Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet: Discourse on Universal History. Part II, chapters 19-31, Part III. Elborg Forster translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Bossuet argues that Jesus Christ transformed the course of human events, first of all by the miracles He performed. “His miracles are of a peculiar order and of a new kind”: unlike Jewish miracles, which were “signs from heaven,” Jesus works His miracles directly upon men, “heal[ing] their infirmities”; His miracles “imply kindness rather than power and do not so much surprise the beholders as touch the depths of their hearts”; He performs His miracles “with authority,” making nature and demons alike obey; “the source of the miracles is within himself,” not from God working through Him; and although “none had ever performed either so great or so many miracles,” He “promises that his disciples shall, in his name, do still greater works than these, so fruitful and inexhaustible is the virtue he bears within him.” Yet even with such powers, His children receive no promises of worldly rewards. When he speaks to them, revealing “the secrets of God,” He “tempers the sublimity of his teachings” to His hearers, offering “milk for babes and at the same time bread for the strong.” He “dispenses with measure” His measureless knowledge.
He similarly measures His power. The Pharisees and priests condemn Him; His disciples forsake Him; the Sanhedrin and the High Priest condemn Him as a blasphemer; the Roman governor, knowing Him to be innocent, nonetheless calls Him guilty and orders His execution. He never resists this evil. That is, “the most heinous of all crimes”—Deicide—is “the occasion for the most perfect obedience that the world ever saw.” “Jesus, master of life and of all things, voluntarily surrenders to the fury of wicked men and offers the sacrifice which was to be the expiation of mankind.” With His death on the Cross, “the Law” of Moses “ceases, its symbols pass away, its sacrifices abolished” by this one supreme sacrifice. [1] “Everything changes in the world” when Jesus, dying, says “It is finished.” Performing yet another miracle upon a human body, he rises from the tomb to be seen, heard, and touched by His followers. With these proofs in their minds, with His command to bear witness to them in their hearts, the preaching of His followers “is unshakable, its foundation a positive fact, unanimously attested to by those who saw it” and their sincerity “vindicated by the strongest proof imaginable, that of torments and of death itself” in imitatio Christi. By promising always to be with them, until the end of the world, “he assures the perpetual continuance of the ecclesiastical ministry.”
Having confirmed the Sonship of Jesus, Bossuet turns to a discussion of His ‘nature’—His relation to the other Persons of the Trinity and His Incarnation. Just as his defense of miracles aims at the criticisms offered by Spinoza, his theology aims at the philosophy of Descartes.
In revealing the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation to us, Jesus “makes us find the image of them in ourselves, so that they may always be present with us and so that we may understand the dignity of our nature.” Begin by doing as Descartes recommends. “If we impose silence on our sense and shut ourselves up for awhile in the inmost recesses of our soul, that is, in that part where truth makes its voice heard, we shall see there some image of the Trinity we adore.” Our intelligence gives birth to our thought, which “gives us some idea of the Son of God eternally conceived in the intelligence of the Heavenly Father.” Jesus is God’s Son in the sense that our thought comes forth from our intelligence, not a body “but that inner word which we perceive in our soul when we contemplate the truth.” Further, in our introspection “we love that inner word and the mind in which it is born; and by loving it, we perceive in ourselves something no less precious to us than our mind and our thought, something which is the fruit of both, which united them, which is united with them and constitutes with them but one and the same life.” The Holy Spirit, then, is the divine analogue to this human love. “Thus, I say, is produced in God the eternal love which proceeds from the Father who thinks, and from the Son who is his thought, in order to make with him and his thought one and the same nature equally blessed and perfect.” Just as human intelligence, thought, and love arise simultaneously within us, so “we must not imagine anything unequal or separate in this divine Trinity,” and “however incomprehensible this equality may be, our soul, if we listen, will tell us something about it,” being made in the image of it.” In “these three things” “lie the happiness and dignity of rational nature,” a nature that “knows perfectly what it is,” whose “understanding corresponds to the truth of its being” and “loves it being with its intelligence, as much as both deserve to be loved.” “These three things are never separated and contain one another: we understand that we are, and that we love; and we love to be and to understand. Who can deny this, if he understands himself?”
