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Berruyer S Bible Public Opinion and The Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France 1st Edition Daniel J. Watkins
Berruyer S Bible Public Opinion and The Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France 1st Edition Daniel J. Watkins
Berruyer S Bible Public Opinion and The Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France 1st Edition Daniel J. Watkins
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Berruyer’s Bible
McGILL-QUEEN’S STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION
Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman
Foundation of Toronto.
1 Small Differences
Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922
An International Perspective
Donald Harman Akenson
2 Two Worlds
The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario
William Westfall
3 An Evangelical Mind
Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada,
1839–1918
Marguerite Van Die
4 The Dévotes
Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France
Elizabeth Rapley
5 The Evangelical Century
College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to
the Great Depression
Michael Gauvreau
6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods
James M. Stayer
7 A World Mission
Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International
Order, 1918–1939
Robert Wright
8 Serving the Present Age
Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in
Canada
Phyllis D. Airhart
9 A Sensitive Independence
Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the
Orient, 1881–1925
Rosemary R. Gagan
10 God’s Peoples
Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster
Donald Harman Akenson
11 Creed and Culture
The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society,
1750–1930
Edited by Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz
12 Piety and Nationalism
Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic
Community in Toronto, 1850–1895
Brian P. Clarke
13 Amazing Grace
Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the
United States
Edited by George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll
14 Children of Peace
W. John McIntyre
15 A Solitary Pillar
Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution
Joan Marshall
16 Padres in No Man’s Land
Canadian Chaplains and the Great War
Duff Crerar
17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America
A Critical Analysis
P. Travis Kroeker
18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land
Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981
Robert K. Burkinshaw
19 Through Sunshine and Shadow
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and
Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930
Sharon Cook
20 Church, College, and Clergy
A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto,
1844–1994
Brian J. Fraser
21 The Lord’s Dominion
The History of Canadian Methodism
Neil Semple
22 A Full-Orbed Christianity
The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–
1940
Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau
23 Evangelism and Apostasy
The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico
Kurt Bowen
24 The Chignecto Covenanters
A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New
Brunswick and Nova Scotia, 1827–1905
Eldon Hay
25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925
Johanne Selles
26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy
William Lamont
Daniel J. Watkins
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-
consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Figures
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth … And God
said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.1
God was from all eternity; the world wasn’t: because the world
could not come to be by itself nor could it be eternal, it had to have
been created in time and drawn out of nothingness … At about
noon, God says, “Let there be light,” and there was light. This wasn’t
yet the light coming out of the center of the sun, which soon would
enlighten the world by its equally rapid and regular course. This
was the body of lights … destined to form eventually the sun and all
the other [stars].2
The Enlightenment
To suggest that the Jesuit Berruyer and his paraphrase of the Bible
had something to do with the Enlightenment is to wade into the
turbulent waters of scholarly debate over the nature of the
Enlightenment itself. While the singular intention of my book is not
to add yet another voice to the conversation on how to define the
Enlightenment, the story of Berruyer’s Histoire provides some insight
into the ways that religious actors attempted to participate in
Enlightenment debates and the effects that this participation had on
the Catholic Church. The following study contributes to the larger
revisionist movement that has reimagined the Enlightenment as far
more open to religious ideas and thinkers than previously
recognized. It reveals that even members of the French Society of
Jesus – despite their reputation among many historians as the chief
enemies of the philosophes – found the new intellectual sensibilities
of the eighteenth century attractive and integrated them into their
articulations of the Catholic faith. The tale of Berruyer’s Histoire
shows that Jesuit efforts to accommodate the philosophical ideas of
the Enlightenment captivated many and impacted the development
of the church over the long eighteenth century.28
Since the early decades of the twentieth century, historians have
traditionally associated the Enlightenment with the collective
departure of mostly Western societies away from the religious and
toward the secular. Ernst Cassirer located the core of the
Enlightenment in the advent of a modern philosophy that broke
away from the worldviews of medieval theologians and replaced
them with the study of the “fundamental form of reality” through
the scientific interrogation of nature.29 Tying together the work of
philosophes throughout the Atlantic world, Peter Gay posited that
the Enlightenment was an intellectual program that promoted, most
importantly, “secularism.”30 This vision of the Enlightenment
continues to undergird opinions today. “It is undeniably true,”
Anthony Pagden has recently claimed, “that the Enlightenment was
profoundly anti-religious.”31 From the vantage point of Cassirer,
Gay, and others, the Enlightenment was a unified intellectual
movement whose proponents, the philosophes, advocated for a
break from religious worldviews, the promotion of reason over
tradition, and an empirical mindset that privileged the natural over
the supernatural.
