The Modernist Imagination

Intellectual History and Critical Theory

Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn, Warren Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyn

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781845458812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Some of the most exciting and innovative work in the humanities currently takes place at the intersection of intellectual history and critical theory. Just as critical theorists are becoming more aware of the historicity of theory, contemporary practitioners of modern intellectual history are recognizing their potential contributions to theoretical discourse. No one has done more than Martin Jay to realize the possibilities for mutual enrichment between intellectual history and critical theory. This carefully selected collection of essays addresses central questions and current practices of intellectual history and asks how the legacy of critical theory has influenced scholarship across a wide range of scholarly disciplines. In honor of Martin Jay's unparalleled achievements, this volume includes work from some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

Part I

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

“THE KISS OF LAMOURETTE”

“Possibilism” or “Christian Democracy”?

David Sorkin

The sense of boundless possibility—“possibilism” one could call it—was the bright side of popular emotion, and it was not restricted to millenarian outbursts in the streets. It could seize lawyers and men of letters sitting in the Legislative Assembly. On July 7, 1792, A.-A. Lamourette, a deputy from the Rhône-et-Loire, told the Assembly's members that their troubles all arose from a single source: factionalism. They needed more fraternity. Whereupon the deputies, who had been at each other's throats a moment earlier, rose to their feet and started hugging and kissing each other as if their political divisions could be swept away in a wave of brotherly love.

—Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette

With an essay entitled, “The Kiss of Lamourette,” and the volume in which it appeared bearing the same title,¹ Robert Darnton has made this obscure incident of the French Revolution so widely known that other historians have begun to repeat his account of it.² Yet the one engaging paragraph devoted to the incident reduces the “kiss of Lamourette” to a curiosity that allegedly reveals the French Revolution's excesses and eccentricities (“possibilism”). Darnton rightly insists that we should prefer the voices and thoughts of historical participants to the theories of contemporary historians.³ In this essay, I will attempt to let Lamourette speak for himself. I will offer an alternative understanding of the incident by providing a detailed account of Lamourette's life and thought. My contention is that we need to employ the methods of narrative intellectual history to comprehend this event as did the historical participants themselves.

Lamourette, whom Darnton identifies only as a “deputy from the Rhône-et-Loire,” was not only an Abbé, a serious theologian, a Constitutional Bishop, and a deputy, but one of the patriotic clergy who understood enlightened Catholic belief and the Revolution to be mutually fulfilling. His “kiss” was located at the heart of the Revolution's conflicts: it was intended as a defense of what he significantly called “Christian democracy.” This essay will revisit the “kiss” by employing the methods of narrative intellectual history to look closely at what the sources say first about Lamourette and next the kiss itself.

Who was “A.–A. Lamourette”?

Adrien Lamourette (1742–1794) was a member of the Lazarist order, a sometime seminary Professor, Seminary Director, and parish priest.⁴ Born in 1742 as the oldest of five children to a humble family in the market town of Frévent (in the northwest, now the Department of Pas-de-Calais) where his father was a comb-maker, he showed an early aptitude for study and his parents dedicated him to the Church. He entered the Lazarist order at the age of seventeen (1759) and was ordained a Priest ten years later (1769).⁵ Lamourette attended the Order's central seminary at its Paris headquarters, known as the Maison Saint-Lazare (hence the Order's name), where he likely followed a twelve-year curriculum for the training of Lazarist seminary professors.⁶ His first teaching post was at Metz (1769–1772), where he taught philosophy, and the Abbé Grégoire (1750–1831) was one of his students. Beginning in 1773, he was a Professor at the Lazarist seminary in Toul (west of Nancy) in the province of Lorraine. He served for two years (1776–1778) as Director of the Seminary of Toul, a placeholder during the reorganization of the institution.⁷ Lamourette then became a parish priest in Outremcourt (Haute-Marne), where he spent five formative years (1778–1783). Lamourette returned to the Congregation of Saint Lazare in 1784, and in 1785 went home to his parish of origin, where he was appointed a member of the Academy of Arras.