The analogy between God and Man extends to the Incarnation. The human soul, “by nature spiritual and incorruptible,” by which Bossuet means eternal not sinless. It has been joined to “a corruptible body.” Taken together, soul and body constitute “a man,” a being “at the same time incorruptible and corruptible, intelligent and totally brutish.” So too with the Son, Word become flesh as the son of Mary as well as the Son of God. “This makes him God and man together.” True, the analogy, like all analogies, is “imperfect.” Jesus’ soul existed before His body did, whereas “our soul does not exist before our body.” The human soul “elevates the body to its own level by governing it,” but “in Jesus Christ, the Word presides over everything,” keeping “everything under its control.” Jesus’ every thought, speech, and action are “worthy of the Word, that is to say…worthy of reason itself, of wisdom itself, ad of truth itself.” When we fail to understand this, we show ourselves human-all-too-human: “the senses govern us too much, and our imagination, which insists on intruding in all our thoughts, does not always permit us to fix our attention upon so pure a light.” As a result, “we do not know ourselves,” remaining “ignorant of the riches we carry deep down in our nature,” visible to “none but the most purified eyes.”
The mission of Jesus therefore “is infinitely exalted above that of Moses,” who was “sent to rouse sensual and besotted men by temporal rewards,” Bossuet alleges. The only way to elevate such debased men was to “lay hold of them through the senses and to inculcate in them by this means a knowledge of God and an abhorrence of idolatry, which for mankind has such an amazing propensity.” Christ’s mission was “to inspire man with higher ideals and to give him full and evident knowledge of the dignity, immortality, and eternal felicity of his soul.” Philosophy by itself can’t find its way to this truth, as “most of the philosophers could not believe in the immortality of the soul without believing it a portion of the deity; a deity itself, an eternal being, uncreated as well as incorruptible, and having no more beginning than end,” as seen in their doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The Pentateuch “gave man but a first notion of the nature of the soul and its felicity,” showing Man that he was animated by God’s breath. Once man failed to live up to his God-given origin, God gave Moses the Law by which a portion of humanity, made exemplary by that Law and that Law alone, to prevent the worst carnage. Under the dispensation granted to Moses, Judaism acknowledges the future life but doesn’t make belief in it and in God’s supremely self-sacrificing way of guaranteeing it “the foundation of religion,” as Christianity does.
Therefore “the most characteristic law of the Gospel is that of bearing one’s cross”—the “true test of faith.” Jesus sets the example, dying “without finding either gratitude in those he serves, fidelity in his friends, or equity in his judges.” He does this “to let upright man see that in the greatest extremities he needs neither human consolation nor even any tangible sign of divine help: let him but love and trust, resting assured that God is mindful of him though he gives no token of it, and that eternal bliss is in store for him.” The cry of Man, even of the God-man in extremis, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” finds its answer in this faith.
This truth has a moral corollary. Plato’s Socrates tells the story of Gyges, a man who possessed a ring that made him invisible whenever he wanted to be, and so led a life of criminal vice without detection. Socrates argues that the truly virtuous man remains virtuous not only if his actions are unseen by other men but even if his virtues bring down upon him the envy of other men, “even to the point of being” tortured. That is of course exactly what happened to Jesus. “Does it not seem that God put this wonderful idea of virtue into a philosopher’s mind only to have it realized in his Son’s person and to show that the just man has another glory, another rest, in short, another happiness than can possibly be attained upon earth.” “What greater accomplishment could be reserved for a God coming into the world?”
Perhaps there is one greater: the revolution or regime change Jesus makes against Satan, who had ruled this world. Satanic powers had murdered the one truly innocent man. All men were, and are, guilty of sin and therefore justly turned over to the most sinful of all rulers. But “by attacking the innocent,” Satan’s Hell “shall be obliged to release the guilty whom it held captive” because Satan overstepped the just limit God had placed upon him. “The woeful obligation by which we were delivered over to rebel angels, is wiped out: Jesus Christ has nailed it to his Cross, there to be blotted out by his blood.” In His grace, divine justice “is itself overcome; the sinner, its due victim, is snatched from its hands.” With this sacrifice, “Jesus Christ eternally binds to himself the elect for whom he sacrifices himself: they are his members and his body; henceforth the eternal Father can only see them through the body of Christ; and thus [the Father] extends toward them the infinite love with which he loves his Son.” “The true Promised Land” is not the physical one Moses saw from afar but “the heavenly kingdom” under a “wholly spiritual law,” the Christ-ian law of love, no longer the Mosaic law.
