Content dans cet abîme Mais je suis la victime But theologians will tell us it is right that the voice of Bossuet should break in on this solemn silence, proclaiming that the Maxims and all that appertained to it was no victim of truth, but fell itself under the very condemnation hurled by its author against Molinos, of destroying Christianity under pretence of making it more pure. Like many before him, Fénelon would not recognize that Christian Mysticism is no single tendency, but a nice adjustment of two opposite forces, where the Particular must qualify the General and the centripetal hold its contrary in equipoise; as, in its first principle, belief in a limited Personal God must check the doctrine of Absolute Godhead from expansion into a Pantheistic Alles ist Gott und Gott ist Alles, so, in its practice, Contemplation of the far-off abstract Essence of Divinity must be balanced by the remembrance of an ever-present Crucified Saviour, God made Man. Forgetfulness of this last condition was the great blot on Fénelon's system, nor could the stain be washed away by many half-hearted correctives; it was of little use to style neglect of Christ's Humanity' a damnable error,' 2 when traces of that very error were discoverable in the Maxims, or to bid the Disinterested still view God as a Person, yet love Him chiefly as an abstraction of the Schools, as the Idea of His own Goodness, separated from Himself. "Christ's Church," said one of Fénelon's opponents, " is not a school of metaphysics," and more than once the author of the Maxims stood in sore need of this reminder. For he had broken away from the tradition of the Latin 1 Wks., vi. p. 660. 2 Maxims, p. 197. Mystics to follow Clement of Alexandria,1 the most metaphysical of all the Fathers, and, though at heart a Christian, a Greek philosopher in tongue, nor ever so more openly than in his teaching of Disinterestedness, the doctrine for which Fénelon chiefly valued his authority. Their ends in view, indeed, were not the same; Fénelon's was a purely spiritual, Clement's an also philosophic Detachment, Fénelon's Saint a puppet in the hands of God, Clement's Gnostic himself already, 'a god that walked abroad in flesh,' a sage, half Christian half Platonic; his fulness of perfection was a state of holy apathy,' rough-hewn, it may be, by the precepts of the Gospel but shaped in the Stoic mould of Epictetus.2 But Fenelon, with his master's language, adopted not a little of his master's spirit. Both dreamed the same ideas of sunny passionless serenity, unaided by feeling, untainted by desire, that touched earth lightly with one foot; both made its mainspring Love, yet a love far different from the tumultuous cravings of St Bernard, an ordered calm affection of the Reason, worthy of men to whom ideas stood nearer than realities. 'In St Clement,' said Bossuet, 'we should look in vain for tender communings of the soul with. God, for the delights of Spiritual Marriage, the chaste embraces of the Song of Songs. For Clement's Platonism raised him high above the gross emotions of a carnal world : "he could not bear that the rose of Sharon should blossom on this common soil, and he paid the price of his transcendental theology in that his love was not for Jesus but for the Logos, the Ideal." 4 And Clement's disciple also put an Idea in place of a 1 Clement (fl. circa A.D. 150-213) was treated as a Saint by Fénelon and Bossuet, though his name had been omitted from the Roman Calendar by Clement VIII. See Bigg, Christian Platonists, p. 272. 2 Dr Harnack (Dogmengesch, i. p. 557) declines to fix the respective limits of Clement's Christianity and Greek philosophy. The interaction on his doctrine of Gnosis (or Perfection) of Christianity, Stoicism and Platonism is well brought out in Eugène de Faye's Clement d'Alexandrie, pp. 256 and ff. Wks., xiv. p. 395. Bigg, Christian Platonists, p. 93. Being, and also paid the price, in that, by his doctrine of Disinterestedness, he choked with the sand of over-subtle distinction the simplest spring of Christian motive, and threw the chill reproach of selfishness over the most natural of Christian aspirations. For, when love is of a Person, selfishness and unselfishness have no meaning; the poet who wrote that 'Love seeketh not itself to please' added immediately 'Love seeketh only self to please,' and the one maxim is as true as the other; in heavenly as in earthly love there is no answer to the eternal dualism save that of the wisest of theologians: 'Duplex est dilectio, une concupiscentiæ, alia amicitiæ, utraque diliges Dominum Deum tuum.'1 'He Nor does the true lover wish a nearer solution. loves,' says St Bernard, and asks not how or why. He loves because the Beloved is worthy of his love; he loves that he may love the more, seeking no reward yet earning, it, for his Reward is the Beloved Himself." 1 St Thomas Aquinas quoted Deharbe, p. 191. |