvinist Synod at Dordrecht spoke on problems concerning the efficacy of grace, and if the Protestant University of Leiden changed the focus of its curriculum, then Catholic Utrecht, Ypres, and the University of Louvain would blink and react swiftly. And everything that happened in the Lowlands could not help but be of concern to the Hapsburg Family, in both its Spanish and Austrian branches, as well as to the French Bourbons, always eager to penetrate this divided Hapsburg bailiwick.²⁴

Bishop Cornelius Jansensius of Ypres, author of a massive work called the Augustinus (1640-1641), built on many of the themes first developed by Baius.²⁵ His studies gained an early enthusiastic backing in France due to the influence of one of the bishop’s old friends and regular correspondents, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, the Abbot of St. Cyr (d. 1642). They were also energetically endorsed by a variety of members of the important Arnauld Family: Mothers Angelica (1591-1661) and Agnes (1593-1672), active in the powerful religious communities of Port Royal, with branches in both Paris and the countryside, along with their brother Antoine (1612-1694)---known as the Great Arnauld---a brilliant and leading member of the University of Paris.

St. Cyr and the Arnauld Family were part of the dévot party. The dévots, once again, were eager to emphasize the construction of a truly Catholic political and social order on the national and international level. They were upset by Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin’s direction of French energies on the international level to purely secular projects, as reflected in the decision to oppose the Catholic Hapsburg cause in the Thirty Years War. Jansenius aided this dévot opposition with that anti-war pamphlet entitled Mars Gallicus mentioned above. Taking their cue from its message, the budding Jansenist movement encouraged at least a passive resistance to a king who based his actions upon Reason of State alone. One serious way in which it did so was through its penitential practices, which involved an “opting-out” of the world that clearly tempted those segments of that French elite that Richelieu was most eager to entice into active service of the cause of dynastic and national “glory”.

Still, the Jansenist rump of the dévot party proved to be a more troublesome force for the Papacy than any Jesuits who might temporarily have veered into the bon français camp. However much its clear challenge to French regalism during the first part of the reign of Louis XIV sometimes earned the movement the gratitude of popes like Blessed Innocent XI (1676-1689), its assault on the Jesuit free will position proved to be a dangerously exaggerated one, perilously close to that of supporters of the doctrine of total depravity. Occasional appreciation of Jansenist political positions was therefore interspersed with repeated condemnations of its theology by the Papacy and the vast bulk of the French episcopacy alike. From shaky victory to temporary defeat to renewed fragile triumph, the Jesuit free will camp fought to gain the upper hand for good.

It appeared to have done so definitively by the time of Pope Clement XI’s (1700-1721) Apostolic Constitution, Unigenitus (1713). This document, one of the most significant, discussed, passionately defended, and angrily reviled papal statements of the entire eighteenth century, was remarkable for far more than its firm and complete attack on Jansenism. For, in one respect, it represented a serious backtracking and repudiation of the Gallican position on the part of the French Monarchy. Louis XIV, who loathed Jansenism for its doctrinal and pastoral vision as much as for its anti-regalist approach, had himself pressed the pope to intervene in French affairs to condemn the movement anew. The government of his successor, Louis XV (1715-1774), would demand obedience to the judgment of Unigenitus through French civil as well as religious law. Jesuit support of Bourbon Absolutism had seemingly been vindicated on at least this one practical matter. The Papacy, the French Monarchy, and the Society were united in the battle of grace and free will as never before on any other issue.²⁶

By that time, however, Jansenism had much evolved since the publication of Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus. What, exactly, did it mean in the eighteenth century? Its depressing theology of sin, with little if any room for human freedom and nature to aid man’s progress to God, always underlay everything it thought and did. Its most important changes, however, involved, first of all, a development of a “spiritual” form of naturalism reminiscent of the later work of Rousseau and, secondly, the adoption of a pronounced revolutionary political spirit. It is best to postpone discussion of a third factor, its focus on pastoral activities, until the moment that the bitter Catholic debate on these important practical matters is addressed in detail.

We have seen that the Jansenists began as defenders of the superiority of the spirit over the political demands of the bons français. Unfortunately, due to their condemnation by the Papacy and the French Episcopacy---with the enthusiastical approval of the Bourbon Monarchy, no less---they felt obliged to find another, final, still more spiritual teaching authority than that provided by Church and State. They discovered solace in the midst of eighteenth century crises in the dictates of the individual Jansenist conscience. This they proclaimed infallible because of its unquestionable “sincerity”. It was here that they arrived at a position that was not particularly different from that of Rousseau, who, in fact, himself had passed through a brief Catholic stage as a member of the Jansenist camp. Conscientious resistance against papal, episcopal, and regal “despotism” thus became one of their major themes, even though their future horror over the Civil Constitution of the Clergy at the time of the Revolution indicated a continued—though perhaps illogical—commitment to the vision of an organized, hierarchal Church.

Having reached the point of basing the defense of truth on an interior sincerity that could transform one single honest Jansenist believer into the firm source of orthodox teaching, the movement’s means for responding to opposition also inevitably took on a proto-Rousseauian character as well. Any resistance to the sincerely held convictions of the Jansenists was castigated as a sign of pure hypocrisy and cynicism. While all of the enemies of the movement were thus chastised, Jansenists devoted most of their energies to debunking the spiritual and devotional practices of their primary theological opponent, the Society of Jesus, treating them as sanctimonious humbug at the very best. Exposure of Jesuit casuistry and trickery became the regular obsession of these “obviously” more sincere, more pious, and, therefore, more natural men.

Jansenist “sincerity” was hammered home by the most effective secret journal of the day—and perhaps of all time—Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques (Church News).²⁷ This periodical, more than any other eighteenth century journal, developed the future standard operating procedure of an underground revolutionary “cell”, as well as the use of the cause célèbre to further its goals. Revolutionary organization enabled it to operate illegally, in the underbrush, from 1728-1803, without ever once being closed down, and this despite the most assiduous efforts of the French police. Skill in manipulating causes célèbres involved its editors in the use of “noble lies” in propagating the movement’s evolving message; lies somehow transmuted by Jansenist sincerity into acceptably pious and natural tools for building the future reign of virtue in a presently evil universe. Perhaps most famous among such tall tales was that of the savage, anti-Jansenist Louis XV, kidnapping, murdering, and bathing in the blood of Parisian children to try to cure his physical and spiritual leprosy.

Mention of Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques brings us to the last stage in the evolution of the Jansenist movement, that which transformed it into a naturalist revolutionary force. This development flowed logically from its location of the source of truth in the sincere conscience. Convinced of its righteousness, the leaders of the movement organized an international network of opponents of the Papacy, the discovery of which---functioning under the guidance of the Jansenist author and agitator Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719)---was the immediate cause for Louis XIV’s demand for another papal intervention against the influence of “the sect”. Despite that intervention, in the form of Unigenitus, the movement’s work of subversion was to continue and expand throughout the eighteenth century. But, just as with Kant and Rousseau, the Jansenist vision of the supremacy of conscience was a recipe for encouraging the self-righteous rebuilding of existing man and society by those advocating other “sincere” projects as well. In fact, it was a recipe for the handing of the definition of things spiritual into the hands of as many little “kings” ready to bend everything natural to their own “Reasons of State” as there were sincere, natural, individual wills prepared to insist upon their evident infallibility.²⁸

I. Speculative, Positive, and Pastoral Theology

Another major source of dispute in the centuries following the Council of Trent, one that also continued and expanded upon older battles long familiar to the reader, involved the question of the theological methodology most suitable for dealing with problems of faith and morals.²⁹ This dispute was highly significant because it was the conclusions arrived at and propagated through different schools of thought regarding such methodology that appeared in popular catechisms, devotional books and practices, preaching, and spiritual direction—in short, in pastoral work in general. And pastoral work was designed to resolve the enormously important prudential problem of how to carry out the corrective and transforming labor of the Word in history—firm in allegiance to the truth, but open, through possession of the proper pilgrim spirit, to the new and varied steps in the dance of life required by constantly changing times.

Let us begin our discussion at Trent itself. We have already seen that something of a renaissance in speculative theological studies began to take place by the latter part of the Fifteenth Century. Speculative theologians of Thomist, Scotist, and broad Augustinian schools were therefore active, in differing degrees, at each of the three sittings of the Council. Representatives of the new Society of Jesus, dedicated more and more to the use of the systematic writings of Aquinas, were especially active in the third and last stage of Trent’s history, assuring the Angelic Doctor a high place in the formulation of that synod’s final decrees.