Lamourette's first book appeared in 1785 and he published three more by the time of the Revolution (1786, 1788, 1789). This torrid pace says something about the 1780s as a crucial juncture in France's history: the accession of Louis XVI brought an end to the era of Unigenitus (1713). By enforcing this papal bull prohibiting Jansenism, Louis XV's government had created the conditions for a tripartite struggle (Jansenists vs. parti dévot vs. philosophes) that largely determined the shape of French religious and political culture throughout his long reign (1715–1774).⁸ The Jansenist-parti dévot divide began to dissolve with the suppression of the Jesuits in 1764. Louis XVI's restoration of the Parlement at the conclusion of the Maupeou controversy (1774) signaled the end of the monarchy's alliance with the parti dévot and its heretofore implacable dispute with Jansenism.⁹ A political realignment ensued, in which the clergy and the Bishops began to ally with the Parlement, Jansenist thinkers opened to new cultural possibilities, and the government began to implement reforms, the most salient being the limited toleration granted to Protestants (1787).¹⁰

The 1780s were thus conducive to new directions in thought. In his four books, Lamourette attempted to offer a version of Catholic Enlightenment. Most famously associated with Joseph II's reforms, Bishop Hontheim, the Punctation of Ems (1786), and Bishop Scipio de Ricci and the Council of Pistoia (1786), Catholic Enlightenment was an attempt to articulate Catholic faith in the categories of Enlightenment science and philosophy. Catholic Enlightenment also included an effort to recover neglected aspects of Catholic tradition (e.g., study of Scripture, Patristics) and a program of Church reform (usually inspired by the ideal of the primitive Church, conciliarism, and some variant of Jansenism or neo-Jansenism). Its proponents generally adopted the key ideas of reasonableness and natural religion, natural law and toleration. Other theologians in France began to move in this same direction prior to the Revolution: the Abbé Grégoire applied natural law theory to the issue of the Jews’ civil status (Essai sur la Régénération physique, morale et politique des Juifs, 1789), while the Abbé Claude Fauchet (1744–1793) applied it to the reorganization of the Church (De la Religion nationale, 1789).¹¹

Lamourette broke new ground in endeavoring to devise a Catholic Enlightenment theology. His theology is distinctly apologetic. The philosophes are his partners in dialogue to the degree that on every fundamental issue, he developed his own position by criticizing theirs: the role of reason and sentiment (inspired by Rousseau) in faith; the relationship between revealed and natural religion; and Christianity as a political philosophy and a social ethics.

In general, Lamourette aimed to make a fresh theological start. He referred neither to medieval scholastic theology nor to the vast and acrimonious theological literature of the eighteenth century, but rather turned to the great figures of the seventeenth century (Bossuet, Fénelon). As his biographer aptly observed, Lamourette was trying to avoid the extremes of Jansenism, whose aridity destroyed the sources of piety, and of philosophy, which sapped the basis of faith.¹²

Lamourette's version of Catholic Enlightenment consisted of a moderate skepticism, well established in French Catholicism (Pascal), which he wielded against the philosophes' claims. By considering such words as “revelation, miracle, mystery, and prophecy” incompatible with truthful analysis, the philosophes deluded themselves, Lamourette believed, into thinking that they are able to decipher everything but religion. In fact, they found nature impenetrable and cannot even explain the true character of a drop of water. The theologian's belief in the trinity had the same basis as the philosopher's in geometry: perception, “bon sens,” and reason. Theology qualifies as philosophy since it rests on true perception and reason: “everywhere philosophy consists in heeding reason and submitting to truth.” It is “anti-philosophical” to cite as grounds for incredulity the obscurity of miracles and mysteries.¹³

Lamourette's skepticism restricts his notion of reason, and especially, science. While admiring two centuries of scientific achievement (Copernicus, Galileo, Cassini, Torricelli, Pascal, Malphighi), he insists that it remains on the surface of phenomena. The essence or final cause of nature is as impenetrable as the divine mysteries: “it is…only in the Infinite that the true principles of differences that distinguish created substances are to be found hidden away.” Man's task is to act, not to understand.¹⁴

From this skeptical restriction of science and equation of theology and philosophy, Lamourette made a fideist leap, redefining “enlightened man.”