While historians like Cassirer and Gay argued for the inherent
secularity of the Enlightenment, a counter-current of scholars drew
attention to the ways that religious and Enlightenment mentalities
were not so far apart. Already in the 1930s, Carl Becker had
provocatively claimed that “the philosophes were nearer the Middle
Ages [and were] less emancipated from the preconceptions of
medieval Christian thought than they quite realized.”32 Becker’s
student, Robert Palmer, expanded this argument by showing that
the writings of Catholic apologists had much in common with the
writings of many of the very same philosophes that Cassirer and
others held as the harbingers of European secularism.33 Over the
past four decades, historians have continued to show how the
philosophes were more receptive to religious ideas and mentalities
than previously imagined. The admission that religious ideas played
a role in shaping the Enlightenment has contributed to the
fragmentation of what was once a unified, singular Enlightenment
into many, various “enlightenments” each with its own distinct
ideological characteristics. By drawing attention to these various
styles of Enlightenment, historians have emphasized the place that
religious ideas held in the intellectual culture of the eighteenth
century.34
Many eighteenth-century Catholics also found faith and reason
compatible. In his schema of the “Religious Enlightenment” – a
trans-national and trans-confessional movement in which people of
faith sought both the affirmation of traditional theological doctrines
and the pursuit of “reasonableness,” toleration, and an engagement
with the public sphere – David Sorkin included, for example, the
French Catholic priest Adrien Lamourette who promoted, in Sorkin’s
words, “a theology that combined reasonable religion and
Rousseauist sentimentalism on the basis of a moderate fideist
skepticism.”35 Jeffrey Burson, Ulrich Lehner, and others have found
similarly inclined Catholics all over Europe from Spain to Poland.36
In a recent synthesis, Lehner identified “Catholic Enlighteners” as
philosophers, theologians, and authors that were committed to using
“the newest achievements of philosophy and science to defend the
essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining them in a
new language.”37 Like the philosophes, Enlightenment Catholics,
according to Lehner, sought to reform both church and state. Thanks
in large part to this recent scholarship, the “Catholic Enlightenment”
has become entrenched as one of the many distinct varieties of the
Enlightenment throughout the eighteenth-century globe.38
In the same way that historians have broken the Enlightenment
into many geographical and ideological styles, however, recent work
on the Catholic Enlightenment has uncovered variations in the ways
that eighteenth-century Catholics sought to integrate new
philosophical ideas into their understandings of the Catholic faith.
