Reason and Reasonableness in French Ecclesiastical Scholarship

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University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Huntington Library Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org Reason and Reasonableness in French Ecclesiastical Scholarship Jean-Louis Quantin abstract Enlightenment philosophers, who pushed ecclesiastical scholarship to the margins of French culture, denigrated it as impervious to reason and entirely based on memory. In the seventeenth century, however, the historical and philological criticism practiced by such French scholars as Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) and Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637–1698) appealed to an elaborate epistemology that was much influenced by Cartesianism. Moreover, they aimed at purifying Catholicism from what they regarded as legendary and superstitious accretions, bringing it back to primitive truth. Jean-Louis Quantin argues that, judging by the cultural values of their own time, these scholars were both intensely religious and eminently reasonable. keywords: Cornelius Jansen; Jean Le Rond d’Alembert; Jean de Launoy; François Lamy; Port-Royal Logic ! it is well known that érudition,1 particularly when pursued by members of religious orders, occupied a low status in the French Enlightenment division of knowledge. The words érudits and érudition were redefined at the time, and both terms acquired slightly pejorative connotations, which they have kept in French until the present day. Dictionaries of synonyms—a major interest of Enlightenment linguistics—offer clues to these revised meanings. Condillac, in the one that he compiled about 1760 for the education of the prince of Parma, explained that érudition was Abbreviations for patristic collections and reference works are those of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. E. A. Livingstone, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1997). Other abbreviations: ACDF: Vatican City, Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; AN: Paris, Archives nationales; AT: Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 2nd ed., 11 vols. in 13 (Paris, 1964–74); BL: British Library; BNF: Bibliothèque nationale de France; SVEC: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century; UPR: Utrecht, Rijksarchief, Port-Royal collection. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 1. The word has no exact English equivalent. It refers both to (primarily historical and philological) scholarship and to erudition. Pp. 401–436. ©2011 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2011.74.3.401. huntington library quarterly | vol. 74, no. 3 401 ! 402 jean-louis quantin “rather learning than science,” in as much as “it does not necessarily compose a system, and is properly a collection of researches on language and history.”2 As for érudit (which as a substantive only came into use in the eighteenth century), it did not mean someone who has érudition (the word for that was savant) but someone “who sports an ill-digested and ill-chosen erudition.”3 In his 1751 preliminary discourse to the Encyclopédie, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert excluded érudition from the realm of reason no fewer than three times: first, in what he called “the encyclopedia of knowledge”; second, in his account of the sociology of knowledge; and third, in his sketch of the history of knowledge.4 In outlining the encyclopedia of knowledge, he placed the parts of human knowledge in one of three categories—memory, reason, or imagination—according to the faculties of the mind connected with their apprehension. He classified knowledge of the various branches of history under the faculty of memory. Reason comprised philosophy in all its forms. The fine arts made up the final category, ruled by the imagination.5 This model had already been developed by Diderot in the “Système des connaissances humaines” (System of human knowledge) included in the Encyclopédie’s “Prospectus” at the end of 1750.6 Having classified knowledge under three headings, d’Alembert then pointed out that this threefold division was reflected sociologically in the contemporary world of learning, in which érudits, philosophes, and beaux-esprits (whom d’Alembert also described as “poets”) rivaled for cultural supremacy. Memory was the érudits’ forte, while philosophers had penetration (sagacité), and poets gave delight (agrément).7 The three-part division surfaces a final time in d’Alembert’s sketch of the development of knowledge since the Renaissance. He stressed that humankind had first cultivated érudition, then literature, and eventually philosophy. Érudition came first when Europe began to emerge from the age of ignorance and superstition—this was how d’Alembert saw the Middle Ages—because memory was the easiest faculty to cultivate.8 2. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Dictionnaire des synonymes de la langue française, vol. 3 of Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris, 1951), s.v. “Science,” 509–10. 3. Ibid., s.v. “Savant, savante,” 508–9. On Condillac’s “militant” lexicography, see Luciano Guerci, Condillac storico: Storia e politica nel “Cours d’études pour l’instruction du prince de Parme” (Milan and Naples, 1978), 134–35, 147–48. Cf. Gabriel Girard, Synonymes françois, leurs différentes significations, et le choix qu’il en faut faire pour parler avec justesse, new ed. by Nicolas Beauzée, 2 vols. (Liege, Belgium, 1775), s.v. “Littérature. Érudition. Savoir. Science. Doctrine,” 1:136–37, and s.v. “Érudit. Docte. Savant,” 2:279–80. 4. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, 28 vols. (Paris, 1751–72), 1:ii–xxxiv. See also Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie, ed. Michel Malherbe (Paris, 2000); Discours préliminaire des éditeurs de 1751 et articles de l’Encyclopédie, introduits par la querelle avec le Journal de Trévoux, ed. Martine Groult (Paris, 1999); and Robert Darnton, “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 191–213, 277–79. 5. D’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire,” 1:xvi–xviii. 6. Denis Diderot, “Système des connaissances humaines,” and “Système figuré,” in “Prospectus de l’Encyclopédie,” in Diderot, Encyclopédie I (lettre A), vol. 5 of Oeuvres complètes, ed. John Lough and Jacques Proust (Paris, 1976), 105–18, 121. 7. D’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire,” 1:xviii. 8. Ibid., 1:xix–xx. reason and reasonableness ! 403 D’Alembert’s grand récit belonged to the typically French genre of the history “of the progress of the human mind,” which was itself a paradoxical effect of the Cartesian contempt for history.9 Descartes himself took pride of place in d’Alembert’s scheme, not for the contents of his thought but as a revolutionary figure who definitively emancipated philosophy from authority.10 Thus, although the Encyclopedists referred to Bacon’s famous call for a historia literarum et artium, their approach tended to discount the gathering of historical knowledge, in contrast to the Baconian tradition.11 Bacon had stimulated the project of historia literaria, which had first emerged in the Renaissance and especially flourished in late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury Germany.12 Historia literaria was steeped in erudition, and it was taught in German universities as a practical knowledge, according to the axiom that “nothing is known, except what is known historically.”13 The history of a discipline was regarded as an essential component of it. Bacon’s own vision of historia literaria was partly modeled on the historia ecclesiastica by the Magdeburg Centuriators, the masterpiece of Lutheran scholarship.14 Nothing could be more different from d’Alembert’s model.15 His low regard for ecclesiastical scholarship was made explicit in the entry “Charity brothers” in the Encyclopédie, in which he pointed out that members of religious orders were not fit for the “higher sciences, such as geometry and physics,” and could only 9. See Yvon Belaval, Leibniz critique de Descartes (Paris, 1960), 126–27; and Jean Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain dans la pensée française de Fontenelle à Condorcet (Paris, 1977) (who has, however, very little to say on érudition). 10. Mariafranca Spallanzani, L’arbre et le labyrinthe: Descartes selon l’ordre des Lumières (Paris, 2009). 11. Diderot, “Système des connaissances humaines,” 106 (reprinted as “Explication détaillée du système des connoissances humaines” in Encyclopédie, 1:xlvii, after the “Discours préliminaire”). See Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, book 2, heading 4, in vol. 2 of Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London, 1864), 198–201. On Diderot and d’Alembert’s use (and misconstruction) of Bacon, see Darnton, “Philosophers,” 199. For the contemporary polemics over the Encyclopedists’ indebtedness to Bacon, see the articles published by the Jesuit Guillaume François Berthier in the Journal de Trévoux (January to March 1751), conveniently reprinted in d’Alembert, Discours préliminaire, ed. Groult, 33–54; and Diderot’s replies in Encyclopédie, 1:27–33. See also John N. Pappas, Berthier’s Journal de Trévoux and the Philosophes, SVEC 3 (Geneva, 1957), 167–80. 12. Donald R. Kelley, “Writing Cultural History in Early Modern Europe: Christophe Milieu and His Project,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 342–65; Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin, “Introduction,” in History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute, ed. Ligota and Quantin (Oxford, 2006), 17–27 (section written by Ligota). 