For the enlightened man [l'homme éclairé] of good faith the collection of human knowledge carries a preconceived disposition to believe without understanding; and the reluctance to recognize as truth that which cannot be explained is an absurd ostentation which decisively proves mediocrity and ignorance.¹⁵

Lamourette then turns on its head the philosophes' claim that “Christianity is a cruel and seditious religion” and a form of “religious fanaticism.” The philosophes are the true fanatics since they aim to create “discord in the hearts of all peoples and combustion in the entire universe” by making “the philosophical spirit…as much the ruin of reason as the tomb of all virtue.”¹⁶

Lamourette strove to overcome the polarity between religion and reason: “the philosophes of our century have shown themselves to be too anti-Theologian, and our other theologians have perhaps been a bit too anti-Philosophes.” This polarity is a human invention—people mistakenly confound reason and revelation's fundamental compatibility.¹⁷ This false polarity can be avoided by finding a middle ground in which “the masters of theology would reduce less severely the rights of reason, and…the philosophes show more respect and consideration for those of revelation.” Philosophers should recognize not only that there are truths beyond reason, but that the very fact of being beyond reason attests to their divine source.¹⁸

Lamourette proposed to undo this polarization in France by recapturing the University and the Republic of Letters for belief.¹⁹ He wanted the Republic of Letters to promote belief and piety, and the Universities to allow pious writers to teach religion.²⁰

Within this skeptical structure, Lamourette made sentiment a source of belief alongside reason. Lamourette began to exhibit traces of Rousseau's sentimental understanding of religion in his second book (Thoughts on the Philosophy of Unbelief or Reflections on the Spirit and Design of the Irreligious Philosophers of our Century, 1786), where he wrote repeatedly of the “sentiment of faith” and asserted that Catholicism not only elevated the spirit but also “contents the most capacious heart.”²¹ In his third book, The Pleasures of Religion, or the Power of the Gospel to make us Happy (1788), he elevated sentiment to a source of religious knowledge equal to reason. He combined the argument of reasonable religion with that of belief from sentiment, aiming “to enlighten reason and interest feeling,” as his treatment of the Gospel demonstrates: “our intimate sense [sens intime] is the first proof of the beauty of the Gospel and the strongest conjecture of its truth.” The same holds for our perception of Jesus, which has all the persuasive proof of science.

It is not the demonstration of the internal truth of the miracles of Jesus Christ that determines my adoration and belief; but it is a proof of sentiment that draws its strength from the knowledge that I have of his character, the tissue of his actions, the infinity of local circumstances and persons, whose combination victoriously produces conviction in a healthy and reasonable mind, like all the evidence of a geometric proof. ²²

Since reason is equally a source of belief, Lamourette argued that we must disengage ourselves from the “realm of passions” and submit to “reason” which is the “realm of God”: “Therefore we see reason everywhere beginning the work of faith, and we are transported by the most natural gradations to the great wisdom of the Gospel.”²³

Whereas in his third book Lamourette had explicitly associated natural religion with rank unbelief (“the disciple of natural religion, the impious person who no longer sees God in the universe”), in his last book he linked it to reason in a manner characteristic of Catholic Enlightenment: natural religion is identical with Christianity since there is no such thing as theism without revelation.²⁴ True natural religion “pushes and inclines toward the Gospel.”²⁵

Lamourette vehemently attacked the philosophes' political philosophy, unmasking them as “a dark and malicious sect which…makes a study of corrupting men and freeing them of every sort of duty” as well as subverting all authority and undermining morality because there is no “middle route…between Christianity and atheism.”²⁶ Lamourette discerns similar “malignity” in the philosophes' view of society: by positing that men are originally solitary beings who wish to devour each other, they promote an “egoism destructive of all social virtue” that removes all sense of obligation.²⁷ The philosophes are, therefore, “as much an enemy of throne as of altar.”

Lamourette had two political-social ideals. He examined an idyllic, penurious rural parish (which he had presumably experienced first hand in his years at Outremcourt, but which was also a trope of eighteenth-century Jansenist literature), which is led by a dedicated priest and is imbued with faith.

[A] rural parish becomes, through a virtuous and sensible pastor, the most beautiful and delightful spectacle that the entire grand theater of the world can offer. There one can see religion shining in all the glory of its triumph.²⁸

In his third book, he construed this rural parish in terms of sentiment, idealizing the poor as its true repository. He then combined it with his second ideal, the property-less primitive Church. “[N]ever were the virtues of Christianity known and practiced to such an amazing and sublime extent” as in the early Church.²⁹

Lamourette sketched an alternative social philosophy.³⁰ He took issue with social contract theory, attacking its “first principle,” namely, that there is a “natural man” or “state of nature.” This is “an abstraction and a pure hypothesis,” a “geometric postulatum” that is the equivalent in the social world of being emerging out of chaos in the physical world, namely, that, “matter is originally indifferent to everything.” The underlying problem for philosophers is that they “cannot explain anything without chaos.”

He...