The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 69

His criticisms affect the form of the Council of Trent rather than the substance of its decisions. It is the competency of the court to which he pleads, rather than its decrees. Aside from the canon of the Scriptures, which, for the Old Testament, he would restrict to the Hebrew books properly so-called, and exclude therefrom the books in Greek transmitted only by the Septuagint, I am aware of no dogmatic point, defined at Trent, which creates with him any serious difficulty. And even on this subject of the canonicity of the sacred books, he has nothing that resembles that audacious criticism to which Richard Simon, in the seventeenth century, opened the way, and which, a very few years after, all Germany was to rush into and level and broaden. It was not the criticism of our days, which pretends to an imprescriptible right over the entire text of the Scriptures, and to serve as the ground of all certainty, moral and philosophical. The criticism of Leibnitz takes not such lofty airs. It is restricted to some accessory parts of the Old Testament, and presumes not to go beyond. And when Bossuet, adopting a method familiar to logicians (though not always prudently employed), would push it to the extreme, to absurdity even, and prove that its principles logically carried out would ruin entirely the Holy Scriptures, Leibnitz recoils, frightened at the last word of his own logic.

Leibnitz, having never been accused of a narrow or timid mind, of any lack of boldness in his principles or of force in deducing from them their logical consequences, it is necessary to believe that if he avoided the debate between the Reformation and the Church under its grander aspects, it was solely because he was separated from Catholic beliefs only by the narrow trench which he himself has traced, and because his own Protestantism, so to speak, was neither longer nor broader. Certainly he can be very little of a Protestant who acknowledges all the councils _less_ one alone, and even all the decrees of that one save a single exception--who speaks as a Catholic of the Church, of tradition, of the priesthood, and of the sacraments.

That to these sentiments, so near to those of a Catholic, {450} Leibnitz joined the sincere desire to take the final step; that, having reached the threshold, he was strongly pressed to cross it, we must believe, in order not only not to throw doubt on his often repeated protestations, which have every appearance of being made in good faith, but to account for his perseverance, meritoriously displayed on more than one occasion to sustain or revive, against all hope, the flickering flame of the languis.h.i.+ng negotiation. Neither the growing coldness of the powers of the earth, who after having started it abandoned it midway, nor the haughtiness of Bossuet, a little contemptuous, which exposed without any mercy the vanity of his projects, succeeded in discouraging him. He was proof against all disgusts; he knocked at every door, and the crooked methods he adopted to open or turn them, not according to the rules of loyal warfare, attest at least an ardent desire to enter the place. Yet, in spite of this agreement on principles, this heartfelt desire for union, and the feeble distance which remained for him to traverse to become a Catholic, Leibnitz never in his life traversed it. The end of the discussion found him just where he was at its beginning, always debating, never advancing. When the reasoning of Bossuet became urgent and victorious (and it will be admitted that with the choice of ground, and the advantages conceded him, one needs not to be a Bossuet to conquer)--whenever it took a turn _ad hominem_, and pa.s.sed from the general interests of Protestantism to the particular duties of individual conscience--whenever the question was no longer of concluding a treaty of peace between two hostile powers, but of articulating the submission of a believer, Leibnitz drew back, and escaped. The tone becomes sharp and sour, recriminations are mingled with reasoning, subterfuges retract the concessions. Broad and easy in regard to principles, he haggles at consequences. What are we to think of that alternation, of those constant advances followed by as constant retreats? What was the after-thought back of the exterior motives of that intermittent resistance? For no one can be persuaded that a man of a serious character, and a mind which stops not at trifles, admitting in the outset the necessity and the right of an infallible authority in matters of faith, could remain a Protestant, that is, a rebel to that acknowledged authority, because the bishops, united at Trent, admitted _Ecclesiasticus_ and _Macchabees_ into the canon of the Scriptures.

The moral problem being curious and complex, every one has a right to offer his own solution. I formerly, in this periodical, offered mine, and I shall hold to it till a better and a more satisfactory solution is discovered. In my judgment, all is explained, if we suppose that Leibnitz became a Catholic in intellect and by study, yet remained a Protestant by force of habit, interest, and self-love. The first part is not even a supposition, but a fact. For, waiving the disputed value of the _Systema Theologic.u.m_, the doc.u.ments which we have before us contain alone avowals amply sufficient to prove it. When one admits the concurrence of free will and the divine will in the work of salvation, the mysterious virtue and efficacy of the sacraments, the transubstantiation of the elements in the eucharist--when one recognizes the sacred character of the priesthood, the Primacy by divine right of the bishops of Rome, and, above all, the infallibility of the Church (and Leibnitz accords all this to Bossuet, always by implication, and often under the form of explicit concession), one is willingly or unwillingly a Catholic, or at least has lost all right not to be one. In such a case the defect is in the will, not the intellect. Let nothing be said here of invincible ignorance, for never was there ignorance more vincible, more completely conquered, subjected, drowned in floods of light, than in the case of Leibnitz.