With this new ruler of the world comes a new ruling body—the Church or assembly of Christ’s people. The original body of the children of God, the Jews, had established the earthly site of God’s kingdom in Jerusalem, “notwithstanding the lack of belief of most of the nation,” for which they were repeatedly punished by their loving Father. Indignant at the Apostles’ preaching to the Gentiles, “the Jews” delivered Paul, the Jewish convert to Christianity, to the Romans. (Bossuet later actually claims that the Jews “crucified Him.”) They revolted against the Romans and were crushed by them; the Romans, unconverted either to Judaism or Christianity, were used by God as instruments of punitive judgment against the Jews, whom Bossuet regards as apostates, and against the Christians of Jewish or Gentile origin, now united as the new people of God, subject to chastising or corrective punishment by those Romans, whose persecution only strengthens the bonds of the new politeuma. “A new people is formed, and the new sacrifice, so much heralded by the prophets, begin to be offered over the whole earth.” As for the Jews, those who did not convert no longer belong to God’s people; “by their infidelity toward the seed promised to Abraham and David, [they] are no longer Jews or sons of Abraham other than in the flesh”; they thereby “renounce the promise by which all nations were to be blessed.” “The Gentiles incorporated with the Jews henceforth become the true Jews and the true kingdom of Judah, opposed to that schismatic Israel cut off from the people of God; they [i.e., both Jewish and Gentile converts] become the true kingdom of David through their obedience to the laws and Gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of David.” Indeed, “there is nothing more remarkable than that separation of the unbelieving Jews from the Jews converted to Christianity.”
Had Bossuet foreseen the ‘universal history’ of the subsequent three hundred years, he would have understood what dangerous ground he treads, here. He does admit that “the God of mercies has not yet exhausted his mercies toward that patriarch race, despite its faithlessness,” preserving them “outside their country and in their ruin, even longer than the nations that have conquered them.” The ancient Medes, Persians, Greeks, and Romans “have been blended with other nations.” By preserving the Jews, by not enabling them to ‘assimilate,’ God “keeps us in expectation of what he will still do for the unhappy remnant of a people once so highly favored.” At the end of days, Jews shall be redeemed; “they shall return, never again to go astray.” But for now, they are “slaves wherever they are”—as they had been in Egypt—without honor, without liberty, without identity as a people,” by which Bossuet must mean without sovereignty, since he just said God has carefully preserved them. Their present diaspora “teach[es] us to fear God” and to consider “the judgments he executes upon his ungrateful children, so that we may learn never to glory in the favors shown to our fathers.”
All of that notwithstanding, it still is necessary to pause and to consider what Bossuet teaches, here. This isn’t the modern pseudoscience of the ‘anti-Semites.’ Bossuet’s argument does not classify Jewish people as members of a ‘race’ in any biological sense, and therefore does not lead to genocide. In fact, it effectually prohibits it by classifying race-murder as an attempt to thwart God’s providence. But his supercessionist theology does lead to callousness with regard to Jewish subordination in ‘Christian Europe.’ In effect, he claims that Jewish slavery ‘serves them right’ for failing to convert to Christianity. He is explicit on this point. The unconverted Jews’ punishment for “the most heinous of all crimes, a crime until then unheard-of, namely, deicide…resulted in a vengeance such as the world had never seen,” much worse than the destruction of the first Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. “They had to perish,” not as a nation but as a sovereign nation united in one place. This isn’t anti-Semitism, but it is an attempt to justify the old-fashioned ghettoization of Jews, up to and perhaps including pogroms or at very least making pogroms likely. Where is Christian love, the love of the Holy Spirit, in any of this? A few pages later, he condemns the Roman emperor, Julian “the Apostate,” for “stoop[ing] so low as to court the Jews, who were the outcasts of the world.” More, “Jews remain the laughingstock of the nations and the object of their aversion.” Bossuet thus provides a window into the vile practices of many European Christians, crimes committed against innocent people deemed perennially guilty by their persecutors for their refusal to concur with Christian teachings. This sort of anti-Judaism sets up a cycle of self-justifying tyranny by tempting Christians to abuse Jews under the illusion that they, Christians, thereby act as divinely appointed scourges. [2]
The Biblical (not only New-Testament) humility he does commend makes considerable sense, quite apart from the teachings of the Bible, when Bossuet recounts the course of events in Christendom after the days of the Apostles. The blood of the martyr was indeed the seed of the Church, but the doctrines of the heretics were its herbicide. As it happened, the Church learned that “it has no less to suffer under Christian emperors than it had suffered under infidel emperors and that it must shed blood to defend not only the whole body of its doctrine but even every individual article.” It turned out that the ‘new’ Jews, the Christians, were as vulnerable to idolatry as the ‘old’ Jews. The old idolaters “forgot reason” by attempting to make their own gods. The true God did indeed want men to forget reason but “to forget it in another manner.” No one understands the Cross of Christ by reason alone, by ‘unassisted’ reason; you understand it “by bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ, by casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.” God’s remedy for the disease of idolatry was faithful and grateful obedience because “it was not through reason that one could destroy an error which reason had not established.” Idolatry isn’t false reasoning, a thing refutable by logic, but the absence of reasoning at all, hence invulnerable to rational argument, “an inversion of good sense” not to be argued with. Reasoning only irritates a frenzied person. Even Plato could not overthrow pagan altars and found himself force to make sacrifices to them in the form of “a lie,” feigned religiosity. “What purpose have you thus served, O philosophy!”