On the other hand, some of the most active Council Fathers deeply felt the sting of the anti-Catholic attack of Protestants using the most important tools of positive theology: Scripture and historical data. Time and time again, they had to admit that while they firmly believed Catholic doctrines to be true, and Catholic canonical norms and liturgical practices to be justified, they were frequently ignorant of where these came from and upon exactly what pillars they were primarily based. They thus felt themselves to be at a disadvantage in dealing with critiques of indulgences, communion under one kind, private confession, and clerical celibacy as unjustifiable innovations. They correspondingly also felt themselves to be at a disadvantage in explaining why Protestants rejecting such practices should come under ecclesiastical censure. Repeatedly, help had to be sought from Catholic experts in positive theology outside the council to save it from confusion and potential ridicule. And fortunately, such Catholics there were, skilled, through humanist influence, in the use of the same tools as their Protestant opponents but ready to turn them to the defense of the beleaguered Church.³⁰

Positive theology seemed to remain in good shape throughout the 1500’s and 1600’s. The number of Catholics engaged in research on the primary sources of Christian teaching and life were legion. Scripture was being probed by men such as Sixtus of Siena (1520-1569) and Cornelius à Lapide (1567-1637); patrology by Cardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514-1585), Marguerin de la Bigne (1546-1595), Fronton du Duc (1558-1624), and Luc D’Achery (1609-1685); dogmatic history by Dionysius Petavius (1583-1652); archaeology and martyrology by Onofrio Panvinio (1530-1568) and Antonio Bosio (1576-1629), the author of Roma sotterranea. Suffridius Peti (d. 1597), Antonio Possevino (1533-1611), Angelus Rocca (d. 1620), Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, and Aubert Miraeus (1573-1640) provided guides to Christian literature in general, following in the line of St. Jerome’s early work in this field. The lives of the saints were studied by Laurentius Surius (1522-1578), Heribert Rosweyde (1569-1629), John van Bolland (1596-1665) and the Bollandists, as well as (among their manifold pioneering endeavors) by the Benedictine Congregation of St. Maur, or Maurists, and its perhaps most famous representative, Jean Mabillon (1632-1707). Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino (1607-1667) dedicated his labors to analysis of the recent contributions to positive theology from the documents and events of the Council of Trent. Even more than this, broad historical texts constructed from primary source materials and capable of answering the Magdeburg Centuries were also being produced.

The name that immediately rises in this context is that of the above- mentioned Cardinal Cesare Baronius, author of the Annales ecclesiastici. Baronius’ story is linked with that of St. Philip Neri (1515-1595), the founder of the Roman Oratory. Neri was fascinated by the direct approach to the ancient martyrs and the various sites of Christian antiquity that was possible in a city like Rome—hence, his popularization of pilgrimages to the catacombs and early basilicas and stational churches. Aware as he was of the Magdeburg Centuries and the way in which Protestants were trying to claim for themselves the role of representatives of a Christian antiquity subverted by Catholic Rome, Neri promoted an historical response to their threat. He urged--indeed, commanded--Baronius, who had moved in his orbit from a very early age, to prepare lectures on history for the meeting of his Oratory from 1558 onwards. From such modest beginnings, his work expanded, continuing even after he became a cardinal in 1596. He eventually completed twelve volumes on Church history, carrying the Annales down to the eve of Innocent III’s reign in 1198. Baronius, in consequence, made the Catholic view something to be seriously answered rather than one that served simply as an inviting target for any hostile scholar’s sharpshooting practice.³¹

A number of nations offered men who sought to follow in Baronius’ footsteps in the 1600’s, including the Italian Oratorian, Odorico Raynaldi

(1595-1671). Still, it was France, so important to Catholic thought and life in practically every regard throughout the seventeenth century, which, perhaps, did the most in this realm. French scholars laboring in varied fields of positive theology in the 1600’s turned their attention at one time or another towards the publication of broad ecclesiastical histories. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a member of the French Oratory, Charles Lecointe (1611-1681), who is most noted for such work. Eight volumes of his Annales ecclesiastici francorum appeared between 1665 and 1683. In sum, a bright future for Catholic historical studies, drawing from original research in positive theology, might have seemed secured. The chance for Catholics to mold the world’s attitude toward the past, and thereby gain the edge for interpreting the present, might have been judged very good indeed.

Unfortunately, despite the massive efforts of the heirs of Baronius, this desirable Catholic shaping of historical attitudes never materialized. It was the presentation of the past as concocted by the black legends and alternative good stories in the process of definitive formulation at this time that was to tighten an iron grip on the western mind, putting the orthodox Catholic perpetually on the defensive, incapable of organizing the framework of scholarly debate, fighting merely to be heard, much less harkened. Why? In discussing the problem from within the Catholic camp, two reasons come immediately to the fore.

On the one hand, Catholics eager to defend the orthodox viewpoint by drawing from positive theology were not given the full support that the importance of their work deserved. So much was this true that even in the 1600’s the fifth Jesuit General, Claudio Aquaviva (1543-1615), found it impossible to carry to completion plans for a Catholic Academy of History. Perhaps this was because the Church was once again in a seemingly commanding position by the beginning of the seventeenth century and a crisis-driven concern for historical studies appeared to be no longer urgent, and even superfluous. Perhaps having built up a systematic speculative theology that worked together impressively with the ancient philosophical heritage to defend belief both in an ordered universe and its need for Redemption, many Catholics did not necessarily see why one had to undertake a complementary examination of the roots and development of the Christian message. Then, again, on the practical level, historical research had proven to produce painful political conflict, as Baronius himself had discovered in his battles with regalist Spain over Hapsburg claims to special, age-old rights to control Church affairs in Sicily and Naples. Finally, over time, as the victorious advance of the historical picture painted by the word merchants of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo began to be appreciated, many Catholics seem to have drawn the conclusion that all in-depth probing of the Church’s past must be rejected as innately suspect.³²

On the other hand, and quite ironically, Catholics also failed to give a faith-friendly explanation to history because of a corresponding tendency to abandon and even display open contempt for traditional speculative theology. Yes, after its revival in the late fifteenth century, systematic thought continued to thrive in Catholic circles. Certainly Thomism was very much promoted by both the Ratio studiorum of the Jesuits as well as by the Dominican friars. Work with a number of the other great systematic thinkers continued until the second half of the 1600’s as well. By that point, however, the cause of systematic, speculative thought was already once again under serious attack. Some of the Catholics engaged in work on positive theology fell prey to a disdain for traditional speculative theology reminiscent of the spirit of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance Second Childhood. A great man like Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) indicates that he dutifully took his notes on the old, approved, scholastic thinkers while at university, but then tossed them instantly into the rubbish bin as useless once beginning intellectual labor in the “real world”. Here, he found positive theology, especially history, to be much more suitable to his apologetic efforts.³³

Yet without a systematic, speculative, Catholic theology to guide it, positive theology yields nothing but raw data that still has to be molded by an organizing principle to make it fruitful. What would happen when lesser minds and weaker spirits than the Bishop of Meaux tried to operate without such guidance? Who and what would become the guides for learning about the corrective and transforming message of the Word and what was pastorally necessary for its translation from the realm of theory to that of practice? The answer should be clear. Under these circumstances, it would readily fall prey to the organizing principle that comes from the Zeitgeist, the “spirit of the times”---a power that is difficult to resist at any moment and in any land. And this, by the end of the seventeenth century, was happy to second the temptation to abandon Catholic speculative theology with all the means at its disposal.

In doing so, the Zeitgeist appeared, at first, as though it would favor the adoption of Cartesian methodology for theological as well as philosophical labors, and, once again, with good reason, as a means of banishing the interference of the occult in supernatural as well as natural studies. Catholic Cartesians created something of a cult surrounding their master at the Church of St. Geneviève where he was buried, and sought to tie his ideas together with the philosophy of St. Augustine in doing so. Religious orders engaged in intellectual labors then took sides, either for or against the Frenchman’s approach. Since the Jesuits were openly committed to a speculative theology founded upon Thomism, their enemies and vigorous competitors for students—forces such as the French Oratorians—nursed a tendency to approve the Cartesian approach.³⁴

We have seen, however, that Descartes, for many Catholics as well as Protestants, ultimately meant Spinoza’s atheism. Spinoza was simply too radical a figure to exercise a direct influence over any established religious milieu, even when his clear rejection of God was young and somewhat disguised. The only darling of the Zeitgeist with any chance of an impact in the existing religious environment by the 1700’s was that mixture of Pietism with regalism and Whig Enlightenment doctrines dominating Prussia and Britain respectively. And word merchants found this two-headed ideology easy to forge into marching orders for new units of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.

Should Catholic students of positive theology fall prey to its charms, this would mean that they would fit the results of their research into the system being created by their moderate enemies and presented as the obvious Diktat of “common sense”. They, as Catholics, might be tempted to avoid that particular term and label the Diktatthe clear judgment of a sound “natural theology” instead. Work upon a distinct Catholic vision of history would then be rendered superfluous and downright unthinkable. Students of the positive theology of the Word Incarnate might continue to labor, but it would be the “natural theologians”—in practice, the Pietists, scientists, and propagandists of the Moderate Enlightenment—who would explain to them how their work could be used and what it actually signified. Whatever this might be said to mean, it definitely could never indicate anything supporting a vision of life that called for correcting nature and transforming man and society in Christ. And, given the ultimate illogic of the Pietist, Newtonian, and Whig position, it was readily subject to a radicalization that could end by serving the plans of the atheists, disguised or open, as well.

