Bossuet, Loyola's order and Vincent de Paul: the day history was given a plan

On 27 September 1540 Pope Paul III promulgated the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, which recognised as a religious order the small company that Ignatius of Loyola and his companions from Paris had brought to Rome two years earlier, after their plan to go to the Holy Land had come to nothing. The bull limited the new Society of Jesus to sixty members. Julius III lifted the limit in Exposcit debitum on 21 July 1550, by which time the ceiling had become absurd; the order would within two generations run the largest network of schools the world had seen.

Eighty-seven years later to the day, on 27 September 1627, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was born at Dijon into a family of magistrates, and was sent as a boy to the Collège des Godrans, the Jesuit school in the town. He became Bishop of Meaux, tutor to the heir of Louis XIV, the most powerful preacher in Europe, and the author of the last serious attempt in the Western tradition to write the whole of history as the working-out of a divine design. Encyclopaedia Britannica prints his birthday as 25 September; the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Catholic-Hierarchy database of bishops and the French references give the 27th, and this series follows the majority.

And on 27 September 1660, in Paris, Vincent de Paul died. He was about eighty, and had for twenty-seven years been holding a conference every Tuesday at Saint-Lazare for priests who wanted to talk about the duties of their state; the Catholic Encyclopedia records that "among others Bossuet and Tronson took part". Three anniversaries, then, and a connecting thread that is not merely biographical. The order, the bishop and the saint each embodied a conviction that history is not what happens but what is intended, and that the intending is not ours. The philosophy that grew up in their schools and against their sermons spent the next two centuries deciding whether that conviction could be kept without the theology. It is still deciding.

What the Jesuits did for philosophy, and to it#

The case for putting a papal bull in a philosophy calendar rests on the schools. Ignatius had not founded a teaching order; the colleges came because the towns asked for them and the order discovered that it was good at running them. The Ratio Studiorum, the plan of studies issued in its definitive form in 1599, fixed a curriculum that was to be the same in Lisbon and Vilnius: Latin and Greek for the humanities, then a philosophy course in which Aristotle was prescribed as the standard author, then, for those going on, theology with Thomas Aquinas as chief guide. The Catholic Encyclopedia counted more than 750 collegiate and university institutions by 1706, some with over two thousand pupils. For a century and a half a large part of educated Catholic Europe, and not a few Protestants, learned to reason in a Jesuit classroom.

Descartes was one of them. He entered the college at La Flèche in Anjou around 1606, at ten, and stayed until 1614; the Discourse on the Method recalls the education with a mixture of respect and impatience that Roger Ariew has argued belongs to the persona of the Discourse rather than to the historical pupil. What the pupil took away is less ambiguous. The metaphysics he learned had been reorganised a decade before he arrived by a Jesuit, Francisco Suárez, whose Disputationes metaphysicae of 1597 this series marked two days ago and whose terminology, Heidegger said, Descartes uses "almost everywhere". The modern philosophy that presented itself as a clean break was drafted in the vocabulary of the schools it was breaking from, and the schools were Jesuit.

The order was also, from the beginning, the target. Pascal's Provincial Letters of 1656 and 1657, the wittiest polemic in the French language, were written against Jesuit casuistry, the case-by-case moral reasoning that the Ratio had made a professional skill and that Pascal, from the Jansenist side, regarded as a machine for excusing sin. Our entry on Pascal's death is here, and Antoine Arnauld, the Port-Royal logician whose condemnation by the Sorbonne provoked the Letters, has an entry of his own. The Enlightenment inherited the quarrel and won it, for a while: Clement XIV suppressed the Society in 1773 under pressure from the Bourbon courts, and Pius VII restored it in 1814. Kant, who owed the Jesuits nothing, nonetheless appended "casuistical questions" to the sections of his Metaphysics of Morals, which is the form of the thing he was supposed to have abolished.

There is a philosophical point in that history and it is not the obvious one. The Jesuit college was the first institution to treat philosophy as a standardised course, taught to thousands from a common syllabus, examined and certificated. Everything the modern university does with the subject descends from that decision, including the complaint that it turns thinking into a curriculum. The complaint was made against the Ratio in 1600 and is made against modular degrees today; our reporting on what is happening to philosophy departments suggests the alternative to a curriculum is not free thought but no course at all.

Bossuet: history with a single author#

Bossuet went from the Jesuits at Dijon to the Collège de Navarre in Paris for philosophy and theology, was ordained priest on 18 March 1652, and spent seven years at Metz as archdeacon before returning to Paris and becoming, within a decade, the preacher whom the court could not do without. His funeral orations for Henrietta Maria of England and for her daughter Henrietta of Orléans are still read as the summit of French pulpit prose. In September 1670 he was appointed preceptor to the nine-year-old Dauphin, and it was for the Dauphin, and out of the lessons, that the two works which concern philosophy were written.