“God completely overwhelmed reason by the mystery of the Cross; and, at the same time, he applied the remedy to the roots of the evil.” The Cross could do this because idolatry originates in “that profound attachment we have for ourselves.” Loving ourselves, we “contrive gods like ourselves.” In worshipping them, we really worship our “own thoughts, pleasures, and fancies.” By contrast, Jesus teaches us to “forget ourselves, renounce everything, crucify everything, in order to follow him,” to tear ourselves from ourselves, to love suffering instead of pleasure. “By taking upon himself the pain of sin without sin itself,” Jesus “showed that he was not a guilty person punished but the Just One atoning for the sins of others.” “An apparent folly,” the Cross calls us to a wisdom “so sublime that to our wisdom it appears folly; and its rules are so exalted that the whole seems an aberration.” Yet “the apostle and their disciples, the outcasts of the world, mere nothings, if we look upon them with human eyes, have prevailed over all the emperors and the whole empire of the Romans,” now ruined. In making this happen, God “has laid low all human pride which would come to” the defense of the idols, “perform[ing] this great work as he had created the universe, by the sole power of his word.”
A Christian shouldn’t take idolatry too literally. It has “diverse forms,” as sensual pleasure, self-interest, ignorance, “a false veneration of antiquity,” politics, philosophy, and heresy “all come to its aid.” In this struggle, the Bishop of Meaux looks to the Catholic Church as the true bulwark against the idols. “Some”—the heretical sects—were “perhaps lost in the by-ways; but the Catholic Church was always the highway taken by most of those who sought Jesus Christ.” Given the tradition it took over from pre-Christian Jews, Bossuet defends the Jewish tradition as authentic and venerable. “The Mosaic tradition is too clear and too persistent to allow the least suspicion of falsehood”; “the Jewish people always showed an invincible repugnance at accepting something they had never heard of before as ancient and as having come from Moses, and at accepting as familiar and established something just recently put into their hands.” They are the least likely people to have corrupted their own tradition. In “her clear victory over all sects,” the Catholic Church evinces the continuity of true religion—a “wonderful sequence of events” which, “through time…leads you to eternity.”
Bossuet’s account of Christianity teaches the Dauphin and other readers the true justification of humility against human selfishness and the delusions it fosters. In Part III, he teaches them the reasons for humility by presenting the universal history of empires. He doesn’t keep his intention secret, either, titling the first chapter, “The Overthrow of Empires Is Ordered by Providence and Serves to Keep Princes in Humility.” Or so one might well wish.
“Most of these empires” he will discuss “are by necessity linked with the history of God’s people,” God having used the Assyrians and Babylonians to chastise them, the Persians to restore them, Alexander to protect them. Even the persecuting Romans provided Christians with a framework for proselytizing by maintaining a multinational empire with good roads. In the end, “the Roman Empire yielded” to Christianity, “having found a power more invincible than its own.” After God chastised the Romans by permitting them to succumb to barbarian invasions, today “Rome continues to exist only through Christianity,” through the Roman Catholic Church, the religion it now “brings to the whole world.”