In any case, fear of giving aid and comfort to such atheism proved highly significant in guiding many Catholic circles to a particular appreciation for Boyle and Newton in their efforts to combine an experimental science, the practical study of nature, and the worship of a Creator God. Since the opponents of the Jesuits had veered towards Descartes, many of the priests of the Society, who already shared a Baconian and Newtonian love for physical sciences anyway, now turned down the pathway of a “practical Christianity” finding God in the experimentation with and pragmatic development of the fruits of nature. As much as Catholic Cartesians tied Descartes together with Augustine, they then tried to marry off Bacon and Newton with St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.³⁵

Unfortunately, the more that the approach of the Moderate Enlightenment was accepted and imitated, the more that Catholics lost a sense of the supernatural character of their Faith and what it is they most needed to do to fend off intensified attacks on its doctrinal integrity and mission. For, once again, an unexamined acceptance of Newton and his followers could never remain frozen at their initial and seemingly most Christian phase. An uncritical friendship entailed an opening to an outlook that we have seen quite readily lent itself to belief in a Deist rather than a personal God. Moreover, this same uncritical friendship introduced them to the other members of the Whig oligarchy who together made the Glorious Revolution. In ways that would be repeated all too often in the future, this meant that undiscerning Catholics always gained more “friends” by working with the Moderate Enlightenment spirit than first met the eye.

To begin with, they were introduced, on the intellectual front, to camaraderie with John Locke. Such friendship inevitably brought with it two problematic consequences: 1) acceptance of a notion of religious tolerance that Locke expressly excluded doctrine-rich Roman Catholics from enjoying; a religious tolerance that would threaten a total emasculation of the work of correcting nature and transforming it in Christ, even if papists were to be granted its version of freedom of worship; and, 2) exposure to an attack on universal ideas turning the very formulation of a Catholic doctrinal statement into a meaningless endeavor.

On the practical political level, adoption of the Newtonian vision also introduced the unwary to two other “unwanted guests”, the first of which was the enlightened Whig concept of government. I do not mean to say by this that Catholics were obliged to reject a system of checks and balances that had emerged as an historical fact of life in any given land. The problem here was not the constitutional structure of the government as such but the accompanying practical and ideological limitation of the public sphere of activity and victory of arbitrary, materialist, group and individual interests over the common good. Secondly, openness to the Whig spirit brought with it a friendship for British foreign policy. This, we know, made no distinction between a man like Louis XIV in his role as an unacceptable absolutist and Catholic monarchy in general. Moreover, it encouraged a freemasonic “big tent” that included radicals developing the naturalist logic in the Moderate Enlightenment position to a much more destructive degree than their perhaps unwitting Whig patrons.

Interestingly enough, there is an also very clearly documented enthusiasm for all of these extra “friends” among contemporary Catholic theologians, often based on what seemed to them to be solid intellectual and practical grounds. Perhaps most instructive in this regard was the seemingly irresistible attraction of John Locke. French Jesuits and influential Roman academic circles began to revere the teacher of religious tolerance and doctrinal destruction as an oracle—not because they grasped the fullness of his argument and agreed with it but because he was presented to them as the man most suitable for destroying Descartes, Cartesian mathematical ideology, and the Spinozan atheism and mechanical fatalism deemed by many to be their inevitable by-product; in short, because he was presented as a God fearing, modern empiricist in the line of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, along with Bacon, Boyle, and Newton.³⁶

But the attraction certainly did not end with Locke. For, despite papal condemnation of such secret societies, membership in freemasonic lodges also became very popular among Catholics dedicated to gaining “common sense wisdom”. Hence, Catholic cultivation of Freemasonry, which began during Hapsburg involvement with the Grand Coalition fighting Louis XIV, continued long thereafter, and only slackened on the eve of the French Revolution, as the dangers of both the Moderate and Radical Enlightenment slowly began to be more appreciated by a wider audience.³⁷

J. Success

One final point must briefly be discussed in order to understand the weaknesses displayed by Catholics in the developing global war over the meaning of nature: the premium placed by everyone engaged in the battle on “success”. This emphasis was noticeable at the Council of Trent itself. All those truly interested in the work of Tridentine reform believed that any pastoral approach worthy of the name had to prove itself by yielding palpable results. Delivery of clear victories in the fight for improvement in the life of the Church and Christians was to be the mark of the difference of this council from its unsuccessful predecessors, trapped, as they were, by the hellish “traditions” of the Rut Triumphant. No council had said more about reform than Fifth Lateran under Julius II and Leo X, and none had achieved less. Trent could not be permitted to follow in its suit.³⁸

That being the case, each of the many contesting forces noted above developed a “cheering squad” seeking to demonstrate that it offered the best pathway to a Catholic triumph, while its opponents delivered little if anything of true value to the cause. By way of summary, let us recall that these competing guides included Ultramontanists and various defenders of Gallican and local episcopal rights; supporters of the prerogatives of sacred rulers ranging from the Most Christian King to the French parlements and the Divine Venetian Republic; promoters of a “Jesuitical”, Tridentine, Baroque free will vision and a Jansenist sin and grace shaped outlook on life; and, finally, teachers basing themselves on the conclusions of speculative, positive, or natural theology. Couple together the passionate desire to demonstrate “success” with a confusion as to which authority should lead the campaign to achieve it; add to this the debate regarding what pastoral tools should be employed in the process. The result, even under the best of circumstances, had to be yet another crisis in the dramatic history of the work of the Word in history.

What was to make this crisis a much more troublesome one than ever before was the fact that the Achilles Heels described above clearly indicated that there existed in the Catholic camp major divisions over how to define the very character of “success” itself. While the whole spirit of Trent pointed to the conclusion that “success” would entail victory in the work of correcting and transforming nature in Christ, there were all too many competing Catholic forces whose approach, whether conscious or unconscious, seemed destined to define success according to the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”. These latter elements could look to significant assistance from the now public and powerful Grand Coalition of the Status Quo that was eager to incorporate Catholic fellow travelers, alongside those coming from the Protestant world, openly into its ranks. Still, if their definition of Catholic success were to triumph, they would have to inflict a decisive defeat upon whatever it was that most clearly and substantively symbolized the vision of Trent. Their chance to do so now lay open before them.

Chapter 8

The Naturalist Revolution, the Implosion of the GCSQ, and the Troubled Beginnings of the Ninth Crusade

The Grand Coalition of the Status Quo

and Reform Catholicism

By this point, the reader has a clear idea of the new advance of the message of the Word made possible by “Tridentine” Catholicism. That “Tridentine” vision was, of course, merely the perennial teaching of the Church but better understood and freed from the seemingly unbreakable shackles of the late medieval Rut Triumphant. It was a vision that was promoted by a myriad of vibrant forces active in its service. Regardless of the diversity of its support, however, the Tridentine worldview was most symbolized in the eyes of its opponents by the work of three forces: the Hapsburg Family, the Society of Jesus, and, eventually, due chiefly to its detestation by both Whig Britain and the Jansenist movement, the Kingdom of France as well. The Treaty of Westphalia permanently weakened Hapsburg Austria as an internationally threatening Tridentine culture bearer. And the War of the Spanish Succession, with the victory of the Bourbon candidate for the throne, ended the dynasty’s ability to cause Catholic trouble from the Iberian Peninsula as well. That left the Society of Jesus and the Kingdom of France to humble or destroy before the proponents of “nature as is” could psychologically feel successful in their efforts to crush the spirit of Tridentine reform.

Readers are by now also fully aware of the large number and diversity of the members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo ready to be mobilized against that Tridentine ethos. The ranks of this coalition included both those who, in various ways, intellectually rejected the project of correcting the flaws of nature and transforming it in Christ as well as men who simply put specific practical obstacles in the path of implementation of the demands of the Word in history. Both Radical and Moderate Enlightenment naturalists were members of the anti-Word alliance, the first group openly, the second in a more quiet and subtle manner. So were ex-Protestants who had taken seriously the logical consequences of the doctrine of total depravity. But there were others who unwittingly played a role in the Coalition as fellow travelers, such as the Pietists, who no longer wished to discuss divisive doctrinal questions and therefore tended to reduce Christianity to a religion of practical, natural, common sense alone. And signing up for active service in the Christian fellow traveling unit they had formed were recruits from inside the Roman Catholic camp itself.