In German and Italian-speaking lands, Enlightenment Catholics
tended to be connected to Jansenism, a neo-Augustinian theological
reform movement that arose in the seventeenth century.39 In other
parts of Catholic Europe, the Catholic Enlightenment looked
different. In France, those Catholics who seemed to have been most
open to the philosophes’ perspectives on the freedom of the
individual, the possibility of progress, and the value of empirical
and scientific investigation were, in fact, the Jansenists’ principal
rivals, the Jesuits.40 Because of the diversity within the Catholic
Enlightenment, some have preferred to use more specific
terminology. Dale Van Kley has offered up the notion of “Reform
Catholicism” to identify Catholics whose chief concerns were to use
Enlightenment ideas to reform the church, mainly along Jansenist or
Gallican lines. Reform Catholicism, in Van Kley’s description, stood
apart from Jesuit styles of Catholic Enlightenment and worked
toward different ends.41 In his synthesis of the Catholic
Enlightenment, Lehner has affirmed the diversity of approaches and
perspectives of those who attempted to reconcile Catholic faith with
Enlightenment reason. For Lehner, the Catholic Enlightenment was
essentially “an eclectic enterprise” even if certain features –
including a commitment to writing in the vernacular and pursuing
reform and/or progress – were shared.42
Through an investigation of Isaac-Joseph Berruyer and his
Histoire du peuple de Dieu, I make four important contributions to the
scholarship on Enlightenment Catholicism. First, I introduce an
important but overlooked figure into the conversation about the
Catholic Enlightenment. Few studies of the Catholic Enlightenment
have paid much attention to Berruyer.43 What follows is the first
book-length study of Berruyer in English. For a Catholic author so
conspicuously linked by contemporaries to the new sensibilities of
the eighteenth century, Berruyer is long overdue for a thorough
investigation that connects him to the intellectual world in which he
lived.44 In what follows, I bring his story to life and explain why it is
important for understanding the Catholic Enlightenment and its
impact on the church in France.
Second, I adopt the methodological strategies of the history of
the book to reveal the ways that Enlightenment Catholicism
permeated the public sphere. Historians of the book have long
argued that the only way to study the impact of ideas on past
societies is to study the entire “communications circuit,” from the
authors themselves to publishers, distributers, and consumers.45 In
my analysis of Berruyer and his Bible, I consider the Histoire not
simply as a receptacle of ideas but as a material object used and
abused by a wide range of figures for their own political, economic,
and theological purposes. I offer a unique look at the publishers that
were responsible for producing Catholic Enlightenment texts, the
mechanisms of privilege and censorship through which these texts
proceeded, the political authorities charged with monitoring these
texts, and even the communities of readers that bought and
circulated them. To do so, I had to consult new types of sources.
Through analyses of letters, administrative records, court
documents, library and bookseller catalogues, and many other
archival materials, I shed light on the many eighteenth-century
figures that played a role in making the Histoire what it was. In
much the same way as Jeffrey Burson, who has recently argued for
the “entangled” nature of epistemological systems in the writings of
many eighteenth-century philosophers, I use the Histoire’s
communication circuit to reveal that Enlightenment reading habits
were entangled and overlapping.46 Religious readers were also
readers of works of the Enlightenment, and sometimes their tastes
demanded books that combined the two.47 My study of the Histoire
offers a unique look at the “reception” side of the Catholic
Enlightenment’s communication circuit.
Third, in focusing on how the Histoire reached the public sphere,
I explore the political impact that Enlightenment Catholicism had on
the French Catholic Church. The tumultuous story of the Histoire
provides a look at the ways that the church attempted to navigate
the domain of public opinion in a moment when a notion of the
“public” was rapidly expanding. Eighteenth-century Europe saw a
dramatic rise in literacy, the establishment of newspapers, and the
growth of institutions for debate such as coffee houses, salons, and
Masonic lodges. Together these innovations drew an increasing
number of people into shared conversations about politics and
culture.48 The conflict over the Histoire reveals how Jesuit
intellectual activity fanned the flames of public debate. The
Histoire’s proponents and critics attempted to shape public opinion
as a way of gaining support for their intellectual and political
agendas. Eventually their competition over public opinion
influenced such significant political events as the suppression of the
Jesuits and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after the
French Revolution.
Finally, in tracing the Histoire into the nineteenth century, I
reveal how Enlightenment Catholicism shaped the religious culture
of the Catholic Church in the decades following the French
Revolution. Most studies of the Catholic Enlightenment stop short of
the Revolution, arguing that Catholic experiments with
Enlightenment philosophy ceased after the Enlightenment entered a
more radical phase in the second half of the century. My study of
Berruyer’s Histoire highlights how despite the decline in innovative
intellectual activity, the works of the Catholic Enlightenment
remained valuable to post-revolutionary Catholics looking for ways
to articulate and substantiate their faith in a new era. Ultramontane
Catholics in the nineteenth century appropriated elements of
Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism and employed them in new
intellectual and political directions. Berruyer’s story illustrates how,
despite the incomparably disruptive events of the French
Revolution, certain continuities remained in the religious cultures of
the pre- and post-revolutionary worlds.