In light of this course of events, “even from a merely human point of view, it is extremely useful, especially for princes, to contemplate this passing of empires, since the arrogance which so often attends their eminent position is greatly dampened by this sight. For if men learn moderation when they see the death of kings, how much more will it strike the to see even the death of kingdoms!” Because “permanence is not for men,” because “change and unrest are the proper lot of human affairs,” human empire can never match the continuity of God’s religion, or at least not in the same way. The course of human empires has “its own continuity and its own proportion,” which may be seen in the causes “their progress and their decadence”—a topic Bossuet addressed (if in a very different manner) several decades before Montesquieu. “The true science of history consists in uncovering for each age the hidden tendencies which have prepared the way for great changes and the important combinations of circumstances which have brought them about.”
Unlike subsequent thinkers, Bossuet does not ascribe progress and decadence to impersonal causes. It is “the character of the dominating nations in general, and of princes in particular, as well as that of the outstanding men” who “have contributed for good or evil to the change in empires and the fate of nations.” ‘Fortune’ is not running the show. “By looking at unrelated occurrences we might think that fortune alone decides the rise and fall of empires, but…in reality, taking everything into consideration, the situation is rather akin to gambling, where the most skillful player wins in the long run.” “It is those with the most far-reaching plans, have been the most diligent, have persevered the longest in great efforts and, finally, have known best how to press on or to restrain themselves according to the situation who have, in the end, gained the upper hand and have been able to use fortune itself for their ends.” Neither a Machiavellian, promising the Dauphin that he can master Fortune nor a historical determinist denying that statesmen and other “outstanding men” have any real effect at all, Bossuet points to the interplay between impersonal and personal causes. Of the several empires he considers, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome best illustrate his approach.
“The Egyptians were the first among whom the rules of government were known,” “the first to recognize the true aim of politics, which is to make life easier and to make the people happy.” To these ends, they made virtue “the foundation of the entire society,” and chief among these virtues was gratitude. Gratitude was reserved for the gods and divinely guided lawgivers, and “ignorance of religion and of the laws of the realm was not tolerated on any social level.” While those laws “were very good, it was even better that everyone was brought up to observe them” ‘to the letter,’ as “the exactitude with which small things were preserved was also the safeguard of the great.” This resulted in extraordinary political continuity: “no people has kept its customs and its laws for a longer time.” In Egyptian courtrooms, no demagogues were permitted to exhibit that “false eloquence which dazzles the mind and stirs the passions,” fomenting change. “The truth could not be exposed in too dry a fashion” in the senate where cases were judged, and where the Egyptians “preserv[ed] their ancient maxims” by “surround[ing] them with certain ceremonies, which impressed them on people’s minds. Most remarkably, the Egyptians extended the reach of the law beyond death. “When we [moderns] die, it is a consolation to leave our name in esteem among men; and of all the worldly goods, this is the only one death cannot take away. but in Egypt it was not permitted to praise the dead indiscriminately. As soon as a man was dead, he was brought to trial,” his final reputation to be established in formal judicial proceedings. Those found worthy won perpetual gratitude from all subsequent generations of the living.
So, too, with parents. Mummification had a moral and political purpose: to establish perpetual gratitude toward parents. “When children saw the bodies of their ancestors, they remembered their publicly recognized virtue and endeavored to love the laws they had left to them.” Even the kings were bound by the laws, as Egyptians “believed that reproaches would only exasperate them and that the most efficacious way of inspiring them to virtue was to show them their duty in lawful praise, solemnly expressed before the gods.” The kings were accordingly revered, and rightly so. Whereas in most political communities the kings are not the greatest men, in Egypt under the Theban dynasty “the greatest men were the kings.” “The two Hermes, who founded the sciences and all the institutions of the Egyptians—the one living around the time of the Flood, the other, whom they called Trismegistus, or the Thrice Great, living at the time of Moses—were both kings of Thebes.” They invented astronomy, arithmetic, the art of land surveying that developed into geometry, and medicine. Egypt was “the first nation to have libraries,” with which “Egypt cured itself of ignorance, the most dangerous of illnesses and the source of all the others.” No wonder “most kings were so beloved by the people that everyone mourned their death as much as that of a father or a child.” Making sure that the Dauphin doesn’t miss the point, Bossuet encourages him to study the artworks of Thebes and the inventions of Egypt.