Opposition to the Tridentine, Baroque vision was offered by a variety of supporters of what has broadly been called Reform Catholicism, which emerged out of the quarrels rooted in the numerous “Achilles Heels” outlined in the previous chapter. Whatever their original grounds for lamenting Catholicism’s Tridentine manifestation might have been, all of the reformers in question ended by strengthening the “business as usual” concerns of “nature as is” in a way that proved to be highly useful to the goals of the openly enthusiastic members of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo.¹

Regalist defenders of the “dignity” and the “rights” of sacred States often played a major role in the work of Reform Catholicism. Their chief theme was the need to combat the Ultramontanism flourishing in the pro-Tridentine camp and the papal-dominated Church this favored. Regalist-minded reformers, along with their local episcopal allies, were encouraged by the writings of a wide group of canonists, beginning with Zega-Bernard van Espen (1646-1728), author of the Ius ecclesiasticum universum (1700) in the Lowlands, passing through Johann Kaspar Barthel (1697-1771) and Georg Christoph Neller (1709-1783), and culminating in Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701-1790), Auxiliary Bishop of Trier, who wrote underneath the pseudonym of Justinus Febronius. These canonists rejected the idea of an Ultramontanist Church and pressed bishops to defy Rome on the grounds of their apostolic call to be “popes in their own dioceses”. They also stressed both the State’s divinely given right to concern itself with religion as well as its rationally-grounded responsibility for dealing with all aspects of man’s being---including his “natural” spiritual needs. Nature’s God required a secular, civic gendarme, aided in his policing measures by an army of ministers of that “natural” religion formerly known as Christianity. Marsilius of Padua could not have expressed himself more clearly.³⁹

Other reformers generally worked with reference to a primary concern for “pastoral” questions. In consequence, they were eager to play down the importance of that doctrinal rigor that Trent felt to be essential to any solid guidance to practical work among the faithful. Such pastoral-minded Catholics also disliked mystical fervor. They viewed this as, at best, the product of psychologically overheated spirits, and, at worst, conducive to the moral aberrations connected with the Quietism of Miguel de Molinos (1628- 1696), whose activities in Rome eventually provoked a European wide scandal.⁴⁰

Whether these reformers were thinkers or statesmen, their approach was in almost every respect simply a more developed expression of a practical Erasmian or Pietist morality. They pointed to the fact that the Decalogue was accepted as a given by all the main parties to contemporary religious disputes. Moreover, they believed that anyone possessed of a “basic common sense” realized that society obviously called for the moral framework it now clearly provided to carry out its business in orderly fashion. This being the case, why dwell on more detailed theological matters that could add nothing practical to the peace of a Christian commonwealth? Give a man the basic education to persevere in that moral code that was simply part of the fundamental heritage of all European societies, back this up with a more natural, more “nobly simple” liturgical and devotional life than was encouraged by the doctrine-obsessed, Tridentine, Baroque culture, and both the religious and secular order would be far better off.

French and Italian Oratorians, Dominicans, and Augustinians were all active in the anti-Tridentine ranks, although it was Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), the Italian priest-historian, whose Della regolata divozione dei cristianti (1747) gave “the classic statement of Catholic reforming ideals in the eighteenth century”.⁴¹ Every branch of Reform Catholicism was visibly represented and influential in Rome herself from the late 1600’s onwards. Oratorians of the Chiesa nuova provided ready recruits for its ranks, a major center for whose meetings was the so-called Circolo dell’Archetto. The cause of reform was certainly prevalent in the Eternal City by the reign of Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758), a canonist by profession and himself a proponent of the movement. Benedict’s Rome also included reformers of the stature of the Cardinal Secretary of State, Silvio Gonzaga (1690-1756), along with numerous other Princes of the Church, heads of religious orders, and scholars. One would not be far off the mark in saying that Rome herself, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had become openly embarrassed at Catholic “inadequacy” as a spiritual force and was calling out for help from more serious students of God and man to remedy this scandal.⁴²

Jansenists were very prominent among Reform Catholics, in Rome as much as elsewhere in Europe. Already by the latter part of the seventeenth century, primarily in order to divert attention from their doctrinal deviations, many supporters of their movement had turned their efforts to what might be construed as purely “pastoral” work. Those who did so often even denied the very existence of a Jansenist faction, claiming simply to be going about the business of Christian evangelization in line with the perennial tradition of the Church and—once again—much more successfully than their opponents. Enemies who continued to harass them on doctrinal grounds were accused of nourishing a jealous, perverse spirit of private vendetta and of being “schismatic” and “divisive” in their desire to stir up trouble where no grounds for it existed. Through their spiritual direction, the publication of catechisms and devotional works, translations of the liturgy, and other activities, hidden Jansenists insisted that they were merely seeking to form individual men and women ready to live and defend the orthodox Catholic Faith.

Of course the “purely pastoral” direction that they gave---which they refused to discuss on doctrinal grounds---still involved commitment to their peculiar mixture of Catholicism and Calvinist theology. Predictably, therefore, such pastoral guidance struck at the heart of the effort to correct and transform all of nature in accord with the full message of the Word in history. Pastoral Jansenism began with rigorous penitential practices and a reticence to allow sinful men to receive the communion that the Jesuits tended to view as a crucial medicine ensuring growth in Christ rather than a reward for perfect behavior. It moved on to an assault on all the “arrogant”, “pompous” forms of “Jesuitical” Baroque practice in the name of noble simplicity, ancient Christian humility, and the demands of an individual, self-abasing, sincere conscience. Everything indicative of the “pride” of man and nature—which gradually included all higher culture—had to disappear from Catholic life if the goals of this school of pastoral formation were to be achieved. Thus, as the eighteenth century progressed, Jansenists thundered ever more loudly—but always, of course, on the “practical” as opposed to the doctrinal plane—against Latin, music, art, processions, Eucharistic devotions, feast days, the rosary, the way of the Cross, adoration of the Sacred Heart, and any project for any earthly mystical union with the Trinity.⁴³

B. The Grand Coalition and the Assault on the Jesuits

Stirred by their passions, the arguments of their rhetoricians, and the encouragement of so many fellow travelers of the GCSQ from inside the Protestant and Catholic camps themselves, the eighteenth century Grand Coalition was ready to go on the march. It was to do so across the entire globe, in Asia and Latin America as well as Europe. In the process, it would employ every tool useful for imposing the impassioned will of a determined minority upon a confused majority. All of the destructive consequences would be justified as the satisfaction of either the rational wishes of “nature” or the fulfillment of the democratic wishes of the population and the dictates of the outraged consciences of individuals. It began its demolition derby by focusing on a simple, easily defined, and readily demonized enemy: the Society of Jesus.

Of course the Jesuits and Jesuit innovations had been under attack since their very birth. Admittedly, many of those Catholics who opposed the Society had rational, nuanced, and understandable grievances against it. But those whose spirit really dominated the assault railed against the Jesuits simply because they were so visible a symbol of that “Tridentine, Baroque Catholicism” that was merely another and more brilliant development of Christian understanding of the message of the Word in history. It was this corrective and transforming message that was the true target of their ire; this that made them allies with every supporter of the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo from Isocrates to Marsilius of Padua, to Locke, to Kant, and to Rousseau.⁴⁴

What was it that the Society was not chastised for supporting? Its emphasis on individual prayer life and reflection was disliked by more traditional religious orders whose members preferred to worship God in common. Regalists, Gallicans, Febronians, and the canonical writers in alliance with them loathed their outspoken devotion to the Papacy. Reforming prelates, extolling the memory of the anti-Jesuit activity of Bishop Juan Palafox y Mendoza (1600-1659) of Puebla in Mexico, saw in the Society the symbol of the whole of the regular clergy, pampered by Rome in their sabotage of the legitimate power of local ordinaries and the work of their diocesan priests. Proponents of noble simplicity tore into the Jesuit understanding of the relationship of grace and free will, which they correctly deemed responsible for much of the “pompous” doctrinal, mystical, liturgically rich Baroque culture they deplored. Jesuit inspired culture was rejected as an obstacle to that common sense and Scripture-supported education and moral development producing the practical social improvements that Catholic reformers more and more recognized as the pinnacle of “spiritual” growth. Dominican Thomists and Augustinian friars, the latter very much influenced by the Historia pelagiana and Vindiciae augustinianae of their confrère, Cardinal Enrico Noris (1631-1704), happily joined in the assault. But most important to the coalition was the entire army of French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish Jansenists, whose varied divisions, at different moments and in different places, emphasized all the above complaints.

Grand Coalition warriors of “common sense”, “nature”, “conscience”, “simplicity”, “local, national, and regal dignity”, and “liberation from Jesuitical chains” grew even more belligerent in their attitude towards the sons of St. Ignatius due to the Society’s seemingly total victory over the Jansenists through the publication of Unigenitus in 1713. Church and State enforcement of this document, particularly in France, called forth a great number of different strategies and punishments. These ranged from deposition and expulsion of Jansenist bishops and priests to demands for certificates from the dying that demonstrated their use of approved, non-Jansenist confessors before permission for administration of Extreme Unction and burial in consecrated cemeteries was granted. Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques catalogued, but in its own inimitable and often highly mendacious way, all the suffering that these stringent disciplinary measures undoubtedly caused. It drilled home the argument that the Jesuits, along with the popes, kings, bishops, priests, and Tridentine, Baroque Catholicism encouraging them, represented the essence of both blasphemy and tyranny.⁴⁵

Missionary quarrels in China proved to be a highly useful tool for humbling the Society of Jesus, even after Unigenitus made direct assault on their position in the grace and free will dispute more difficult.⁴⁶ The Celestial Kingdom had provided a focus for European discussion of evangelization from the middle of the l600’s onwards. It was at that time that Jesuit missionary tactics, approved by the Papacy although contested within the Society itself, were brought vigorously into question by Spanish Dominicans and Franciscans who were also toiling in the Chinese vineyard. The debate raged on into the next century. Eventually it involved a large number of individuals and groups, including ordinary members of the Society as well as those working as scholar-courtiers in the Imperial City, mendicants, the Sorbonne, disciples of the Paris Mission Seminary active as Vicars Apostolic in the Asian theater in competition with the Jesuits, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and even the Papacy itself. Nevertheless, it was the Jansenists and the Jansenist spirit that tied all these diverse elements together and relentlessly guided the propaganda campaign they jointly inspired, demonizing the Jesuits in the process. Disputes regarding China thus exposed educated Europeans to the backbiting still prevalent among many of those responsible for spreading the Gospel of Love—even after the “official” Religious Wars had ended.