13. Paul Nelles, “Historia litteraria at Helmstedt: Books, Professors, and Students in the Early Enlightenment University,” in Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Helmut Zedelmeier and Martin Mulsow (Tübingen, Germany, 2001), 147–76. Quod nihil sciatur, nisi quod historice scitur (174) is the title of an inaugural oration delivered in 1726. 14. See Anthony Grafton, “Where Was Salomon’s House? Ecclesiastical History and the Intellectual Origins of Bacon’s New Atlantis” (2001), repr. in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 98–113, esp. 108–11. On the history of science in Bacon’s time as a part of historia sacra, see also Nicholas Popper, “‘Abraham, Planter of Mathematics’: Histories of Mathematics and Astrology in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 87–106. 15. On d’Alembert’s own practice as a historian of science, see Judith Shklar, “Jean d’Alembert and the Rehabilitation of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981): 642–64. ! 404 jean-louis quantin cultivate “matters of érudition,” partly for practical reasons but also because such studies are “those that require the slightest amount of intellectual concentration.”16 ! Ecclesiastical Scholarship and Positive Theology Érudits in the golden age of French ecclesiastical scholarship—which roughly coincides with the reign of Louis XIV—would seem substantially to have anticipated d’Alembert’s division of knowledge, since they meant to provide materials to theologians, in most cases in a decidedly Gallican and Augustinian, if not Jansenist, spirit.17 Theology, as it was understood by Gallicans and Jansenists, gave short shrift to reason. In the “Liber prooemialis” to volume 2 of his Augustinus, “On reason and authority in theological matters,” Jansen claimed that “reason” or “understanding” (he used both words interchangeably in this context) was the proper faculty for philosophy, but memory for theology.18 Theology was built on “originary revelation,” as it had come down from the beginning of Christianity. The apostles, and the church fathers after them, were careful to transmit unchanged to their disciples not only the substance “but even the very words” of what they had themselves been taught.19 And Jansen, echoing Tertullian, trenchantly denounced undue reliance on philosophical reasoning as the origin of all heresies.20 In a groundbreaking article, Henri Gouhier suggested that the type of theology advocated by Jansen and his followers (“positive theology,” as it was called, as opposed to scholastic theology) substituted history for philosophy as its handmaiden.21 One could even go further and say that positive theology was conceived as a particular kind of history. As the Carthusian Bonaventure d’Argonne put it in his patristic handbook: “we know religion through history, and Tradition, which is our ground, is a part of ecclesiastical history.”22 Bernard Lamy—one of the exponents of what has been called “Cartesianized Augustinianism” within the French Oratory— was even clearer in his influential Entretiens sur les sciences: “Theology is only a history of what God revealed to humankind or of what has always been believed in the church. 16. D’Alembert, “Frères de la Charité,” in Encyclopédie, 7:301. 17. By “Gallican,” I mean a commitment, not only to the so-called liberties of the Gallican church against papal claims, but also more generally to the distinctive character of French Catholicism, as opposed to the Mediterranean or baroque forms of the Counter-Reformation. Concrete examples will be found below. Seventeenth-century “Augustinians” regarded Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings as the final expression of the faith of the church on grace and predestination. These included, but were not limited to, Jansenists, who expressly defended the orthodoxy of Jansen’s Augustinus as a faithful exposition of Augustine’s doctrine. Bossuet is the classic example of an Augustinian, but not Jansenist, theologian. Pascal was both an Augustinian and a Jansenist. 18. Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus, 3 vols. in 1 (Louvain, 1640), vol. 2, “Liber prooemialis,” chap. 4, col. 7. 19. Ibid., col. 8. 20. Ibid. Cf. Tertullian, Aduersus Hermogenem, 8.3 (CCSL 1:404). 21. Henri Gouhier, “La crise de la théologie au temps de Descartes” (1954), repr. in La pensée religieuse de Descartes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1972), 279–309, esp. 286. 22. Bonaventure d’Argonne, De la lecture des Pères de l’Église, ou méthode pour les lire utilement, En quatre parties (Paris, 1697), 202. reason and reasonableness ! 