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| Joseph-Marie comte de Maistre |
Yesterday we
looked at the Abbé Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais’s rather one-sided
notion of the separation of Church and State: that the State must not attempt
to control the Church, but that the Church must have complete control of the
State. De Lamennais’s ideal society was
a democratic theocracy, in contrast to the theory of Joseph-Marie comte de
Maistre (1753-1821) that the ideal society was a monarchic theocracy. . . .
We noted that de
Lamennais’s ideas regarding separation of Church and State and advocacy of a
theocracy were rooted in something called his “theory of certitude.” And that is? That reason (and thus all rights) are inherent not in individual human beings, but in the generality, the collective. Individuals accept on faith what the collective has reasoned out.
Ultimately
contradicting de Lamennais’s own position on individual sovereignty, the theory
of certitude was essentially a restatement of Plato’s error that ideas exist
independently of the human mind. It also
led inevitably to the socialist idea that God grants rights to the collective (an idea),
which then grants them to actual human beings as expedient.
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| Pius XI |
This was a theory
Pius XI would condemn a century later in § 117 of Quadragesimo Anno as “utterly foreign to Christian truth.” De Lamennais’s Neo-Catholic contribution to
socialist theory was to insist on the ultramontane belief that the Catholic
Church in the person of the pope, not the State, should decide what rights
people should have.
By rejecting all
non-democratic forms of government and making the Church, a religious
authority, the final authority on civil rights, de Lamennais effectively replaced justice, the
highest civil virtue, with charity, the highest religious virtue. Confusing the natural and the supernatural,
this greatly strengthened the case for religious or Christian socialism based
on a distorted charity that tries to take the place of justice, against secular
or scientific socialism based on distorted justice that tries to take the place
of charity.
De Lamennais’s
theory of certitude also led to his development of a theory of a universal
religion as the logical end of Neo-Catholicism, which he presented in the final
two volumes of his Essai in 1823 and
1824. In de Lamennais’s universal
religion, truth is determined by consensus, not by reason or faith founded on
reason. The true religion, therefore, is
the one that can produce the greatest number of witnesses.
This, according
to de Lamennais,
is the Catholic Church, it being “the only religion which began with the world
and perpetuates itself with it.” To
oversimplify somewhat, all people — according to de Lamennais — have always believed what the Catholic
Church teaches, and the Catholic Church teaches what all people have always
believed. (We didn’t say we said we
believed him, only that he believed it, or said he did.)
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| Louis-Philippe de Bourbon |
Louis-Philippe
(1773-1850), “the Citizen King,” ascended the throne following the “July Revolution”
of 1830. Viewing the new king as no
better than the old, de Lamennais used his journal, L’Avenir, to
support his idea of a democratic theocracy as the only way to protect the
Church and secure equal religious and civil rights to all citizens.
His socialism, emphasis on
the theory of certitude, and the violence with which de Lamennais expressed himself on the illegitimacy of
non-democratic civil authority gave rise to questions about his orthodoxy. This was particularly serious in light of the
fact that Pius VIII (perhaps a trifle precipitously) had bestowed the title
“Most Christian King” on Louis-Philippe.
Despite the
popularity of the journal, de Lamennais voluntarily suspended publication of L’Avenir after little over a year. Accompanied by Montalembert and Jean Baptiste
Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861), de Lamennais went to Rome in November 1831 to
present his case in person to Pope Gregory XVI (Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari,
1765-1846, elected 1831), as Pius VIII had died in November 1830, the
same month in which de Lamennais had put l’Avenir
on hiatus.
Calling
themselves “the Pilgrims of Liberty,” they were granted an audience with the
pope almost immediately. As this was a
social call, and Gregory XVI was dealing with the effects of uprisings in the
Papal States and demands for the establishment of a republic, they were warned
not to raise any political matters, which would be dealt with in due time.
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| Cardinal Pacca |
A few days later,
Bartolomeo Cardinal Pacca (1756-1844) suggested the trio should
leave Rome. Pacca told them Gregory XVI
agreed that de Lamennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire had the right to request
the pope’s approval of their political views.
Due to the situation in the Papal States and the pope’s new policy of
dealing with existing and de facto
governments, however, Gregory XVI preferred to leave the matter unresolved.
Gregory XVI was,
in fact, under extreme pressure from both the French civil authorities and the
Gallicanists in the Church to condemn de Lamennais’s democratic principles, not
merely curb his exaggerated and imprudent application of them. As a condemnation would have been contrary to
Catholic doctrine, however, the pope could not anathematize de Lamennais’s
work.
At the same time,
Gregory XVI had never been out of Italy and spoke only Italian and Latin. He did not have an adequate grasp of European
politics and the growing trend toward recognition of popular sovereignty. He felt it would not be prudent for him to
give official approval of democracy, given the political situation as he (almost) understood it.
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| Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire |
Montalembert and
Lacordaire left Rome, but de Lamennais remained, hoping to persuade the pope
to change his mind. Gregory XVI,
however, in the belief that the November Uprising in Poland (November 29, 1830
to October 21, 1831) had been staged to prevent a Russian proposal to use
Polish troops to support the Catholic royalist cause and suppress the July Revolution
in France and the Belgian Revolution of 1830, condemned the revolutionaries.
The Russian proposal, frankly,
was a violation of the Polish constitution.
It did, in fact, trigger the rising, but it was not the cause, which was
the growing list of grievances against Czarist oppression. Nor was the proposal intended to support the
Catholic cause, except incidentally, but to expand Russian influence in Western
Europe, something of which Gregory XVI would have been aware had he had a better grasp of international affairs.
Outraged at what
he regarded as a betrayal of democracy, however unwitting, de Lamennais quit
Rome in disgust. A few days later,
August 15, 1832, Gregory XVI issued Mirari
Vos, the encyclical “On Liberalism and Religious Indifferentism,” the bulk
of which addressed liberal doctrines that de Lamennais himself condemned. These included separation of Church and
State, democratic principles that denied the ultimate sovereignty of God,
attacks on duly constituted authority (although de Lamennais disagreed that any
monarchy could be “duly constituted”), and freedom of conscience.
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| Pope Gregory XVI |
We covered the “freedom
of conscience” condemnation in a prior posting.
Now we can understand what it was that Gregory XVI was really condemning when he mentioned “separation
of Church and State.”
Again, it’s not
what it sounds like. The pope referred
to the liberal demand for complete isolation of religious society from civil
society and the banning of all religious matters from public life.
He did not refer to the essential separation of
administration, authority, and spheres of activity found in the original intent
of the U.S. Constitution. The Catholic
Church maintains that the State should not interfere in purely religious
matters, especially not sanctioning the establishment of an official government church, and the
Church should not interfere in purely civil matters. De Lamennais was correct in saying that the
State should not control the Church, but dead wrong when he insisted that the
Church must control the State — and the pope tried to correct him on it.
. . . and de
Lamennais didn’t like being corrected. . . .
#30#