Perhaps more importantly still, while excoriating the Jesuits for missionary strategies that were said to be too “nature friendly” to be fully Catholic in character, the China wars also pointed to the possibility of the existence of a successful “atheistic” society that supporters of the Radical Enlightenment could exploit for their own purposes. All of this emerged from the debate over the specifics of the so-called “Chinese Rites”—ceremonies in honor of Confucius and the ancestral dead--and the suitability for Christian use of the native Chinese “names” for God.⁴⁷

More than one hundred thirty books on the subject--an astonishing number for the time--were published in France alone between 1660 and 1714. Were such rites merely natural marks of honor akin to saluting a flag, or were they actually acts of pagan worship? Were the terms used by the Chinese to describe their concept of divinity valid starting points from which to leap to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Or were they dead ends pulling the Christian vision downwards into a pantheistic-materialistic swamp? What about Confucianism itself, the grand system underlying the whole ethos of the Empire and its administration? Did it involve Taoist and Buddhist speculations and practices? If so, were these susceptible to allegorical Christian interpretation or editing, along the lines of what Catholic thinkers and missionaries had done with much Greek, Roman, and barbarian thought and custom? Was the entire Confucianist school basically a pagan religious construct or a secular philosophical-ethical system that meshed together happily with the comparably powerful and positivist Chinese legal tradition?

A number of participants in the debate about Confucianism, the names of God, and the Chinese Rites in general emphasized an underlying atheism in the dominant native political-social vision. But here, as the Jesuit missionary Louis Le Comte (1655-1728) worriedly noted, lay both exaggeration and a danger with consequences far beyond anything related to specific Chinese issues. For European theologians had always insisted that atheism was actually an unthinkable position, as every man had the instinct for God written in his soul. They had ascribed disbelief to a pure perversion of the will, a nonsense that made any hope for an ordered society impossible. But if one accepted the notion that atheism was thinkable in the sophisticated Chinese intellectual world and that it sustained the greatest non-European society, the whole apologetic of the necessity of religion for ordered community life would be shaken.

Indeed, with the decisions taken against the Jesuit approach in China from the time of Pope Clement XI (l700-l72l) to Benedict XIV (l740-l758), it was so shaken. Voltaire (1694-1778) gave immediate testimony to its secularizing implications by breaking with the traditional western manner of discussing the history of the world in relation to that of salvation, beginning his own global historical study with China. Here, the atheist society was not only shown to be possible, but (erroneously) given priority in time as well. As A. Kors writes:⁴⁸

In the heat of the polemic...positions lost their nuances, and a concert of voices insisted that what most educated French took to be the most learned minds of the most civilized nation outside Europe were ‘atheists’ pure and simple...Its own Church would come to insist that this was not a theoretical possibility, but a historical fact. If one accepted the widely circulated view of the excellence of Confucian ethics and the official determination by both Rome and the Faculty of Theology at Paris that Confucianism was atheistic, this conclusion followed ineluctably.

C. The GCSQ, the Jesuits, and the Socio-Political Assault

By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Jansenists and their allies had succeeded in convincing many people that the Jesuits, with their influential cheering squads, were promoters of both tyranny and atheism—an atheism that nevertheless somehow worked to maintain the highly admired Chinese Empire—at one and the same time. They had even felt compensated somewhat for their repression by Unigenitus in seeing Loyola’s “papal army” chastised for its missionary “errors” at the hands of its own commander in Rome. But what was still needed for the complete humiliation of the Society and, with it, the excoriation of the whole Tridentine, Baroque, Catholic Establishment, was socio-political pressure. That pressure was to emerge in the years after the War of the Austrian Succession through a desire for fundamental change in many of the Catholic countries of Europe; through the ravages of a middle to late century “reform fever” with terribly detrimental effects for the mission of the Word in history—all long before the revolution in France had even begun.⁴⁹

As a necessary prelude to a plunge into this topic, let us note that some--even much--of what might pass at first glance for an eighteenth-century frontal attack on Christianity was not really such in the final analysis. For Christendom, with its many diverse corporate elements, ranging from parish sodalities through guilds, religious and crusading orders, universities, international confraternities, up to the different branches of the royal and papal courts themselves, did, admittedly, provide shelter for an all too numerous collection of human concerns and ambitions overly dedicated to “business as usual” demands of “nature as is”, alongside and closely intermingled with those which were divine. It is always tempting to enlist theology in the defense and promotion of what might be merely self-interested goals—once again, dictates of the Rut Triumphant—thus lending an exalted, sacred flavor to something historically venerable but unjustifiably parochial and even totally natural in character. An attack on ramparts that serve to protect purely or mostly human treasures but which are nevertheless held together with much shoddy theological cement may understandably seem to be an assault on Christendom. In practice, however, it might actually be an aid in the liberation of the sacred from decadent secularizing incrustations. What is hidebound, overblown, and grasping is not inherently Christian due to a long-term association with the Christian name. We have repeatedly seen that a lunge at the customary and the grandiose, while always risky and psychologically distressing to powerful individuals and groups, is not necessarily a thrust at the Christian heart itself.

Many servants of eighteenth century governments in Catholic Europe were convinced of the desperate need to implement certain educational, scientific, economic, administrative, and legal changes for the benefit of society-at-large. Ecclesiastical privileges and financial exemptions of labyrinthine proportions often stood in their way, alongside the corporate prerogatives of countless secular institutions. Did the State have any right to seek to modify this situation? Was a dismantling of specific aspects of the existing corporate order, religious as well as secular, ever justifiable? It is difficult to answer this question with an uncompromising “no” without jeopardizing the very raison d’être of the civil authority; without baptizing and declaring essential to the plan of God every primarily natural desire that every corporate body with some tie to the Church or to a Christian-inspired tradition has at one time or another succeeded in satisfying. Such a “no” would be entirely closed to a pilgrim spirit ready to admit the need for ever new steps in the ever changeable dance of life.

Nevertheless, middle to late century pre-revolutionary statesmen went further than the mere assertion of the necessary role of the State in coordinating a corporate society for the sake of the common good. Many passed beyond the limits of an arrogant unilateral reform program that could have been totally justifiable if undertaken in cooperation with the Church. A startling number of statesmen ventured into the work of ridding everyday life of truly indispensable sacred elements; supernatural influences that could not be eliminated without a substantive Christianity and its corrective and transforming mission themselves disappearing entirely from the public arena.⁵⁰

Economic resentment, defeat in war, and natural disasters drove most Catholic lands down the pathway of reform by the middle years of the eighteenth century. For Portugal and Spain, inability to resist British commercial pressures at home and in the Americas were major incitements to change. Austria shared similar anti-British sentiments since the reign of Charles VI (1711-1740). She was, however, pushed to tinkering with her own system most urgently by her bad military showing, first against the Ottoman Empire in the 1730’s, and even more against Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the subsequent Seven Years’ War (1757-1763). Severe crop failures that seemed unnecessarily destructive, given the state of contemporary science and technology, led certain Italian and German lands down the same pathway. A desire to be able to tackle these problems with strong State power appears to have been the chief motivating factor in the reform programs of many Italians, particularly those of graduates of the University of Pavia, like the Tuscan-Neapolitan statesman Bernardo Tanucci (1678-1783). Such a desire also strongly influenced the contemporary Electors Emmerich Joseph (1707-1774) of Mainz and Clemens Wenceslaus (1739-1812) of Trier, important bishops of the Roman Church though they were. France responded to comparable stimuli with similar reactions, though her complicated story will require special and separate treatment later in this chapter.