405 Therefore, ecclesiastical history is the chief part of it.”23 Although Lamy was careful not to exclude philosophy altogether, he gave it only a very limited role, that of helping to expound revealed truth “orderly and clearly.”24 D’Alembert thus faithfully echoed Gallican orthodoxy, although with a quite different set of implicit values, in the section on memory in his preliminary discourse, when he made theological tradition the proper object of ecclesiastical history: “History, in as much as it relates to God, comprises either revelation or tradition, and is accordingly divided in sacred history and ecclesiastical history.”25 Revealed (as opposed to natural) theology was fundamentally historical (“it belongs to history through the dogmas that it teaches”), although d’Alembert stressed that it also used reason to draw consequences from revealed dogmas.26 Scholars fully espoused this historical conception of theology. In his Traité des études monastiques (Treatise of monastic studies; 1691), Jean Mabillon unambiguously preferred positive theology (“which only relies on scripture and the tradition of councils and fathers”) to scholastic theology (“which also appeals to human reason, to philosophy, and to other sciences”). He insisted that he did not mean to condemn the “use” but only the “abuse” of reason in theology, but he pointed out that the danger of abuse was intrinsic to reason itself, which faith should “restrain and repress” (retenir et réprimer). He rejoiced therefore that, in contemporary France, scholastic theology itself “now paid less heed to reasoning than to authority.”27 In Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont’s Memoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siecles (Memoirs useful for the ecclesiastical history of the first six centuries), there is, apropos the School Edict of the Emperor Julian, a remarkable digression on the legitimacy of studying pagan literature. Tillemont justified this solely on the ground that such study was necessary to understanding patristic writings, which otherwise might be neglected: “And thus one would forsake the source of the tradition of the Church, by which truth is known, and one would be reduced to the deceitful glimmer of our imaginations and of human reasoning, which we know by reason as well as by experience to be a source of all kinds of aberrations in faith and morals.”28 23. [Bernard Lamy], Entretiens sur les sciences, dans lesquels, outre la méthode d’étudier, on apprend comme l’on se doit servir des Sciences, pour se faire l’esprit juste, et le coeur droit, et pour se rendre utile à l’Eglise (Grenoble, France, [1683]), 7th dialogue, 307. This famous definition has already been quoted by Gouhier, “Crise,” 293, and François Laplanche, “La controverse religieuse au XVIIe siècle et la naissance de l’histoire,” in La controverse religieuse et ses forms, ed. Alain Le Boulluec (Paris, 1995), 373–404 at 402–3. On Lamy, see Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, ed. Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna (Paris, 2004), s.v. (by McKenna). 24. Lamy, Entretiens, 316–18. See also 17–18, 307–8, 328. 25. D’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire,” 1:xvii. 26. Ibid. On d’Alembert and theology, see also below. 27. Jean Mabillon, Traité des études monastiques (Paris, 1691), 207, 208, 210. 28. Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, Memoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclesiastique des six premiers siecles, 16 vols. (Paris, 1693–1712), 7:348. On this text, see Bruno Neveu, Un historien à l’école de PortRoyal: Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont, 1637–1698 (The Hague, 1966), 249–50; Jean-Louis Quantin, “Port-Royal et l’ancienne théologie: Sur une bévue de Le Maistre de Sacy,” Chroniques de Port-Royal 56 (2006): 25–48 at 47–48. On the publication history of Tillemont’s Memoires and of his Histoire des empereurs et des autres princes qui ont regné durant les six premiers siecles de l’Église, 6 vols. (Paris, ! 406 jean-louis quantin The difficulty with Lamy’s definition of theology, of course, was its double object (“a history of what God revealed to humankind or of what has always been believed in the Church”). The suggestion that these histories were identical was already problematic in the seventeenth century, if only because Protestant writers, from the Magdeburg Centuriators onward, had taken great pains to trace the progressive corruption of original truth after the apostolic age. For theologians such as Bossuet—the great champion of Gallican orthodoxy—the role of scholarship was precisely to confirm and document against every possible objection the notion that Catholic doctrine had never changed.29 By the same token, a doctrine that was not grounded on ancient