Organization
My argument proceeds chronologically beginning with an overview
of the scholarly environment that Berruyer entered when he first
became a scriptor. Chapter 1 focuses on the Jesuits in France and
explains why they were interested in adopting new epistemologies
and engaging in the burgeoning public sphere at the turn of the
eighteenth century. I argue that the Jesuits were inclined to
participate in Enlightenment debates because of their identities as
missionary-scholars, the competition they had with their chief
ecclesiastical rivals, the Jansenists, in France, and the growing fear
of the spread of “unbelief.” Chapter 1 concludes with an
introduction to the Histoire and the ways in which Berruyer himself
described his Bible as part of this larger Jesuit effort to
accommodate the new sensibilities of the eighteenth century. In
explaining the reasons for Jesuit engagement with the
Enlightenment, the opening chapter provides the larger political and
social context for rest of the book.
Chapter 2 jumps to the 1720s, ’30s, and ’40s and looks at the
production and publication of the first section of the Histoire. I argue
that even before the project was complete, the Histoire produced
conflict in the church. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the
conflict was situated mainly within the Society of Jesus itself. Many
Jesuits worried that the Histoire represented rampant and reckless
theological “innovation” and a willingness to shirk traditional
intellectual authorities to advance opinions that were entirely
“new.” Berruyer’s connections with a previously controversial Jesuit
author, Jean Hardouin, made many within the Society of Jesus
worry that the writings of their own scriptores were weakening the
theological bulwarks of the church. Their concerns eventually made
their way into the public sphere. While many readers throughout
France enthusiastically embraced the Histoire, a debate about
whether it was indeed fulfilling its apologetic purpose emerged and
provided ammunition for the Jesuits’ detractors to use the Histoire
for their own polemical purposes.
In chapter 3, the story moves to the 1750s, the Enlightenment’s
“high noon.”49 The 1750s saw the Histoire both reach new heights in
notoriety and unleash unprecedented levels of resistance. In 1753,
Berruyer released the second part of his Histoire, inarguably the
most controversial section of the work. Applying his enlightened
perspectives to the task of interpreting the life and person of Jesus,
Berruyer raised the theological stakes of his project and sparked an
intense debate, referred to by contemporaries as the “Berruyer
Affair.” The debate featured many members of the French Jansenist
community who saw in Berruyer a perfect target for unreserved
criticism. By the 1750s, French Jansenists were already well-
acquainted with the power of public opinion and public controversy
to fuel their cause. The Histoire allowed Jansenists the opportunity
to voice their concerns about the “dangers” of Berruyer’s
Enlightenment Catholicism and smear the reputation of the Jesuits
before the public eye. Unwilling to endure these attacks silently,
Berruyer and his colleagues penned their own responses and thus
turned the Berruyer Affair into one of the most notable literary
causes célèbres of the mid-century. The affair became one of the first
of what would be a series of literary scandals all involving works of
the Catholic Enlightenment that drove a wedge between those who
supported efforts to accommodate Catholic theology with
Enlightenment philosophy and those who did not.50 The Jansenist-
inspired Berruyer Affair placed the Histoire and its style of
Enlightenment Catholicism before the public tribunal and helped
make the debate over the Catholic Enlightenment a fight for control
over public opinion.
Chapter 4 details the role that church and state authorities
played in defining the legacy of the Histoire in the 1750s. Because
the Berruyer Affair became so contentious and because the French
monarchy found any sort of public controversy to be fundamentally
destabilizing, agents of the Direction de la librairie, the royal
bureaucracy assigned with managing the world of print, quickly
moved to censor the Histoire and shut down public discussion. Royal
agents seized copies of the Histoire from booksellers and religious
establishments. Soon the courts got involved and condemned the
Histoire to be burned. Church officials added their own
denunciations. By the end of the 1750s, the highest authorities in
both the Catholic Church and the French state had condemned the
book and prohibited people from reading it. Censorship politicized
the Histoire, associating its style of Enlightenment Catholicism with
social chaos and political subversion.