More than anything else, those kings and ministers of state gripped by reform fever were guided in their pursuit of change by the standard of “success”---that psychologically powerful slogan that sophism has always turned into an “either-or” measuring rod favorable to its work on behalf of the “business as usual” demands of “nature as is” and destructive to that of its Logos-hunting enemies. “Success” seemed easy to identify by mid-century. Everything Britain touched from the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) appeared to turn to political and even literal gold. Prussia was similarly blessed, and at no time more than in the reign of Frederick II “the Great” (1740-1786), son of the “soldier-king”, Frederick William I (1713-1740). What, the rest of Europe asked, was their secret? ⁵¹

On the one hand, that secret was nothing other than the willingness to embrace each political and material opportunity that a fallen nature offered; to apply all of one’s available strength to exploit good fortune, regardless of obstacles arising from existing alliances or generally agreed upon norms of international behavior. One cannot help but share the contemporary astonishment over British diplomatic and commercial audacity; its willingness to provoke Spain, France, and Austria without just cause and then react with moral indignation when these countries responded in kind. Neither can one be surprised that many Catholics were shocked by Frederick the Great’s open, cynical admission that truth played no role in the governance of men, and by his readiness to act without any just cause, as with his sudden aggression against Austria in Silesia.

Still, kings and ministers wondered, perhaps the outrage of Louis XV (1715-1774) over illegitimate British colonial incursions in the Americas and Frederick’s diplomatic shenanigans, as well as Maria Theresa’s (1740-1780) horror at the Prussian king’s eagerness to dismember Poland, merely expressed the bewilderment of outmaneuvered and decaying powers. The telling French expression, “to work for the King of Prussia”, indicating laboring without pay and originating out of experiences with Frederick during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), once again underlines the basic attitude of the rest of Europe to both Britain and Prussia: no matter what we do, they win. Britain and Prussia must, therefore, hold the key to effective successful reform.

Maria Theresa (1740-1780) began instituting reform measures in Austria. Joseph II (co-ruler, l765-1780; sole ruler, 1780-1790) and the Austrian Chancellor, Wenzel Anton Kaunitz (1711-1794), who had imbibed cameralist and Pietist principles in foreign schools, were still more vigorous promoters of Hapsburg administrative, fiscal, and educational changes along Prussian lines. Austrian Prussophilia also influenced smaller German states, many of which had already made tentative moves down the same highway, following the model of co-operative activity offered by the Dublin Society. Prussian methods and ideas penetrated from Hapsburg Austria into its lands in Italy, though the entire peninsula was itself filled with men like the Neapolitan, Antonio Genovesi (1713-1769), who pointed to the English experience for their primary guidance.⁵²

Portugal’s secularization under José I (1750-1777) is forever associated with the influence of his Prime Minister, Sebastiao José de Carvalho e Melo (1699-1782), known as the Count of Oeiras from 1759, and as the Marquis de Pombal after 1770. Pombal became a member of a British-style “confraternity” established by the Ericeiras Family, the Academia dos Illustrados, in 1733. He drank in more British influence during his diplomatic work in London (1739-1744), at which time he was admitted to the Royal Society. Pombal completed his reform education during a second assignment in Vienna in the 1740’s, just as Prussian fever was taking hold of the Hapsburg Crown.

King Charles III of Spain (1759-1788) had already gained a reputation as a reformer while ruler of the Two Sicilies (1734-1759). His work in Italy was aided and continued by men like the regalist Tanucci. In Spain, other allies also proved to be useful in the effort to redirect society to the primary goal of practical, constructive labor. One of them, Pedro Rodriguez de Campomanes (1723-1803), in his Discourse on the Encouragement of Popular Industry (1774) argued for the universal spread of the English-style cooperative movement as the best means of promoting economic efficiency. This movement was mediated in Spain through organizations such as the Basque Economic Society of Friends of the Country, founded in 1763.⁵³

Wherever regalists took up the banner of practical regeneration, they found that Reform Catholics of various stripes would enthusiastically fall in step alongside them, often pressing them to advance still further in their assault. Oratorians like the Portuguese Luís António Verney (1713-1792), whose O Verdadeiro metodo de estudiar (1746) had called for the introduction of a type of instruction “intended to be useful to the Republic and to the Church commensurate to the style and necessity of Portugal”,⁵⁴ was of central assistance to Pombal’s educational policies. The Spanish bishops José Clíment (1706-1781) and Felipe Bertrám (1704-1783), as well as the Benedictine Benito Jeronimo Feijoo (1676-1764), author of the Teatro critico universal, proved invaluable to Charles III’s reform program, in education as well as in other fields of activity. Johann Ignaz Felbiger (1724-1788), the Augustinian Abbot of Sagan in Prussian Silesia and a noted educational reformer, was imported to Vienna in 1774 to supervise the alterations in Austria, which provided its own Benedictine apologist for change in the person of Franz Stephan Rautenstrauch (1734-1785).

Muratori’s influence over reform fever was palpable. Two of his disciples, Johann Joseph Trautson (1751-1757) and that Christoph Anton Migazzi (1757-1803) who ensured the translation of the Italian’s major work into German in 1763, became Archbishops of Vienna and, thus, advisors to reforming Hapsburgs. But Jansenists were not far behind Muratori in the strength of their impact. A Jansenist trio--the natural law theorist Carlo Antonio Martini (1726-1800), along with Maria Theresa’s physician, Gerard van Swieten (1700-1762), and confessor, Ignaz Müller (1713-1782)--was most conspicuous in Austria. The University of Pavia was a conduit for practical Jansenist support of reform in Italy, though its most famous active proponent was the Bishop of Pistoia and Prato, Scipione de’Ricci (1741-1809), himself a close collaborator of the secularizing Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (1765-1790). Jansenists from the reform circles of Feijoo, Clíment, Bertrám, and the historian-philosopher, Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar (1699-1781), flourished in Spain and assisted Charles III’s activities there.

Rome herself frequently stimulated or accepted the results of reform fever, depending upon pope and pontificate. Encyclicals on varied matters signaled papal support for change. Concordat after concordat, some forced, some bought, still others willingly conceded, abandoned Church prerogatives to State authorities in Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, and elsewhere, allowing them to make their desired alterations. Once again, the practical reformer might be excused for thinking that the Papacy itself saw the justice of securing or submitting to secular help in order to control a voracious regular clergy and a self-interested traditional lay elite that led people away from useful activity, both divine and human.⁵⁵

But what reforms were actually undertaken? As noted above, many were of an administrative, fiscal, and legal character, concerned with bureaucratic efficiency, tax collection, and the reduction of expenses. Even if generally unilateral and insensitive in their planning and implementation, they did not necessarily impinge upon the essential spiritual rights of the Church. Where unjust, they were often unjust regarding primarily secular matters. Moreover, it must be admitted that certain changes that even did impinge upon the spiritual realm ultimately helped to alleviate undeniable abuses which Trent itself had sought to address, one of them being the exaggeratedly early and easy entry into religious life of men and women who later regretted lives dedicated to what had really not been free will choices in the first place.

Others reforms, however, entailed an unbearable tightening of regalist restrictions on all Church activities, spiritual as well as secular, according to the naturalist, secularizing plan. This plan, as the dynasties of Europe and their ministers to a large degree conceived it, dictated devoting the primary attention of a State to military matters. Such a project demanded corresponding controls on Church teachings and activities that were too peaceful, otherworldly, and costly in character to allow for the victory of a dynasty in a world filled with belligerent spirits.

Unacceptable measures included the closing of contemplative monasteries, the abolition of “unproductive” feast days, devotions, and liturgical ceremonies, the prohibition of confraternities not engaged in “practical” work as ipso facto “useless”, the expropriation of properties supporting such “pointless” groups and their activities, the civil usurpation of controls over marriage questions, and State direction of seminary education. This last reform, in places like Austria, was integral to the overall effort of the civil authority to train the secular clergy as a Pietist morals police in the Prussian manner and the consequent need to prohibit non-governmental (especially papal) spiritual influence over the formation of priests. Such changes were repeatedly promoted and implemented by prince-bishops as well as lay rulers, while popes like Clement XIV (1769-1774) cooperated, willingly and unwillingly, in radical reform. They savaged religious orders and avoided “insulting” the “spiritual” activities of the secularizing Catholic monarchs of Europe by abandoning the traditional Holy Thursday catalogue of State abuses in the religious sphere altogether.⁵⁶

Most symbolic of all these reforms was the almost total annihilation of the Society of Jesus.⁵⁷ This took place at first on the national level, through truly Stalinist libels, purges, imprisonments, expulsions, and deportations, causing great physical pain for a large number of individuals, many of them old and long highly respected in their varied fields of study. Such horrors began with Portugal, Spain, and their colonies throughout the globe, and eventually included Italian States and the Kingdom of France as well. Pope Clement XIV decreed the universal destruction of the Society, imprisoning its last General under increasingly brutal conditions, although the utility of individual Jesuits as scholars and educators kept the order unofficially alive in places like Prussia and Russia until a happier day finally dawned. But the interim disaster, for Catholic education, Catholic devotional life, and basic Catholic self-respect was incalculable.