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Remains, then, only the second part of the hypothesis, which I confess is less clearly demonstrated, as well as less charitable; but it perfectly meets the facts in the case, and perhaps, when the first part is once conceded, it, better than any other explanation, saves the dignity and loyalty of Leibnitz.

If it was true, as we hold, that Leibnitz, agreeing with the Church in all the fundamental principles of the Catholic faith, was retained outside of her communion by the fear of losing the high position which he had gained in the ranks of Protestants and with their princes, nothing more simple than that, to satisfy at the same time his conscience and his interests, he should labor earnestly and perseveringly to effect a reconciliation of his party and his protectors with the Church. If it was true that he felt himself bound by strong and respectable ties which attach men to the monuments, and to the forms of wors.h.i.+p, which received their first vows and dictated their first prayers, it is very natural that he should hesitate to go alone, to take his seat in churches unknown to his childhood, and that he should, instead, seek at first to reconstruct the broken down altars of the temples of the middle ages which had seen his birth. If finally the _proud weakness_ attached to the royalty of science as to every other royalty, made him dread to change the part of an accredited doctor of one party for that of a penitent and neophyte of another, who can be astonished that, to spare himself the painful transition, he should wish to pa.s.s out with arms, baggage, and all the honors of war, instead of submitting to conditions, and enter into the Church with head erect, followed by a retinue of nations, and have therefore a right to as much grat.i.tude as he gave of submission?

The persistence of Leibnitz in a forlorn negotiation finds in this at least a probable explanation. His insistence on points of little importance is less easy to understand. These points, of which he knew well what to think, are those without which, according to his knowledge of the Protestant courts and schools, no peace was possible either to be concluded or even proposed. He knew how completely and irrevocably Protestant princes and doctors were pledged by their word and their self-love (_amour-propre_) against the Council of Trent, from which they fancied they had been unjustly excluded. Many of them were on the point of reaching by their own reason and study dogmatic conclusions a.n.a.logous to those of Trent; but the date and seal of that council affixed to any formulary presented for their signature made them instinctively recoil. It was in their name much more than in his own, or rather to manage their pretensions much more than to tranquillize his own conscience, as he allows us in more than one place to perceive, that he insisted with invincible obstinacy that this obstacle to peace must be removed. He acted as a negotiator who follows his instructions and speaks for others, much more than as a doctor who decides, or a philosopher who discusses, on his own account. In the new council whose convocation he called for, he thought all low in himself, the dogmas of Trent, after an apparent discussion, would be re-established on the more solid basis of a more general agreement, and not having that quick sense of the dignity of the Church which belongs only to her children, he felt no repugnance to the adoption of expedients borrowed from political prudence, and wholly out of place in the Church of G.o.d.

Thus may be resolved, it seems to me, in the most simple manner in the world, the apparent contradictions in the conduct of Leibnitz, and be discovered the secret of his obstinacy in protracting a fruitless discussion, instead of either candidly breaking it off or boldly bringing it to its logical conclusion. He had postponed the day of his personal conversion to the day constantly hoped, constantly announced as near, of a general reconciliation. {452} It would have cost him too much to move before that day came; but it cost him hardly less to own to himself that come it would not. Hence, with him, a prolonged state of indecision, which, as human life is short, and death always takes us by surprise, had naturally no termination but that of his life itself. We in this have, I think, explained that other problem presented by the _Systema Theologic.u.m_. If we have rightly seized his state of mind, nothing was more natural than that we should find among the papers of Leibnitz a profession of Catholic faith, and there can be nothing astonis.h.i.+ng in the fact that it remained unfinished and unpublished. From the moment in which the doctrines contained in that tract became his real belief, it was very natural that he should reduce them to writing, and, from the moment when he had subjected the publication of his conversion to a condition always hoped for, but never realized, it was more natural still that he should keep the writing by him as the witness of the fact of his conversion. At what point of his life, therefore, did he confide to paper the interior state of his mind? It is impossible, but at the same time wholly unimportant, to determine. Probably it was in one of those moments of sincerity and recollection in which the soul, detaching herself from all worldly considerations, places herself face to face with the problems of her eternal destiny; or, indeed, may have been at a time when, in the vein of hope, and believing that he was on the eve of concluding ecclesiastical peace, he wished to draw up before-hand, in readiness for the event, its manifesto and programme. Little imports it. As soon as he thought as a Catholic, there were a thousand circ.u.mstances in his life in which he must have spoken and written as he thought. The moment in which he would have expressed himself with the least frankness was most likely that in which, being made the plenipotentiary of the Protestants, and charged to treat for them, he felt it his duty to put forth in their name pretensions to which in his own heart he attached no importance. Leibnitz the negotiator must necessarily have been more difficult, and set a higher price on his submission, than Leibnitz the philosopher, so that, in opposition to the a.s.sertion of M. de Careil, his sincere work would be the _Systema Theologic.u.m:_ his diplomatic work would be the correspondence of which we have made the a.n.a.lysis.

