Lamennais

Great minds and ardent hearts—those people who leave behind a deep trace—manifest in their lives with particular vividness those very stages of development that are traversed, to a greater or lesser degree, by all ordinary people.

These stages are as follows: 1) Childhood faith, instilled from without, complete submission to authority, calm and confident communion with all around. 2) Deepening into the essence of this faith that was instilled and accepted on trust, unspoken doubts about its truth, and a particular zeal in affirming and spreading it. Approval and praise from those around. 3) An attempt to purify the teaching accepted on faith from everything false, superfluous, and superstitious, to improve it and base one’s life upon it; a break with those who formerly sympathized, their ill will, and finally, 4) complete liberation from the teaching accepted on trust, recognition only of what accords with reason and conscience, awareness of one’s solitude among people and unity with God, the lofty and strong love of a small number of close ones, and the fear and hatred of the majority—and the end.

All people, whether they wish it or not, pass through these stages more or less consciously. First, 1) complete trust, then 2) sometimes barely perceptible, yet still doubts, then 3) sometimes the feeblest, yet still attempts to somehow establish one’s own understanding of life, and finally, 4) standing face to face with God, complete knowledge of the truth, solitude—and the end.

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

Félicité Lamennais was born in Brittany in 1782. In 1816 he was ordained a priest. Although Lamennais was always religious from childhood, he did not become a priest solely by his own wish. From Lamennais’s letters it is evident that he became a priest only because his family insisted on it. His relatives, seeing his religiosity, wanted to put it to use for the church. And indeed, having become a priest, Lamennais devoted all his powers to the service of his Catholic Church, in the truth of which he did not doubt. Lamennais saw the decline of faith in society and among the people and strove to raise it, proving its truth primarily by the fact that Catholicism is the most widespread religion, recognized by the majority of humanity. According to his view at that time, truth is not grasped by an individual person; truth is grasped only by the aggregate of people. The greatest number recognizes Catholicism, and therefore the truth of Catholicism is indubitable. And since Catholicism represents the highest truth, the state too must submit to this truth. A state cannot exist without religion, religion cannot exist without a church, a church cannot exist without a pope.

Such was Lamennais’s conviction at that time. In this spirit he wrote one of his first works: Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion. This was the first phase of Lamennais’s spiritual state—faith without doubts. Since Lamennais placed his hopes in state power as the defender of the Catholic religion, these ideas brought him close to the extreme defenders of monarchical power, and he began to write for the newspaper Le Conservateur. In this newspaper he occupied an exceptional position, and while his colleagues wrote in defense and support of monarchy, Lamennais always and above all had religion in mind; monarchical power interested him only insofar as it could contribute to the triumph of Catholicism. But soon Lamennais saw that the interests of power and religion are not only not the same but are for the most part opposed; so that sometimes it is even profitable for the authorities to oppress religion. Seeing this, Lamennais changed his view and, moving to another newspaper, began to demand from the authorities not help for religion and alliance with it, but complete freedom and non-interference in religious affairs. Lamennais could not stop there either and soon went still further, demanding the separation of church and state and, condemning governmental power, involuntarily took the side of the revolutionaries, justifying the revolution of 1830. This was the second phase of Lamennais’s spiritual state.

During the revolution of 1830, Lamennais, in collaboration with Montalembert and Lacordaire, began publishing the journal L’Avenir (“The Future”), in which the following was preached: 1) separation of church and state, 2) guarantees of personal liberty, 3) abolition of the House of Peers and the extremes of centralization, 4) abolition of the obligatory property qualification and establishment of universal suffrage. In this newspaper he expressed the idea that just as state authority should not interfere in church affairs, so church authority should not participate in state affairs, and therefore the pope should renounce secular power and the clergy should refuse state salaries. Such ideas could not find sympathy in Rome. Foreseeing this, Lamennais went there, hoping to persuade the papal authority of the necessity of such concessions for the sake of keeping the peoples in the power of the church. But in Rome Lamennais was not received by the pope, and no answer was given to his proposal. Already greatly disillusioned in his hope of renewing Catholicism, Lamennais returned to Paris and for some time continued to publish his journal, in which he expressed the idea of the necessity of changing the forms of Catholicism in order for it to continue to hold power over the peoples. This was the third phase.