Whatever the specific measures dictated by reform fever, its truly offensive aspect was the spirit in which they were adopted: an ultimately closed-minded and self-interested spirit which, nevertheless, passed itself off with a good story—as a public-minded, philanthropic attack on a meaningless obscurantism. Pombal’s Deducção chronólogica analítica and Relação abbreviada laid all secular problems at the doorstep of a Church dominated by Jesuit irrationality---and this at a time when fellow reformers like Joseph II were scattering scholarly Bollandist libraries as useless scrap paper and van Swieten was rejecting the Jesuit-encouraged use of smallpox vaccine. Love of mankind led reformers simultaneously both to deep anguish over religious intolerance as well as summary condemnation of a myriad of Jesuit priests to a decades-long living death in monstrous Portuguese prisons. Popular anti-reform protests were attributed to Jesuit conspiratorial activity and brutally suppressed on that basis. Meanwhile, “the People” as a whole were repeatedly said to benefit by the reforms in question: such “practical” measures as the tossing of aged contemplatives into the street, an end of price controls in grain and the prohibition of evening outdoor diversions that kept men up too late at night, limiting their sleep and, hence, their productivity on the following morning. The “reform movement” rejected contemptuously and out of hand the idea that Catholic Christianity had the ability to say anything sensible and practical. Catholicism was there to learn, not to teach, and the teaching it was obliged to swallow displayed that same union of sweet rhetoric, practical cruelty, and blatant money-grubbing that had been a central characteristic of most revolutionary movements since the twelfth century.⁵⁸

Outright supporters of the Enlightenment, both Radical and Moderate, were involved in all of these changes, although the enthusiastic backing of Jansenists and Reformed Catholics made the concerns of the open naturalists hard to separate from the others. Voltaire found it easy to utilize the writings of Reform Catholics in his more radical, post-1750 work, and men such as Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733-1817), one of Joseph II’s educational czars, could move back and forth from the Reform Catholic to the anti-Catholic Enlightenment camp without notable difficulty.⁵⁹

Many of the religious proponents of practical change and Reform Catholicism were, however, ultimately quite well meaning believers. Upon seeing that governmental reform was moving down an openly anti-Christian direction, they became honestly frightened for the future. Archbishop Migazzi and Maria Theresa, shocked by the intensity of the anti-Catholicism of her more radical son, Joseph II, were among them. So was Pope Pius VI (1775-1799), who also has to be generally counted as an advocate of reform. His famous journey to Vienna in 1782 to urge the Austrian Emperor to retract his secularizing Edict of Toleration, illustrated the extent of this deepening papal concern.⁶⁰

Unfortunately, objections of repentant pragmatists and reformers got almost nowhere. The Migazzis of the movement had badly underestimated the way in which their own confused intellectual and spiritual statements had deprived them of logical consistency when wishing to bridle more radical elements. The pre-revolutionary Revolution could not be halted by their action. Mass resistance in places like Belgium, stimulated by a mixture of “gut” parochial and religious feeling, did much more to stop it. Still, by that time, the whole Catholic understanding of political and social life and its relation to God had received a tremendous and seemingly irrevocably jolt. And the worst was yet to come.

D. The GCSQ and the Assault on Catholic France

Good stories regarding the foundation of a nation, both the false along with the accurate ones, do indeed play a practical role in the life of any given people. Foundation stories concerning the Kingdom of France, whatever their obvious flaws, did relate two basic truths regarding its history. The first was the fact that France’s earliest origins as a historically important power lay with the acceptance by her leaders of the faith of the Roman Catholic Church. The second was that the Capetian Dynasty had cemented this union still further by associating itself with the crusading vision that underlay the great reform movement of the High Middle Ages and the brilliant achievements accompanying its new ascent of Mount Tabor.

Despite the evils of Philip the Fair, the Gallican regalism of the New Monarchy under the Valois, and the belligerent, centralizing, and secularizing tactics of the Bourbons and the bon Français, something of the commitment to the underlying truths of the foundation story always remained alive within segments of the Court as well as in the country at large. If a Frenchman were a believing Catholic, he might proudly argue that St. Louis IX was praying for his nation in heaven. In fact, personal royal commitment in some ways seemed to grow in the course of the eighteenth century, justifying the steadfastness of that segment of the dévot party that had always remained loyal to the monarchy and its policies.

Louis XIV, both due to the influence of his second wife, the very Catholic Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719), as well as to his own intuitive dislike of Jansenism, cemented the nation’s doctrinal unity with the Roman Pontiffs. Yes, Louis XV’s unending sensual escapades, which prevented his reception of Holy Communion and made it impossible for him to play his necessary public role as a sacred monarch, did much damage to the monarchy’s religious reputation. Nevertheless, this in no way blocked him either from pursuing a policy that was as Catholic friendly as the very volatile circumstances of his reign and the bitter divisions within his own Court made possible. Nor did it prevent him from understanding and attempting to fulfill his duty to defend the common good in a land of great corporate diversity. And, finally, in Louis XVI (1773-1794), the Church and the royalist segment of the dévot party found a firm believer and a man who, however limited he might have been intellectually, was morally above reproach.⁶¹

In short, the French Monarchy, its abundant failures notwithstanding, was, in the days before its destruction, in many respects precisely the kind of Catholic target that the enemies of the Word needed to destroy before their victory over the “Tridentine” vision could be considered in any way to be symbolically complete. As befits a force that should be open to the full message of Christ in the pilgrim dance of life, the Court of that venerable kingdom was proving itself to be both doctrinally committed and yet ready to experiment on the socio-political level with all that the natural world around it offered. Ironically, it was perhaps too uncritically ready to indulge in political and social experimentation in an environment more subject to the dictates of the Zeitgeist than the good of the monarchy—and the nation as a whole—actually permitted.⁶²²⁴ But explaining the peculiar situation of Catholicism, the monarchy, and France in general demands a return to the developing story of the Jansenist movement.

We have seen that that second wing of the dévot party in which the Jansenists militated went steadily down the path of radical opposition to the established system. With both the Papacy as well as the vast bulk of the French bishops working against them, the Jansenists obviously could not rest secure either in their former Ultramontanism or in a Gallicanism relying on native prelates for protection against the pretensions of Rome. To make matters worse, they had discovered that a Gallicanism based on the support of the king had proven to offer an equally unsuitable protection. The Papacy, the local episcopacy, and the monarchy were all firmly united against them.

On the other hand, the law courts, the parlements, were also bitterly angry with the king and the vast majority of the French bishops. They were furious with them for three reasons: for abandoning the “Gallican liberties” in the appeal for papal judgment against the Jansenists that had resulted in Unigenitus; for their support for Jesuit “agents of a foreign court”; and for repeatedly attempting to repress their own legitimate role in what we would call the judicial review of legislation. Moreover, many members of the lower ranks of the secular clergy were also disposed to rebellion against the decisions of king and prelates. They were upset both by the unbearably tight controls that the monarchy had allowed the bishops to exercise over their ecclesiastical careers in exchange for episcopal subservience to the court, as well as by their total exclusion from all deliberation in French Church affairs. Jansenists moved to gain a support from both of these forces, just as their leaders were disposed, voluntarily, to offer it to them. And this alliance of Jansenists, parlements, and lower clergy against popes, kings, bishops, and Jesuits proved to be a powerful and subversive one indeed—even if stronger wills ultimately led it down directions that it did not itself “choose” to go.²⁵

The history of the Kingdom of France in the years between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the Revolution of 1789 involves twists and turns in the war of these contesting alliances that require a book of their own to outline.²⁶ Philippe d’Orleans (1674-1723), Regent during the minority of Louis XV, presided over a general reaction to the policies of the previous reign and therefore brought about a temporary relaxation of the monarchy’s efforts to control the Jansenists and the parlements. The consequent disruption of monarchical power swiftly resulted in Philippe’s recognition of the need to return to past restrictions upon them. Such controls then gave way to renewed efforts to satisfy anti-monarchical and anti-Jesuit forces when the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years War (1756-1763), and the financial difficulties associated with them, seemed to require concessions guaranteeing a solid national unity. These concessions having proved counterproductive, stricter restraints on the subversive coalition were once again rigidly imposed. Attempts to revive or weaken the assault on the Jansenists and the parlements were met with angry and often violent reactions on the part of all concerned, friend and foe alike.

Still, it was the anti-papal, anti-Jesuit, and anti-monarchical faction that excelled in cultivation of rage and violence. Here, more than anywhere else in the eighteenth century, one finds a true “War of Words against the Word” in full swing. Vilification became the stuff of daily political discourse. “Sincerity”, “conscience”, “nature”, and accusations of despotism, atheism, and subservience to foreign interests were invoked with wild abandon. Historical myths concerning the role of the parlements in the life of the French nation were treated as absolute truths.

