BOSSUET AND THE TRADITION OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY

When traditional Christian ideas about the source of religious knowledge came under attack in the ways that we have looked at in the preceding chapters, what was at stake was not merely the status of dogmas and mysteries and epistemologies but also the status of the Christian conception of history.

Bossuet's Discours de l'histoire universelle (1681) provides us with an epitome of traditional Christian historiography as well as a vivid introduction to the way in which that historiography is implicated in and threatened by the religio-political struggles of the period. Bossuet "perhaps more than any other [man] stands for the transmission of the early Christian historical tradition into the modern period."1 But Bossuet was not simply a transmitter of historiographic tradition. He was Versailles's most eloquent spokesman for royal authority and Catholic hegemony. He urged Louis XIV to "complete" the conversion of the Protestants and cheered the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.2 His justification—before the king on 21 October 1685 (two days before the revocation)—of measures already taken against the Protestants made use of an appeal to compelle intrare and "les principes de Saint Augustin"3 and was evidently one of the specific factors surrounding the revocation that moved Bayle to write his Commentaire.4

It should not be surprising to find Bossuet's absolutist and antischismatic viewpoints reflected in his Histoire universelle. Nor, indeed, should it be surprising that the conflict between Bossuet and Bayle over religious toleration should be fought not merely in the philosophical and theological arena but in the historiographic one as well. The historiographic differences between the two writers are nonetheless worth our attention; for they will help us to understand a surprising aspect of the evolution of the high Enlightenment's interpretations of Christianity and paganism, culminating in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire —namely, the way in which individual writers were motivated by religio-political considerations to embrace apparently inconsistent evaluations of pagan and Christian cultures. Consequently, as we will see below, the trajectory that carries us from Bossuet to Gibbon will involve not merely the transvaluation of the traditional attitudes toward Christians and pagans but a series of dilemmas that will arise from the need to condemn what one is valorizing and to valorize what one is condemning.

Insofar as he is transmitting the traditional Christian historiography, Bossuet is concerned with depicting all of history as the unfolding of God's providential scheme and with showing that the central event around which that scheme is organized is the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.5 In narrating the history of religion, Bossuet has little difficulty in presenting the advent of Jesus as the watershed. In a chapter entitled "Prodigieux aveuglement de l'idolâtrie avant la venue du Messie," Bossuet sets forth the depravity of pagan religion before it was supplanted by Christianity:

Comme . . . la conversion de la gentilité était une oeuvre réservée au Messie, et le propre caractère de sa venue, l'erreur et I'impiété prévalaient partout. . . . Qui oserait raconter les cérémonies des dieux immortels, et leurs mystères impurs? Leurs amours, leurs cruautés, leurs jalousies, et tous leurs autres excès étaient le sujet de leurs fêtes. . . . Ainsi le crime était adoré, et reconnu nécessaire au culte des dieux.6

Since the conversion of the gentiles was a task reserved for the Messiah, and of a character appropriate to his advent, error and impiety prevailed everywhere. . . . Who would dare to describe the ceremonies of the immortal gods and their polluted mysteries? The

gods' carnal passions, their cruelties, their jealousies, and all their other excesses were the subject of their festivals. . . . Thus was crime adored and deemed a necessary part of divine worship.

As depicted in this passage, paganism is an abomination not simply because it is a false religion but because it sets forth vile examples of immoral behavior among the gods and requires evil behavior in its rituals. For the Christian historian, the history of religion is closely related to the history of morality in that the Incarnation of God in the person of Jesus needs to be seen as bringing into the world—along with a new conception of religion and a new offer of eternal bliss—a new morality, a new concept of virtue. And Bossuet appears to be eager to make this point:

Avec de si nouvelles récompenses, il fallait que Jésus-Christ proposêt aussi de nouvelles idles de vertu, des pratiques plus parfaites et plus épurées. La fin de la religion, l'âme des vertues et l'abregé de la loi, c'est la charité. (DHU, 848)

Along with such new rewards, it was also necessary that Jesus Christ should set forth new ideas of virtue, purer and more perfect standards of behavior. The end of religion, the core of the virtues, and the essence of the law is charity.