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

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

The fundamental idea of Lamennais, which he expressed in all his books, articles, and speeches (when he was a deputy in parliament), is that the people should themselves be the deciders of their own destinies and the organizers of their own life. Just as in his defense of the Catholic Church, he is guided by the same principle: that the bearer of truth and moral perfection cannot be an individual person but the aggregate of people—the crowd, the nation, and in its limit, the human race. While granting full power to the people, Lamennais nonetheless never ceased proving that no external reforms or changes in the sphere of state organization can improve the condition of the people if the people do not constantly strive toward moral perfection. “Desire only what is just,” he told the people. “Justice will always triumph. Respect the rights even of those who trample on your rights. Let the safety of all without exception be sacred to you. Duty is obligatory for all and always. If you once violate duty, where will you stop? Disorder is not helped by disorder. What do your enemies accuse you of? Of wanting to replace their dominion with your dominion, of wanting to abuse power as they abuse it—of harboring thoughts of revenge, tyrannical intentions. Hence the indefinite 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.

Toward socialist and communist systems Lamennais always had a negative attitude. 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 primarily because all of them had only material goals in view and did not recognize the necessity of religion. In any social restructuring he considered necessary not material but spiritual goals, achieved through the victory of reason and duty over the passions.

At the beginning of the 1850s Lamennais fell ill, and, feeling that his illness was fatal, he summoned his friend Barbet and appointed him as manager during his life and illness at home, and after his death as executor of his will. Besides this, he left a written statement that he wished to be buried among the poor and as a poor man; on his grave he asked that no monument be placed; his body was to be carried directly to the cemetery and not brought into a church. Despite all the attempts of the clergy to return him to the church, Lamennais, as before, answered all such attempts with a gentle 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 his conscious life. His last words were: “I feel that the end has come; one must submit to God’s will; it will be good for me when I am with Him.” And in the very last minutes he repeated several times: “This is a happy moment.” He died on February 27, 1854.

The work of Lamennais—l’oeuvre, as the French say—is great and far from fully appreciated. He, like all great minds and ardent hearts, blazed the path along which humanity inevitably will go and is already going: the path of liberation from external faith divorced from life, falsely Christian, and the establishment of that fundamental Christian teaching which transforms both the life of the individual person and of all human society.

—L. N. Tolstoy

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Translator’s Notes:

• Félicité de Lamennais (1782–1854) was a French Catholic priest, philosopher, and political theorist who underwent a dramatic evolution from ultramontane defender of papal supremacy to excommunicated critic of the institutional church.
• His Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion (1817–1823) was a major work arguing for the necessity of religious authority in society, making him initially a champion of the papacy.
• L’Avenir (“The Future”), the journal he founded with Montalembert and Lacordaire in 1830, adopted the motto “God and Liberty” and advocated liberal Catholicism—separation of church and state, freedom of the press, freedom of education, and universal suffrage.
• Pope Gregory XVI’s encyclical Mirari Vos (1832) condemned the ideas of L’Avenir without naming Lamennais directly. His Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer, 1834) was then specifically condemned by the encyclical Singulari Nos as “small in size but immense in perversity.”
• Tolstoy’s four-stage schema of religious development—(1) inherited faith, (2) defensive zeal masking doubt, (3) attempted reform, (4) independence from institutional religion—clearly reflects his own spiritual autobiography as much as Lamennais’s.
• The description of Lamennais’s death—refusing the last rites, asking to be buried among the poor without ceremony, dying with “living faith in God”—exemplifies the kind of authentic, personal Christianity Tolstoy advocated against institutional forms.
• Lamennais’s warning against revolutionary violence and his insistence on spiritual transformation as the prerequisite for social change anticipates Tolstoy’s own philosophy of nonviolent resistance.