CHAPTER XI. NO MORE SYSTEMS; AN EMBLEM. THE IMMACULATE WOMAN. THE SACRED HEART. DOUBLE MEANING OF SACRED MARIE ALACOQUE. CHIMERICAL POLICY OF THE JE OF PORT ROYAL, 1709.-THEOLOGY ANNIHILATED IN THE EIGHMATERIALITY OF THE SACRED TEENTH CENTURY. HEART.JESUITICAL ART. QUIETISM, So accused of being obscure, was but too evident. It formed into a system, and established frankly, as supreme perfection, that state of immobility and impotency which the soul reaches at last, when it surrenders its activity. Was it not simplicity itself to prescribe in set terms this lethargic doctrine, and give out noisily a theory of sleep? "Do not speak so loud, if you want to make people doze." This is what the theologians, men of business, instinctively perceived; they cared little for theology, and only wanted results. We must do the Jesuits the justice to confess that they were disinterested enough in specu lative opinions. We have seen how, since Pascal, they themselves wrote against their own casuistry. Since then they had tried Quietism: at one time they let Fenelon believe they would support him. But as soon as Louis XIV. had declared himself, "they ducked like divers *," preached against their friend, and discovered forty errors in the Maxims of Saints. They had never well succeeded as theologians. Silence suited them better than all their systems. They had got it imposed by the pope upon the Dominicans, in the very beginning of the century, and afterwards upon the Jansenists. Since then, their affairs went on better. It was precisely at the time they ceased writing, that they obtained from the sick king the power of disposing of benefices (1687), and thus, to the great surprise of the Gallicans, who had thought them conquered, they became the kings of the clergy of France. Now, no more ideas, no more systems; they had grown tired of them. And the public also was getting tired of them. Besides, there is, we must confess, in the long lives of men, states, and religions, there is, I say, a time, when, having run from project to project, and from dream to dream, every idea is hated. In these profoundly material moments, every * Bossuet, letter dated March 31. 1697. Works (ed. 1836), vol. xii. p. 85. thing is rejected that is not relative. Do people then become positive? No. But they do not return any more to the poetical symbols which in their youth they had adored. The old doter, in his second childhood, makes for himself some idol, some palpable, tangible god, and the grosser it is, the better he succeeds. This explains the prodigious success with which the Jesuits in this age of lassitude spread, and caused to be accepted, a new object of worship, both very carnal and very material, the heart of Jesus, either shown through the wound in his partly opened breast, or as plucked out and bloody. Nearly the same thing had happened in the decrepitude of paganism. Religion had taken refuge in the sacrifice of bulls, the sanguinary Mithraic expiation -the worship of blood. At the grand festivals of the sacred heart which the Jesuits gave in the last century, in the Coliseum of Rome, they struck a medal with this motto, worthy of the solemnity, "He gave himself to the people to eat, in the amphitheatre of Titus *:"-instead of a system, it was an emblem, a dumb sign. What triumph for the friends of obscurity and equivocation! no equivocation of language can equal a material object, which may be interpreted in a thousand ways, for rendering ideas undecided and * In 1771. On Sacred Hearts (by Tabaraud), p. 82. confused. The old Christian symbols, both those which are explained, and those which are translated, present to the mind, at first sight, too distinct a meaning. They are austere symbols of death and mortification. The new one was far more obscure. This emblem, bloody it is true, but carnal and impassioned, speaks much less of death than of life. The heart palpitates, the blood streams, and yet it is a living man, who, showing his wound with his own hand, beckons to you to come and fathom his halfopened breast. The heart!—that word has always been powerful; the heart, being the organ of the affections, expresses them in its own manner, swollen and heaving with sighs. The life of the heart, strong and confused, comprehends and mingles every kind of love. Such a sentence is wonderfully adapted to language which is meant to have a double meaning. Women: And who will understand it best?. with them the life of the heart is every thing. This organ, being the passage of the blood, and strongly influenced by the revolutions of the blood, is not less predominant in woman than her very sex. The heart has been, now nearly two hundred years, the grand basis of modern devotion; as sex, or a strange question that related to it, had, for two hundred before, occupied the minds of the middle ages. Strange! in that spiritual period, a long discussion, both public and solemn, took place throughout Europe, both in the schools and in the churches, upon an anatomical subject, of which one would not dare to speak in our days, except in the school of medicine! What was this subject? Conception.* Only imagine all these monks, people sworn to celibacy, both Dominicans and Franciscans, boldly attacking the question, teaching it to all, preaching anatomy to children and little girls, filling their minds with their sex, and its most secret mystery. The heart, a more noble organ, had the advantage of furnishing a number of dubious though decent expressions, a whole language of equivocal tenderness which did not cause a blush, and facilitated the intrigue of devout gallantry. In the very beginning of the seventeenth century, the directors and confessors find a very convenient text in the sacred heart. But women take it quite differently, and in a serious sense: they grow warm and impassioned, and have visions. The Virgin appears to a country girl of Normandy, and orders her to adore the heart of Mary.† The Visitandines called *See among other books that by Gravois, De ortu et progressu cultûs Immaculati conceptûs, 1764, in 4to. † Eudes, the brother of Mazerai, the founder of the Eudists, wrote the life of this peasant, and was the real founder of the new worship. The Jesuits revived the thing, and profited by it. (See Tabaraud, p. 111.) I have sought in vain for the manuscript of Eudes in all their libraries. Have they made away with it? |