The advantage of Bossuet in the debate is that in his case no such questions can be raised, and no such subtle distinctions be called for. Bossuet the bishop and Bossuet the diplomatist are one and the same person, and speak one and the same language. Knowing perfectly whence he starts, whither he can go, what he is permitted to abandon, and what he must hold fast; very liberal in the part which he gives to reason, very precise in what he a.s.serts in the name of authority; marking with a steady hand the limits of what can be changed in the Church, and what is as immutable as she herself, he has no occasion, when he has once laid down his principles, to withdraw any concession, or to shrink from any logical consequence; possessing an erudition less varied, an argumentative ability less flexible than that of Leibnitz, Bossuet, in his letters, carries the day by his rect.i.tude and precision. We say, however, and without wrong to the great prelate, that his cause was too nearly gained in advance. All the principles are conceded him in the outset, and the slightest logical pressure suffices to force out the necessary conclusions. Leibnitz found at times his hand heavy, and complained of it; but he himself armed that powerful hand with the instrument which it set at work, without management indeed, but also without forcing its action.

This privileged situation, which gives to Bossuet his preponderance in the struggle, takes, however, from that struggle a large part of the interest which otherwise it might have had for {453} us, and deprives us of the instruction that might have been derived from it. We a.s.suredly have little chance of seeing pitted against each other combatants of their stature, and less still, if it be possible, of seeing a debate carried on under like conditions. There is no longer a Bossuet in the Church; but still less, perhaps, are there Protestants and philosophers who, like Leibnitz, recognize infallibility in principle, and the inspiration of three-fourths of the canon of Scripture. That kind of enemies is gone, and left no heirs. Those whom we now encounter make to our forces a less stiff resistance. The very image and shadow of authority have disappeared from the Protestantism of our age, each day more and more dissipated in the thousand shades of private judgment. With unbounded free inquiry and unbridled criticism, controversy can no longer find a starting-point in any dogma or in any text, and, in fact, has ceased to be possible. The enemy escapes by the want of a body to be grappled with. Happily, another sort of combat can be waged, another sort of victory be hoped for. Doctrines, remote from one another, to be disputed in their principles, may still be compared in their effects. It is henceforth by their respective fruits, rather than by arguments, by their respective action on society and on souls, that, before an uncertain public, must be judged the principle of authority in matters of faith and that of private judgment. On this new soil, as on that of pure intelligence, G.o.d permits the efforts of man to concur in the triumph of his cause. If he wills, then, for the honor of his Church, to raise up Bossuets to take his cause in hand, there ought to be, for the honor of her nature, Leibnitzes to meet them, and measure themselves with them.

PRINCE ALBERT DE BROGLIE.

From The Month.

SAINTS OF THE DESERT.

BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN, D.D.

1. Abbot Antony said: I saw the nets of the enemy lying spread out over the earth; and I cried out, "Alas, who shall escape these?" And a voice answered, "Humility."

2. It is told of Blessed a.r.s.enius, that on Sat.u.r.day evening he turned his back on the setting sun, and, stretching out his arms toward heaven, did not cease to pray till the sun rose before his face in the morning.

3. Abbot Agatho was zealous to fulfil every duty.

If he crossed a ferry, he was the first to take an oar.

If he had a visit from his brethren, his hand was first, after prayer, to set out the table.

For he was full of divine love.

4. The novice of Abbot Sisoi often had to say to him, "Rise, father; let us eat." He used to make answer, "Are you sure we did not eat just now, my son?"

The novice replied, "Quite sure, my father." Then the old man said, "Well, if we did not eat, come, let us eat."

5. A president came to see Abbot Simon; and some clerks, who got to him first, said to him, "Now, father, get ready! Here comes the president for your blessing; he has heard a great deal about you."

"_I_ will get ready," said the abbot. So he took some bread and cheese, and began munching at the door of his cell.

"So _this_ is your solitary!" said the president, and went away again.

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From St. James's Magazine.

'TIS BETTER LATE THAN NEVER.

Has sorrow cast thy spirit down, And crush'd thy hopes Elysian?

Be not disheartened by her frown.

Nor heedless of thy mission.

But go forth gaily on thy way-- The bonds of care dissever, And pluck the roses while you may; 'Tis better late than never!

Doth love consume with pensive woe Thy heart whence hope has fleeted-- As sunbeams melt away the snow They never could have heated?

Come, wreathe thy brow with laurel-leaf-- Be wise as well as clever, And learn a n.o.bler lore than grief; 'Tis better late than never!

For life's a stand-up fight, I ween.

With poverty and labor, And many a hero there has been Who never drew a sabre.

So buckle bravely to the strife.

How perilous soever.

And win some glory for thy life; 'Tis better late than never!

Or hast thou, worn in folly's wars, Forgot the land that bloometh Beyond the cedars and the stars.

Where sorrow never cometh?

Oh, do not for a phantom fly From Paradise for ever, But turn thy trusting eyes on high; 'Tis better late than never!

GREAT LORD OF HEAVEN! CREATION'S KING!

Whose vineyard open lies, Thou deemest not a worthless thing Man's tardy sacrifice; Still sanctify the work we've wrought, And every fond endeavor.

This blessed creed thyself hast taught-- 'TIS BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!

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From The Month.

CONSTANCE SHERWOOD:

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.