Egyptian architecture, seen most notably in the pyramids, contrasted with the impressive but unstable structure of the Tower of Babel. Of a piece with its laws and the regime behind them, “from the very beginning the taste of the Egyptians was such that they liked solidity and unadorned regularity,” in imitation of the simplicity of “Nature itself”; “once taste has been corrupted by novelty and extravagant boldness” (perhaps as seen in the Palace of Versailles?) it is “hard to recapture.” But “Egypt did not expend its greatest effort on inanimate things. Its most noble labor and its most accomplished art consisted in forming men” with the “art of developing the body as well as the mind” by “frugality and exercise.” “The country was healthy by nature, but philosophy had taught them that nature needs to be helped.” As a result of this “frugal diet and vigorous exercise,” even the bones of the Egyptians, like their monuments, were hard, unlike “the fragile skulls of the Persians” with whom Egyptian remains were mingled on battlefields. And the brains inside those skulls were still more impressive. “Egypt ruled by giving advice, and this rule of the mind seemed to them more noble and more glorious than any rule that can be established by armies.” This brought such Greeks as Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Lycurgus and Solon “to Egypt to learn wisdom.” And “God wished that Moses himself be learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians; this is how he came to be mighty in words and deeds. True wisdom avails itself of everything; and God does not wish those whom he inspires to neglect human mans, which, in their own way, also come from him.” That is, the two wellsprings of Western civilization, the Greeks and the Hebrews, both flowed from Egypt.
The Babylonian Empire provides a contrast to Egyptian wisdom. Babylon “had a strange destiny, since it perished through its own inventions.” They had diverted the Euphrates River into an artificial lake in order to build a bridge, giving them control of the entrance to the city against any would-be conqueror. When Cyrus besieged the city, he simply rediverted the river back to its original course and marched through the dry riverbank into Babylon. And even then, had “the slopes been guarded, the Persians could have been overpowered when they passed through the riverbed” below. But the “insane self-confidence” and hedonism of the Babylonians made them neglectful even of establishing a proper military order and chain of command. “This is the downfall not only of the strongest fortifications but even of the greatest empires.” France, take note.
Persia’s Cyrus, although indeed great, “well brought up in warlike pursuits,” failed politically by exhibiting less-than-Egyptian wisdom when it came to his successors. He “did not take enough care to give the successor to his empire an education similar to his own; and, as is usual in human affairs, too much greatness was detrimental to virtue.” With the exception of Cyrus, Persia generally lacked the civic virtues, thanks to a defective education. “The respect for royal authority which the Persians were taught from childhood on was carried to excess by its admixture of adoration; and” unlike the Egyptians, “the Persians seem to be slaves rather than subjects who submitted their reason to lawful authority.” Bossuet find a possible excuse for this in “their Oriental temperament,” a “keen and violent nature” which may have “called for a firmer and more absolute government.” The East is not the West; Egypt civilized the Greeks and the Hebrews but the Babylonians and Persians, for all their refinement and all their conquests, lacked the virtues necessary for self-government under their gods.
Bossuet regards this point as well worth repeating to the Dauphin. “The Greeks, naturally intelligent and courageous, had been educated early by the kings and colonists from Egypt, who, established in various regions of the country from the earliest times on, had widely spread the excellent institutions of the Egyptians,” among which “the best thing taught them was a willingness to learn and to be molded by the law for the public welfare.” As a result, the Greeks learned “to see themselves and their families as parts of a greater body, the state,” which they regarded as “a common mother, to whom they belonged even more than to their parents.” The Greek polis or city-state fostered liberty understood as civility. “To the Greeks the word civility meant more than that graciousness and mutual deference which makes men sociable”—the ‘polite society’ seen in the royal courts of Europe within the vaster boundaries of the centralized modern state. For them, “a civil person was the same thing as a good citizen, who always considers himself as a member of the state, abides by law, and works within it for the public welfare without encroaching on anyone.” By “show[ing] their love of the people, not by flattering them, but by furthering their well-being and upholding the rule of the law” with “uncompromising rectitude,” the ancient Greek monarchs established “a regime” in which “the Greeks gradually came to feel that they were capable of self-government, and most of the cities formed themselves into republics” under the guidance of “wise legislators, such as Thales, Pythagoras, Pittacus, Lycurgus, Solon, Philotas, and many others known to history,” who “prevented liberty from degenerating into license.” Under the republican regimes, “the liberty the Greeks had in mind was a liberty subject to the law, meaning to reason itself as recognized by all the people,” a feature of politics as Aristotle defined it, as ruling and being ruled in turn. “The magistrates, though feared during their tenure, later became private citizens again.” Bossuet carefully states that although “every form of government has its own advantages,” and “the Greeks profited from theirs in the sense that the citizens were all the more attached to their country since they all had a share in its government and since every individual could aspire tp the highest office,” “lawful submission” under a law-abiding monarch presents fewer risks than “the hazards of liberty” in a republic.