The Discours sur l'histoire universelle was published in 1681, the year Bossuet was given the see of Meaux. It runs from the Creation to Charlemagne and it has a thesis, stated without embarrassment: the rise and fall of empires, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, is a sequence arranged by God for the protection of his people and the eventual establishment of his Church. Secondary causes are real, and Bossuet is a shrewd analyst of them; the Roman constitution gets pages of attention. But they are secondary. "What is coincidence to our uncertain foresight," he wrote, "is concerted design to a higher foresight, that is, to the eternal foresight which encompasses all causes and all effects in a single plan." The claim is Augustine's, from The City of God, restated for a prince who would rule by it.

The second work is the Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Écriture sainte, begun in 1679, taken up again in 1700 and published only in 1709, five years after Bossuet's death. Its ten books derive from Scripture the propositions that royal authority is sacred, paternal and absolute, and also, in the fifth book, that it is subject to reason. The distinction Bossuet insisted on, and that his critics have not always allowed him, is between absolute and arbitrary government. The king answers to no earthly court, but he answers to God and to the law of reason, and a king who rules by caprice is not the figure the book describes. The doctrine is nonetheless the divine right of kings in its most systematic French form, and it was written, as this series noted on Thursday, against an argument that had come out of the Jesuit schools. Suárez, in Defensio fidei, had held that political power is given by God to the people and by the people to the king. Bossuet, the Jesuits' pupil, held that it goes to the king direct. The order that trained him would have been within its rights to ask for the fees back.

His other quarrels were of the same shape. In 1682 he drafted the Declaration of the French clergy, the Gallican Articles asserting the independence of the crown and the national church from papal jurisdiction, a document the Catholic Encyclopedia judges to have "altogether exceeded the measure of what it was useful or necessary to say". He defended the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. And in the 1690s he pursued Fénelon, the gentlest man at court, over the mysticism of Madame Guyon, and did not stop until the Inquisition condemned Fénelon's Maximes des saints on 12 March 1699. In each case the instinct was the same: that authority, in the state as in the Church as in the soul, must be single, visible and answerable upward, and that inner experience which claims a warrant of its own is the beginning of disorder. He died in Paris on 12 April 1704.

The Enlightenment's Bossuet, and Löwith's#

Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, published in 1756, was written against the Discours. Where Bossuet had made the Jewish and Christian nations the axis of history, Voltaire began with China and India and treated the Mediterranean as a province. Where Bossuet saw a plan, Voltaire saw customs, climates and the accidents of character. The move looks like a simple substitution of human causes for divine ones, and the eighteenth century took it for one.

Karl Löwith, in Meaning in History (1949), argued that the substitution was never made. The philosophies of history that succeeded Bossuet, Voltaire's progress, Condorcet's, Hegel's cunning of reason, Marx's, kept the shape of providence and removed its author; the secular story of humanity advancing towards a goal was Christian eschatology with the theology filed off and the confidence left in. On that reading Bossuet is not the last of the old but the last honest one, the writer who still says who is doing the planning. Hans Blumenberg answered Löwith in 1966 that the modern idea of progress was a legitimate new thing, not a disguised inheritance, and the argument between them is not over. It is, in fact, the argument that our review of the political vocabulary of the authoritarian turn keeps running into: whether a politics that has given up on a plan can still say what it is for. Bossuet's answer was that it cannot, and that the alternative to the plan is not freedom but the arbitrary, which he thought worse.

That should be weighed against the record. The plan, in Bossuet's hands, licensed the persecution of the Huguenots, the harrying of a mystic and the dismissal of every reader's right to judge Scripture for himself. Kant's definition of enlightenment, as the exit from a tutelage one has brought on oneself, was written against precisely this bishop's picture of the subject, and the reader who wants Kant's own argument will find it here. It is fair to Bossuet to add that his prince, taught out of the Discours and the Politique, grew up to be a dull and obedient man who died before his father, and that the plan did not save him.

Vincent de Paul: providence as practice#

Vincent de Paul is on this page because he died on it and because Bossuet sat at his table. Born to a peasant family at Pouy in Gascony around 1580, the year is disputed, he founded the Congregation of the Mission in the 1620s and, with Louise de Marillac, the Daughters of Charity; the Tuesday conferences at Saint-Lazare began in 1633. The point of the coincidence is a contrast. Vincent's providence was not a theory of empires but a practice of soup, of foundlings taken in and galley slaves visited, and he had a method that was the reverse of Bossuet's. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that when he founded his two congregations "he refrained from giving them fixed constitutions beforehand; it was only after tentatives, trials, and long experience that he resolved in the last years of his life to give them definitive rules". The plan, on that view, is discovered by doing the next obvious thing for the next person in front of one, and written down last. Bossuet learned to preach in that room and then went to court. It is not the least of the day's ironies that the man who wrote the design of history into a book for a king had been trained by a man who thought the design was disclosed one pauper at a time. Bossuet, to his credit, supported Vincent's canonisation, which came in 1737.

Also on the day#

The Philosophicum Lech closes today in the Vorarlberg after a week under the title "Betreutes Denken", supervised thinking, which the Jesuits would have regarded as a compliment; the programme and the Tractatus prize presented on Friday are in our conference diary. Yesterday's entry, on Heidegger, Benjamin, Eliot and Reichenbach, follows the entry for 24 September in the archive.