But no sooner does Bossuet seem to assert that the Christian doctrine of charity represents a moral revolution than he goes on to treat Christian morality more as an extension and purification of pagan morality than as an absolute innovation:

Mais, jusqu'à Jésus-Christ, on peut dire que la perfection et les effets de cette vertu n'étaient pas enti<0232>rement connus. C'est Jésus-Christ proprement qui nous apprend à nous contenter de Dieu seul. Pour établir la règne de la charité, et nous en découvrir tous les devoirs, il nous propose l'amour de Dieu, jusqu'à nous hair nous-mêmes, et persécuter sans relâche le principe de corruption que nous avons tous dans le coeur. Il nous propose l'amour du prochain. (DHU, 848)

But before Jesus Christ, it can be said that the perfection and the effects of this virtue were not completely known. It is properly Jesus Christ who teaches us to find our happiness in God alone. In order to establish the regime of charity and reveal to us all of the duties entailed therein, he instructs us to love God to the extent that we hate ourselves and to persecute unremittingly the source of corruption in all our hearts. He tells us to love our neighbor.

The central moral concept of charity was evidently available to the pagans, albeit only imperfectly. This abrupt shift in Bossuet's narrative points to the fact that he is undertaking to reconcile the traditional view of Christianity as a new moral system with the theologically unexceptionable notion that there was a natural light that informed pagan morality before the advent of Jesus. Nor is Bossuet merely bowing to the technical demands of orthodoxy. The notion that moral knowledge was available to pagans through the natural light is something that serves more particular purposes.

First, pagan virtue is a useful tool for him in his role as moral teacher. The Histoire universelle is addressed to the Dauphin— whose education had been placed under Bossuet's pious supervision—and is replete with explicit lessons for him as well as implicit lessons for his father, Louis XIV. Christian moralists and satirists often used the notion of virtuous pagans or heathens—real or imagined7 —as a way of reproaching Christians for failing to live up to the explicit dictates of revealed Christianity, and such a technique would seem to be at work in Bossuet's text, for example, in the following passage regarding the Athenians:

Ils détestaient l'adultðre, dans les hommes et dans les femmes; la société conjugale était sacrée parmi eux. Mais quand ils s'appliquaient àla religion, ils paraissaient comme possédés par un esprit étranger, et leur lumière naturelle les abandonnait. (DHU, 821)

They detested adultery, in men as well as in women; the marital state was sacred among them. But when they turned to religion, it was as if they were possessed by an alien spirit, and their natural light abandoned them.

In metaphorically associating Greek religion with possession by alien spirits, Bossuet is summoning up the old idea that pagan religion was the work of demons. But beyond this, in contrasting this demonic religion with the virtuous detestation of adultery that is attributed to the natural light, Bossuet is evidently availing himself of an opportunity to reproach Louis XIV for his adulteries by reminding him that even pagans were more virtuous in this regard than the divinely ordained Christian monarch.8

Bossuet does not limit his moralizing to matters of personal behavior but also mines ancient history for institutions and policies that highlighted the failures of Christian governments to follow

Christian precepts. He is able, for example, to praise the early Roman institution of the College of Fetiales for refusing to allow Rome to engage in unjust wars and to use this example to chide Christian monarchs who flout revealed Christianity by engaging in wars of conquest:

Sainte institution s'il en fut jamais, et qui fait honte aux chrétiens, à qui un Dieu venu au monde pour pacifier toutes choses n'a pu inspirer la charité et la paix! (DHU, 1008)

A venerable institution if there ever was one, an institution that shames Christians, in whom even a God bringing universal peace to earth could not inspire charity and peace!

