LamennaisЛаменэ

Great minds and ardent hearts, those people who leave a deep mark behind them, show in their lives with particular vividness the very stages of development that all ordinary people pass through, to a greater or lesser degree.

These stages are: 1) A child’s instilled faith, complete submission to authority, calm and confident communion with all those around. 2) Going deeper into the essence of this faith, instilled and accepted on trust, unspoken doubts of its truth, and a particular zeal in affirming and spreading it. Approval and praise from those around. 3) An attempt to cleanse the doctrine accepted on faith of everything false, superfluous, and superstitious, to improve it, and to found life on it; a break with those who sympathized before, their ill will, and, finally, 4) complete liberation from the teaching accepted on trust, acknowledgment only of what agrees with reason and conscience, consciousness of one’s solitude among people and of one’s unity with God, the lofty and strong love of the few close to one, and the fear and hatred of the majority, and — the end.

All people, whether they want to or not, pass more or less consciously through these stages. First 1) complete trust, then 2) doubts, at times barely noticeable, but doubts all the same, then 3) attempts, at times the feeblest, but attempts all the same, to affirm somehow their own understanding of life, and, finally, 4) standing face to face with God, full knowledge of the truth, solitude, and — the end.

All people pass through these states, but in Lamennais they showed themselves with particular strength and fruitfulness.

Félicité Lamennais was born in Brittany in 1782. In 1816 he was ordained a priest. Though Lamennais had always been religious, from childhood on, he did not become a priest by his own wish alone. Lamennais’s letters show that he became a priest only because those close to him insisted on it. His family, seeing his religiousness, wanted to use it for the benefit of the church. And indeed, having become a priest, Lamennais devoted all his strength to the service of his Catholic church, of whose truth he had no doubt. Lamennais saw the decline of faith in society and among the people and tried to raise it up, proving its truth chiefly by the fact that Catholicism is the most widespread religion, acknowledged by the majority of humanity. In his opinion at that time, truth is not grasped by the individual; truth is grasped only by people in their totality. The greatest number acknowledge Catholicism, and therefore the truth of Catholicism is beyond doubt. And since Catholicism is the highest truth, the state too must submit to this truth. The state cannot be without religion, religion cannot be without the church, the church — without the pope.

Such was Lamennais’s conviction then. In this spirit he wrote one of his first works, “An Essay on Indifference in Matters of Faith.” This was the first phase of Lamennais’s state of soul — faith without doubts. Since Lamennais placed his hopes in the power of the state as the defender of the Catholic religion, these thoughts brought him close to the extreme defenders of monarchical power, and he began to write for the newspaper “Le Conservateur.” In this paper he held an exceptional position, and while his fellow contributors wrote in defense of the monarchy and for its benefit, Lamennais always and above all had religion in view; monarchical power interested him only to the extent that it could further the triumph of Catholicism. But Lamennais soon saw that the interests of power and of religion are not only not the same, but for the most part opposed; so much so that it is at times even to the advantage of power to oppress religion. Seeing this, Lamennais changed his view and, moving to another paper, began to demand of power, no longer help for religion and an alliance with it, but complete freedom and noninterference in the affairs of religion. Lamennais could not stop even at this, and soon went further still and began to demand the separation of church and state, and, condemning the power of government, unintentionally took the side of the revolutionaries, justifying the revolution of 1830. This was the second phase of Lamennais’s state of soul.