These legends were perhaps best represented by Louis-Adrien Le Paige’s (1712-1802) Historical Letters on the Essential Functions of the Parlement, on the Rights of Peers, and on the Fundamental Laws of the Realm (1753-1754), along with his Letter on the Lits de Justice (1754). Such writings illustrated the strength of the Jansenist-judiciary alliance and once again demonstrated how a “high-minded lie” making claims to a distinguished pedigree could be used to bend nature to the demands of strong-willed contemporary hearts. They drilled in the argument that only the “sincerity” of the Jansenist-minded law courts, whose role was traced back to their “foundation” in the forests of Merovingian France, could properly guide both the religious and political life of the nation, defending it from “absolutism”, “despotism”, and “tyranny”. They taught that only the parlement, with their Jansenist allies, were worthy of the name of “patriot” in a land where foreign interests, reflected in the influence of despotic popes, casuist Spanish and Italian Jesuists, and a wicked woman bred by the still loathed Hapsburg Dynasty, Marie Antoinette, clearly dominated.²⁷

In periods of strength, when national unity for war purposes was required, this alliance was pampered by the monarchy, which permitted it to persecute Catholic bishops and priests, driving them into exile from their dioceses and their parishes. In periods of weakness, when the court followed the normal dictates of its Catholic mind and heart, functionaries of the parlements resorted to judicial “strikes” that ground the legal machinery of France to a halt. These strikes then provoked royal interventions that were chastised as still further examples of a “despotism” whose most palpable symbol more and more became the fortress of the Bastille in Paris. Aside from impacting upon the religious question, the influence of men like Le Paige and the parlementary obstructionism he advocated helped mightily to cripple the legitimate, experimental, and often quite innovative efforts of the monarchy to make necessary reforms that might effectively have dealt with a threatening national bankruptcy. For whether this perceived approaching economic disaster was real or imaginary, it was true that nothing serious could be accomplished to handle it in the atmosphere of the battle of absolute evil against absolute good that the Jansenist and parlementary word merchants worked unceasingly to foster.²⁸

Under these circumstances, supporters of the Enlightenment were forced to a painful choice of their own.²⁹ In theory, none of them, whether leaning towards the radical or moderate naturalism of the movement, were friends of Bourbon Absolutism. One of their number, the Baron Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755), was a leading proponent of the kind of “constitutionalism” that seemed to support parlementary objectives. And even if Montesquieu’s historically and sociologically influenced approach veered far away from the universal natural law vision that most mainstream philosophes preferred, permitting him to justify a diversity of political systems where they would wish to find but one, the parlementary-Jansenist coalition included more acceptable thinkers as well. The Abbé Claude Mey (dates unknown) and Gabriel-Nicholas Maultrot’s (1714-1803) Maximes du droit public français (1775), along with Guillaume-Joseph Saige’s (dates unknown) Catéchisme du citoyen (1775), expressed their concerns on the universal natural law/natural right plane, bringing John Locke as well as Rousseau into the peculiar French battle against the Papacy, the French Episcopacy, and the Bourbon Monarchy.

On the other hand, believing Jansenists, with their loathing of the natural world, were anathema to the nature-friendly philosophes. Their religious fanaticism, roused to fever pitch through claims of miracles and displays of writhings, convulsions, and speaking in tongues around the grave of one of their clerical heroes at the Church of St. Médard in Paris, were among the most blatant examples of contemporary obscurantism rationalists could identify. Voltaire’s brother himself was drawn into them to his intense embarrassment. Moreover, the parlements, whatever the validity of their claim to oppose monarchical “tyranny”, fought royal power in order to protect irrational, brutal, and anti-social national “traditions”, ranging from torture to tax sheltering, that must be shattered if any enlightened progress were to take effect. Hence, the decision of many of the moderate philosophes to work with the government of the king, which allowed them employment and influence and seemed more than open to a number of the reforms that they themselves believed to be necessary. Hence, also, the charge of their more radical opponents that in opting for Versailles, moderates had proven themselves to be power-hungry time servers and insincere hypocrites who might one fine day have to be eliminated from the revolutionary march to the victory of “nature” over artifice.

Before their dissolution, the Jesuits often attacked the Jansenists and their parlementary allies for utilizing a language making an appeal to ancient traditions in defense against novel monarchical usurpations that actually aided the cause of the Radical Enlightenment. But let us also remember that many Jesuits had themselves tried to fit into the Moderate Enlightenment mould, and had been bitterly criticized by Jansenists for doing so in turn. Worse still, the French Church was often all too ready to join the anti-monarchical alliance to protect its corporate financial interests against governmental “tyranny” whenever efforts to confront the supposed national bankruptcy threatened her own “traditional” privileges. But Jesuit infatuation with Enlightenment ideas weakened both due to the growing union of radicals and moderates after 1750 for common intellectual defense purposes as well as to the Society’s need to fight primarily against the relentless attempts of the parlements to undermine its “alien” and “despotic” presence in the Kingdom of France.

Unfortunately, the friends of Monarchy and Church, conscious of the need for serious measures both to avoid bankruptcy and national impotence as well as to protect the doctrinal foundations of Catholicism, sought salvation in an apologetic of “willfulness” more suitable to the proponents of “nature as is” than to orthodox Christians. Hence, as the obstructionism of the court’s opponents grew stronger, the king’s ministers began to see political redemption chiefly in an exaltation of the royal will over any solid intellectual principle or historical fact of life:³⁰

As on the patriot side, a radical, potentially subversive strand of ministerial pamphleteering therefore stands out in contrast to a moderate one. And what distinguishes this radical strand is in part its skepticism about the relevance or even accessibility of the past. While a moderate defender of the monarchy like Moreau attempted to fashion a royalist version of French history in order better to compete with the parlementary and patriot versions, the likes of Linguet and Marie turned their backs on history entirely and, renewing contact with a line of royal apologetics represented most recently by the abbé de Saint-Pierre during the Regency, argued the case of the royal will in utilitarian terms alone. Even sharper, then, was the contrast with patriot pamphleteering. For where patriot pamphleteering—especially the more Jansenist versions of it—all but eliminated the flesh and blood monarch in favor of immutable fundamental laws as they supposedly existed by national consent during the monarchy’s earliest centuries, this more radical wing of the ministerial front strove to free the monarchical will from the constraints of the past however construed.

Catholic apologists tended to so the same, adding their support for a willful Papacy, unbound by dogmas, rational ideas, or history to royalists arguing on behalf of a willful monarchy:³¹

For just as some of the most radical patriot constitutionalism had roots in Jansenist conciliarism and its vision of a pristine patristic revelation—for Jansenists the touchstone of all ulterior theologizing—so some of this radical ministerial anticonstitutionalism arguably had roots or at least a counterpart in a devout apologetical tactic developed during the eighteenth century’s earlier decades.

That apologetical effort, undertaken by the Jesuits Jean Hardouin and his disciple Isaac-Berruyer, had audaciously challenged the authenticity or at least the accessibility of much of the historical and documentary evidence of Christian revelation, like the writings of the church fathers and the pronouncements of church councils. Thereby freed from the constraints of both ecclesiastical and dogmatic history—so ran the strategy of this apologetic—the papal magisterium would be free to define what the church had presumably always believed as it infallibly saw fit. In the works of Jean Hardouin, who wrote during the earlier decades of the century, this apologetic took the crude form of challenging the authenticity of all the church’s documentary evidence except for the Vulgate before the fourteenth century, at which time some atheistical monks forged all of the patristic and conciliar evidence in an attempt to undermine papal authority.

Hardouin’s disciple Isaac Berruyer took a subtler tack, holding that the meanings of terms and the systems of reference of such ancient documents were so time-bound as to render their meaning all but impenetrable to the eighteenth-century understanding. Berruyer therefore hoped to improve on ‘dry and sterile’ précis and vernacular translations and felt free to make the ancient protagonists of the Hebrew Scriptures ‘speak as they would speak today if they were among us’ and to present a ‘living and animated tableau of the adorable perfections of the great Master who we have the honor to serve’. This he did with scandalous effect in his multivolume and novelistic History of the People of God. But the intended effect, as in Hardouin’s work, was to emancipate the papacy from documentary evidence of just about any kind, allowing it to define or refine the Catholic dogmatic tradition in the sense of the bull Unigenitus.

Therefore, in one sense, everyone—including the Church, the Monarchy, and the parlements, alongside Jesuit, Jansenist, and Enlightenment thinkers—was simultaneously engaged in promoting intellectual argumentation founded upon a basic willfulness unbound by historical facts, and the inevitable “business as usual” consequences flowing from it. And it is no surprise that with the final failure of the government’s quite innovative reform efforts and its frustrated summons of the Estates General, this appeal to willful language was still further intensified. The end result was indeed to be a triumph of the will---but not the will of the monarchy. A combination of more committed and determined revolutionary supporters of “nature as is” was the willful force destined to dominate the future of western man and the future of the globe at large.

The French episcopacy, clergy, and monarchy ultimately reacted admirably to the vicissitudes of the Revolution, at least once its blatant anti-religious nature became crystal clear. Any Catholic reading the responses of the overwhelming number of bishops who refused to take the oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791 can be justly proud of their steadfastness. But they did not act successfully against the Revolution for a long time. A major reason they did not do so was that they did not know how to do so. Catholic Achilles Heels and their development into tools for recruitment into the Grand Coalition of the Status Quo had deprived them of their best weapons in fighting their opponents: the full corrective and transforming message of Christ. Far from being able to tell a good story about their true story, their failure to understand important aspects of the Faith actually led them to use the arguments of their enemies in futile attempts to defend themselves.