That the virtuous pagans are able to reject adultery and unjust wars despite the fact that their religions teach bad morals, and that Christian kings engage in adultery and military conquest despite the fact that their religion—the true religion—prohibits these things, gives the above passages their satiric force. Paradoxically, however, the more extensive and estimable the virtues of the pagans, the more danger there is of creating the impression that a religion whose adherents exhibit so much personal virtue and so many enlightened institutions may not be in such dire need of supplantation; and such an impression would threaten the entire structure of providential history.

One way to ward off such danger is by stringently distinguishing between the natural light that informs pagan morality and the darkness that hangs over pagan religion. Bossuet attempts to guarantee such a separation in a very straightforward way, by dividing his Histoire universelle into separate narratives; the history of religions is the subject of Part Two, the history of civilizations, Part Three. (Part One deals with the history of epochs.) By dint of such a separation, Bossuet, in principle, is able to protect his orthodoxy while moralizing about the repeated failure of Christians to be as virtuous as pagans.

Bossuet, however, is writing not simply as an inheritor of the tradition of Christian historiography, nor simply as a Christian moralist; he does not, by any means, use ancient history merely for examples of ways in which pagans informed by the natural light could be more virtuous than Christians endowed with divine revelation. Like other historians, Bossuet looked to the past for ideological legitimation in order to justify those contemporary interests,

outlooks, policies, and institutions that he favored. But, as the analysis to this point has made abundantly clear, political issues in the seventeenth century were inseparable from religious ones. Thus when Bossuet, the relentless enemy of schism and zealous advocate of religious unity through force of arms—for whom the Christian summum bonum of charity manages to get transmuted into obedience9 —praises obedience among the ancients, even in the ostensibly secular context of the Roman army (DHU, 994), it is hard not to see the projection of hierarchical and antischismatic Catholic values. The same may be said of his extended idealization of Egypt—perhaps the most striking feature of his history of civilizations—which focuses, as Paul Hazard has pointed out, on the Egyptians' grave conservatism and horror of novelty.10

Nor does Bossuet's political animus allow him to content himself with projecting religio-political values onto the civic institutions of the ancients. He cannot keep himself from directly praising their religio-political arrangements when he finds them exemplary—for example, when he tells us that although the Egyptian monarchy was hereditary, the kings were obliged by ancient custom to obey (religious) laws, including a body of law that applied to them alone. This submission of otherwise inviolable kings to the power of religion and tradition is represented as enhancing rather than diminishing their godlike qualities.11 Thus in Egypt (as in France) the glory of civilization and the majesty of kings is seen to depend on a proper submission to religious tradition.

A more explicit, and, for our purposes, more crucial, example of Bossuet's exaltation of pagan religion—or, at least, of the role that it played in an orderly society—is to be found in his remarks on the foundations of Roman religion. Romulus, he tells us,

établit l'ordre et réprima les esprits par des lois trLs saintes. II commença par la religion, qu'il regarda comme le fondement des Etats. Il la fit aussi sérieuse, aussi grave, et aussi modeste que les ténèbres de l'idolâtrie le pouvaient permettre. Les religions étran-gères et les sacrifices, qui n'étaient pas établies par les coutumes romaines, furent défendus. Dans la suite, on se dispensa de cette loi; mais c'était l'intention de Romulus qu'elle fût gardée, et on en retint toujours quelque chose. (DHU, 1013)

imposed order and tamed unruly spirits by means of extremely venerable laws. He began with religion, which he considered the foundation of states. He made it as serious, as solemn, as modest,

as the darkness of idolatry would allow. Foreign religions and sacrifices that were not grounded in Roman custom were prohibited. Subsequently, this law was not always enforced; but it was Romulus's intention that it be preserved, and at least part of it was retained.