Jansenists recognized the value of this politicization and utilized
it for their own purposes in the following decade. Chapter 5 shows
how Jansenists used the Histoire to build up a case against the
Jesuits as a whole and persuade the parlements to suppress the
society in France. Jansenists wielded the Histoire as a political
weapon. They held the society responsible for the production and
distribution of Berruyer’s condemned works and used the Histoire to
accuse the Jesuits of weakening Catholic morality and destabilizing
political society. They displayed the political power of public
opinion by using a literary affair to drive out one of the wealthiest
and most entrenched religious organizations in the entire kingdom.
The suppression provides the climax of the Histoire’s story, but it
was not the story’s end. Chapter 6 advances the narrative to the
early nineteenth century and shows how Berruyer’s Histoire,
condemned by all and sundry at the time of the suppression of the
Jesuits, made a comeback in large part because of the French
Revolution. Searching for tools to “re-Christianize” a French society
that they believed had fallen into moral turpitude during the
revolution, post-revolutionary Catholics turned to religious books
that had once commanded significant attention. Catholic publishers
in Paris and other French cities, most especially the eastern city of
Besançon, identified Berruyer’s Histoire as a potentially useful book
for this endeavour and began printing new editions initially in the
form of small, cheap pamphlets designed to reach working-class
families and eventually in full editions aimed at a new generation of
seminarians. Those most responsible for the reproduction of the
Histoire were ultramontane Catholics who saw in the Histoire not
only a book that had once commanded the attention of a host of
readers but also a book that had the potential to communicate the
particular theological and political message that they felt was most
important for post-revolutionary Catholics. In the Jesuit Berruyer,
they identified a sympathy for the ultramontanist argument for
papal supremacy in the church. They also appreciated in the Histoire
the value of sentimentalism and the way that it placed questions of
religious truth on the foundation of human emotions. When the
Histoire began to appear in the public marketplace, however, old
tensions reemerged, and the battles that had dominated debates
about Berruyer’s Enlightenment Catholicism a half-century before
erupted anew. Yet again, the Histoire fomented political divisions in
a church that had already suffered the sting of schism during the
turbulent years of the Revolution.
Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu concisely demonstrates the
myriad ways that experiments in Enlightenment Catholicism
transformed the French Catholic Church in the eighteenth century
and beyond. It is only one story. There are undoubtedly many more
that detail different aspects of the Catholic Enlightenment in France.
But by focusing on one story and one book, we can trace change
over a long period of time. Berruyer’s Histoire connects the religious
and political worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It
reveals how the Catholic Church in France experienced the rise of
the public sphere and the many intellectual and cultural
transformations that the Enlightenment ushered in throughout
Europe. While a story about how the Enlightenment affected the
Catholic Church, Berruyer’s Bible is also a tale of how many members
of the church adapted to a world where conflicts became magnified
under the public eye. It is a case study in the ways that French
Catholics negotiated “modernity” and the impact of their decisions
sometimes to embrace and sometimes to reject intellectual and
cultural norms for the greater purpose of preserving and protecting
the faith. It is a story of how Catholics experienced the beginnings
of the modern world and explored new possibilities for relating to it.
1
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”1
“Let us make man in our image and in our likeness,” says the Lord.
It’s as if he had said: The preparations have been made: It’s time to
draw out from nothing that for which we have undertaken
everything over the past six days, in creation and the material
world. Let us form man on the earth so that he will take our place
… Let’s give him a soul that is spiritual, reasonable, immortal,
blessed with supernatural gifts, sanctifying habits, instilled with
divine virtues. Let us give him, for his actions and deliberations, a
liberty which will render him glorious to us when, with our help
which he will never lack, he chooses to conform his resolutions to
our orders.2