Bossuet judges that philosophy made the Greeks better republicans. “The freer these people were, the more it became necessary to found the rules of behavior and of society upon sound reasoning,” as found in the teachings of Pythagoras, Thales, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Archytas, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, “and an infinite number of others” who “filled Greece with these noble precepts.” “It was a common tenet among the philosophers that a man should either retire from public affairs or consider nothing but the general welfare.” The poets too instructed the Greeks “even more than they entertained them”; Alexander the Great “regarded Homer as a master who taught him how to rule well,” as “this great poet also taught how to obey and to be a good citizen.” “When Greece, nurtured in this manner, saw the Asians in their daintiness, their finery, and their effeminate beauty, it had nothing but contempt for them,” while the Asian “form of government, which was constituted in such a way that the will of the prince was above all the laws, even the most sacred, inspired Greece with horror,” as for them “there was nothing more hatred than barbarism,” whose regime is despotism, the antithesis of ruling and being ruled. They loved Homer’s poetry in part because “it celebrated the victories and advantages of Greece over Asia.” Whereas Asia’s goddess was Aphrodite, the goddess of “pleasure, licentious love, and effeminate manners,” Greece’s goddess was Hera, goddess of “steadiness and conjugal love.” To Hera they added Hermes, god of eloquence, and Zeus, god of “political wisdom.” In Homer’s poems, ” on the side of Asia was the impetuous and brutal Ares, that is, savage warfare; on the side of Greece was Athena, that is, military art and valor controlled by the mind.” Since Homer’s time, then, “Greece had always believed that intelligence and courage were its natural patrimony,” never to be subjugated by Asia, a “yoke that seemed equivalent to subjecting virtue to voluptuousness, the mind to the body and true courage to uncontrolled power, which consists only in numbers,” as seen in the vast Asian armies the Greeks defeated at Salamis.
Impressive though this was, it wasn’t sufficient in the long run. “Reason alone was incapable of restraining” the “overly spirited and free minds” of the Athenians. Plato, “a wise Athenian who admirably understood the character of his country” suggested that “it was no longer possible to govern them once the victory of Salamis had reassured them as to the Persians.” The overconfidence seen in Babylonian despotism overtook the people of Athens, eventually causing them to lose their war with Sparta. Again, Bossuet implicitly commends a certain reasonable humility to the Dauphin.
Bossuet turns finally to Rome, “the empire whose laws we still respect and which we consequently should know like any other.” “The very essence of a Roman, so to speak, was his attachment to his liberty and to his country. These feelings reinforced each other; for because he loved his liberty, he also loved his country as a mother who constantly fostered his generosity and his liberty” under the laws. The Romans further reinforced their attachment to liberty and country by refusing to “consider poverty an evil.” “On the contrary, they saw it as a means of preserving their most complete liberty; for who is freer or more independent than a man who is able to make do with very little and who, not expecting anything from anyone’s protection or liberality, counts only on his own industry and his own work for his livelihood?” As Livy observes, “there never was a people to hold frugality, thrift, and poverty in esteem for so long a time”; and so, for example, “when the Samnites offered Carius gold and silver dishes, he replied that his pleasure was not to have them but to give orders to those who did.” “Nothing could be further” from the Roman regime, the Roman “way of life,” than Samnite “effeminacy.”
The Roman way was the way of a military, not a commercial, republic. Conquer or die was “the inviolable law” of the Roman soldier. Nor was that soldier dependent on his personal virtue, alone. He was a part of a prudently designed military structure, an army divided into small units that could adjust to any terrain, “be united or separated as required,” ready for “separate or concerted actions and to all sorts of deployments and changes, which are executed by the whole army or parts of it, as the need made be.” This organization enabled the Romans to defeat the Macedonians and many others. And you, Dauphin, “see practiced under the command of Louis the Great” exactly such military organization, which lends itself to the flexible tactics prudence or practical reasoning requires, and which the exigencies of warfare demand. [3] Thanks to their superior virtue and organization, the Romans “triumphed over courage when they defeated the Gauls, over courage and art when they defeated the Greeks, and over both of these qualities, sustained by the most artful strategy, when they triumphed over Hannibal.” “Therefore, nothing in their government gave them as much pride as their military discipline. They always considered it the cornerstone of their empire. Military discipline was the first thing their state brought forth and the last thing it lost, and this shows how closely it was connected with the organization of their republic.”