I have suggested that the orthodoxy of Bossuet's traditional Christian historiography depended on the separation of religious history from the history of civilizations, so that those aspects of pre-Christian civilization that were meritorious and thus reflected the benefit of the natural light would not lead one to question the need for the Incarnation of God and the revelation of the true religion. After all, the profound threat to providential history that deism was beginning to pose was precisely that, by making all of the fundamental truths about morality and religion equally available to pagans, it removes any need for the Incarnation.12

Despite this danger, however, Bossuet's virtual sanctification of Romulus's institution of religious conformity indicates how religio-political imperatives could drive even the staunchest orthodoxy to put strains on itself. On the one hand, the fact that pagan religion is not revealed might seem to leave room for the idea that it was invented by humans for human purposes. But if religions that are invented by wise pagans turn out to be exemplary, then that would seem to cast a shadow on the glory of the true religion, which will be brought down to humanity by the incarnate God. Indeed, Bossuet's qualifying statement in the passage just quoted—that Roman religion as set up by Romulus was as serious and as modest as the darkness of idolatry could allow—is clearly a rhetorical attempt to reassert the distinction between the benighted pagan religion and the redeeming light of Christianity. But here, notwithstanding Bossuet's vaunted rhetorical skill, his qualification seems lame. Rather than smoothing over the problem, it only underscores it: to the extent that the natural light illuminates not only pagan morality and political institutions but even pagan religion, to that extent does the historical centrality of the Incarnation become eroded.

In the religio-political discourse of the seventeenth century, then, the central world-historical importance of Christian revelation was being undermined by defenders of orthodoxy as well as by its deistic opponents. But the greatest danger that faced Bossuet's

traditional Christian historiography was to come from a different direction and take a different form. For the Enlightenment would pose its most profound challenge to traditional historiography not by undermining the distinction between paganism and Christianity but by retaining the distinction while inverting its valorization so that paganism comes to be associated with positive values and Christianity with negative ones. Of course, Bossuet, to the extent that he finds pagan virtues putting Christians to shame, manifests a slight tendency in the direction of this inversion. But he still sees the religio-political structure of French absolutism as a model of hierarchical perfection. A crucial step in the transvaluation of authoritarian Catholicism in particular and of Christianity in general will be the transvaluation of religious toleration. The writers that I will be discussing in the remainder of this chapter, starting with Pierre Bayle, find the exemplary manifestation of toleration in ancient paganism, especially that of ancient Rome.13

Less obvious than the shift in lessons drawn from history—but no less important for our purposes—will be a series of shifts in ideas concerning what counts as historical evidence and what methods need to be applied in turning evidence into explanations. It will be useful, therefore, before returning to Bayle, this time in his role as historian, to glance at the mode of explanation that Bossuet used in his comments on Romulus. Bossuet's valorization of the wisdom of Romulus's prohibition of alien religions is not based on historical evidence in the sense that it adduces data that point to some sort of causal relationship between a given policy and its consequences. Bossuet does tell us that Romulus's original decree was eventually set aside, but he omits to tell us whether Romulus's decree had desirable consequences to the extent that it was obeyed or whether its suspension had undesirable consequences. For Bossuet, it is sufficient to say that when the Romans did allow alien religions to come into their republic, they were going against Romulus's intentions—as if that fact, in itself, were sufficient to condemn their actions. In a word, Bossuet's valorization of Romulus's action is based on its originary status and hence is similar in nature to his own appeal to scriptural authority in his argument that French Protestants should be compelled to enter the Catholic church. This is the same essentialist logic that we found

in our brief look at cosmogonic myths in chapter 1. Value is conferred on intolerance by dint of its primordial origins.14

In the next section, we will see that Bayle's approach to Roman history differs from Bossuet's not only in the lessons that it gleans but in the methodology that it employs. Whereas Bossuet, as a priestly historian, approaches history in search of the transhistoricai, Bayle approaches history as an empiricist in search of causal explanations. This shift, as we will see, will have consequences not only for Bayle's attitude toward Roman history but also for his attitude toward Christian history.