During the revolution of ’30 Lamennais, in collaboration with Montalembert and Lacordaire, began to publish the journal “The Future,” which preached: 1) the separation of church and state, 2) guarantees for the individual, 3) the abolition of the Chamber of Peers and of the extremes of centralization, 4) the abolition of the compulsory property qualification and the establishment of universal suffrage. In this paper he expressed the thought that, just as the power of the state must not interfere in the affairs of the church, so the power of the church must not take part in the affairs of the state, and that therefore the pope must give up his temporal power, and the clergy their salaries from the state. Such thoughts could not find sympathy in Rome. Foreseeing this, Lamennais went there, hoping to convince the papal power of the necessity of such concessions for the sake of keeping the peoples under the power of the church. But in Rome Lamennais was not received by the pope, and no answer was given to his proposal. Already deeply disappointed in his hope of renewing Catholicism, Lamennais returned to Paris and for some time longer went on publishing his journal, in which he expressed the thought that the forms of Catholicism must be changed so that it could go on ruling over the peoples. This was the third phase.

In 1832 a papal encyclical appeared, condemning all the thoughts Lamennais had expressed, and, however hard it was for Lamennais to give up everything he had believed in and served, he acknowledged the incurability, the incorrigibility, of Catholicism. From that time he broke off all relations with Rome and wrote his famous work “Words of a Believer.” In this work, in the form of biblical psalms and Gospel parables, Lamennais attacks the existing economic and political order, which stands in contradiction to the demands of religion. This book was at once condemned by the pope. And then Lamennais separated from the church altogether and devoted the last years of his life to the service of the people; this was the fourth and last phase.

Lamennais spent the last years of his life far from political activity, almost in seclusion and poverty, devoting himself exclusively to literary work. Among other things, he finished the sketch of a “philosophy” and wrote one of the best commentaries on the four Gospels.

The fundamental thought of Lamennais, which he expressed in all his books, articles, and speeches (when he was a deputy in parliament), is that the people must themselves be the deciders of their destinies and the builders of their life. As in his defense of the Catholic church, he is guided by the same principle: that the bearer of truth and of moral perfection can be not the individual, but people in their totality — the crowd, the people, and at its limit the human race. While granting full power to the people, Lamennais nevertheless never ceased to argue that no external reforms and changes in the structure of the state can improve the condition of the people if the people do not constantly strive to perfect themselves morally. “Desire only what is just,” he told the people. “Justice will always triumph. Respect the right even of those who trample on your right. Let the safety of all, without exception, be sacred to you. Duty is binding on all and always. If you once violate duty, where will you stop? Disorder is not remedied by disorder. What do your enemies accuse you of? Of wanting to replace their dominion with yours, of wanting to abuse power as they abuse it — of harboring thoughts of revenge, tyrannical intentions. Hence the vague fear of you, which your enemies cleverly use to prolong your slavery.”

“Nothing is possible in the social sphere without spiritual work in the depths of society,” he said.

Lamennais always took a negative view of socialist and communist systems. In his opinion, these teachings do not take into account the laws of human nature, replacing the natural course of life with the violence of power. He disapproved of these teachings chiefly because they all had only material ends in view and did not acknowledge the necessity of religion. In every reconstruction of society he considered necessary not material but spiritual ends, attained by the victory of reason and duty over the passions.

In the early fifties Lamennais fell ill and, feeling that his illness was fatal, called his friend Barbet and appointed him to take charge of his house during his lifetime, while he was ill, and, by his will, after his death. Besides this, he left a written statement that he wished to be buried among the poor and as one of the poor; he asked that no monument be placed on his grave; his body was to be carried straight to the cemetery and not brought into a church. Despite all the clergy’s attempts to bring him back to the church, Lamennais, as before, answered all attempts of this kind with a meek but firm refusal to receive a priest. He died calmly and steadfastly, with the same living faith in God with which he had lived all through his conscious life. His last words were: “I feel that the end has come; one must submit to the will of God; it will be well with me when I am with him.” And in his very last minutes he repeated several times: “This is a happy moment.” He died on February 27, 1854.

Lamennais’s work, “l’oeuvre,” as the French say, is great and far from appreciated. Like all great minds and ardent hearts, he laid the path along which humanity will inevitably go and is already going: the path of liberation from an external, falsely Christian faith, detached from life, and of the establishment of that fundamental Christian teaching which changes the life both of the individual and of the whole of human society.