Bossuet now draws the explicit lesson for France and its Dauphin. Here is how you can win the statesman’s gamble against fortune in the long run: “If a government can give its people a taste for glory, patient labor, the greatness of the nation, and patriotism, it can claim that it ha constituted tis state in such a way that it will surely bring forth great men,” who are “an empire’s strength.” “Nature does not fail to endow all nations”—and that must include Asian or ‘Oriental’ nations—with “lofty minds and hearts, but it needs help in developing them.” The French nobility “is so valiant in battle and so bold in all its ventures…because it was taught from childhood on and confirmed in this opinion by the unanimous feeling of the nation, that lack of courage degrades a gentleman and makes him unworthy of the light of day.” Likewise, “in the best days of Rome, even children were trained for war; the greatness of the Roman name was all that counted,” and a father’s failure so to raise his boys was “brought to trial by the magistrates and convicted of an offense against the public.” Thus Rome’s great men brought forth others; Rome’s regime thus “engender[ed] many heroes.” Its rival, Carthage, a commercial republic, inadequately trained for war, hired foreign troops, preferring money to virtue. Carthage lost. [4]
Rome declined, however, partly because its extensive conquests were unjust, consequences of “the desire to dominate,” and “therefore justly condemned by the rules of the Gospel” and also the teachings of philosophy—notably those of her own Cicero who, following Aristotle, taught that the purpose of war is a just peace, that martial courage must be tempered with civil justice. “The sweet taste of victory and domination soon corrupted the rectitude which natural equity had given the Romans.” Their empire lasted as long as it did because although they were “cruel and unjust” in war, “they governed conquered nations with moderation,” partially following philosophic precept. Indeed, conquered subjects eventually could become citizens, eligible to serve in the Roman senate. “Rome came to be looked upon as the common fatherland.” Ultimately, Rome’s truly fatal flaw was not its injustice in wars beyond its boundaries but its injustice within, its factionalism, its inability “to find a middle course” between patricians and plebeians. “Weary and exhausted by this long period of civil war and in need of tranquility, Rome was forced to renounce its liberty” and to adopt Caesarist despotism. As long as Romans under the republic had external enemies, they remained somewhat united; when their empire was well established, fear no longer united them and their jealous passions destroyed their regime. Moreover, “the character of war is such that the command had to fall into the hands of a single man” and the armies under such men saw that “the empire was at their disposal.” Having “created so many new citizens” in the aftermath of its far-flung conquests, Rome “could hardly recognize itself in the throng of naturalized foreigners.” In the end, the patrician ‘few’ lost to “men of great ambition, together with the wretched poor, who have nothing to lose”; such ambitious men, allied with such wretched men, “have nothing to lose” and so “always favor change” of regime,” in this case away from the mixed-regime, military republican empire to the despotic military empire of the Caesars. Bossuet suggests: Don’t let that happen to France, and to its monarchy, which by his time had a military monarchy that was corrupting its aristocratic element by drawing them into the hedonist society of Versailles.
Bossuet concludes his book with a Christian message. “Let us no longer speak of coincidence or fortune,” since “God alone can subject everything to his will.” “While you will see almost all [great empires] falling of their own weakness, you will see religion upheld by its own strength; and you will discern without difficulty where solid greatness lies, and where a man of understanding is to place his hopes.”
Notes
- This isn’t quite accurate. The Apostle Paul explains to the Galatians that “a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Galatians 2:15-16). Christians receive “the Spirit” not by “the works of the law” but by “the hearing of faith” (Galatians 3:2). This in no way exempts Christians from God’s law, the sum of which is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. It rather puts law in its rightful place, subordinate to the Spirit of God.
- Bossuet would have benefited from revisiting Ephesians 2:11-22, in which passage Paul explains that Jesus has “broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility” between Jews and Gentiles, having “abolished in His flesh the enmity” between the two, “that he might reconcile both unto God” and make them “fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.”
- Charles de Gaulle took the same lesson, as seen in his book, Vers l’armée de métier. Decades later, he said to André Malraux, “I understand Rome.”
- Famously, Montesquieu will commend the peaceful commercial republican regime, not military republicanism or military despotism, as a means of overcoming Europe’s chronic civil and international wars, wars spurred not only by aristocratic pride but by Christian zealotry.
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