testimonies could never become a point of faith. A revealing controversy concerned the Assumption of the Virgin. This doctrine had not yet been officially defined by the Roman Catholic Church (it took until 1950 for Pope Pius XII to do so), but it was commonly taught by theologians and the feast associated with it had been celebrated on August 15 since the Middle Ages. In 1668, the cathedral chapter of Paris decided to reintroduce into its martyrology for that day an extract from the Carolingian martyrologist Usuard, who explained that the church celebrated the feast of the “Dormition” of the Virgin, but that the fate of her body after death was unknown.30 Usuard had been severely rebuked for his skepticism in Caesar Baronius’s Annales, the most authoritative exposition of the post-Tridentine view of church history. “The Roman Church,” Baronius claimed in 1588, “has always used the word Assumption,” not Dormition.31 New manuscript discoveries quickly made this assertion untenable. The German Jesuit Jakob Gretser then suggested that “the Assumption of the Mother of God in body and soul was perhaps not as clear to [ancient martyrologists] as it is for us today: because truth is gradually more and more brought to light and revealed, so that what was regarded as somewhat obscure in the first centuries, is set in a clear light in later times.”32 This reflected the positive view of church history characteristic of French Jesuit scholarship, according to which truth unfolded with time.33 Claude Joly, a canon of Paris with close scholarly links to the Benedictine congregation of St. Maur, wrote an erudite work to defend the chapter’s decision.34 He confuted Baronius but also rejected Gretser’s point: in order for truth to be brought more and more to light, 1690–1738), the “profane” section of his work (which was detached from the whole because of difficulties with theological censorship), see Neveu, Tillemont, 198–212. 29. See Jean-Louis Quantin, “Bossuet et l’érudition de son temps,” in Bossuet: Le verbe et l’histoire (1704–2004), ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris, 2006), 65–103. 30. Le martyrologe d’Usuard, ed. Jacques Dubois (Brussels, 1965), 284. 31. Baronius, Annales (1588–1607), 38 vols. (Lucca, Italy, 1738–59), 1:348 (year 48, § 16). All subsequent references are to this edition. 32. Georgius Codinus Curopalata, de Officiis et officialibus magnae ecclesiae et aulae Constantinopolitanae (Paris, 1625), 263. 33. Marc Fumaroli, “Temps de croissance et temps de corruption: Les deux Antiquités dans l’érudition jésuite française du XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle 131 (1981): 149–68. 34. On Joly, see [Jean-Pierre Niceron], Memoires pour servir à l’histoire des hommes illustres dans la Republique des lettres, vol. 9 (Paris, 1729), 116–27 (122–25 on the Usuard controversy), and vol. 10, pt. 2 (1731), 271–72. reason and reasonableness ! 407 “there is need that previously unknown ancient testimonies should come to light and teach us what we did not know.”35 This was what Leibniz called “the Gallican resolution of the faith,” which was ultimately “in the historical tradition of ecclesiastical antiquity,” as opposed to “the Roman or curial resolution,” which was in the present infallibility of the pope.36 One of the censors who reported on Joly’s book for the Holy Office in Rome, Mario Alberizzi—later a papal nuncio and a cardinal—denied that new historical evidence was necessary for the Assumption to be more clearly known: “As Suarez rightly observes . . . , the Church has often defined similar controversies by its own authority, with the assistance of the Holy Ghost, without any new explicit revelation.”37 It would seem therefore that Gallican ecclesiastical scholarship was doubly impervious to reason—not only as a branch of érudition but more specifically as it was conceived and cultivated within a doctrinal framework and with religious rhetoric that left hardly any positive role for reason in the pursuit of religious truth. The utmost that reason could do in this field, as Tillemont suggested, was to recognize its own inadequacy. Moreover, if the objects of érudition, like those of theology, stood outside the realm of reason, it seemed logically to follow that érudition, like theology, was not susceptible of progress. Pascal made the point forcefully in 1651 in his fragmentary “Preface to a treatise on the Vacuum,” in which, partly, it would seem, under the influence of Jansen’s Augustinus,38 he opposed “purely historical” subjects, which are wholly to be found in existing books (he instanced history, geography, law, languages, “and above all theology”) and “those sciences that depend on experience and reasoning” (such as geometry, arithmetic, music, physics, medicine, architecture). To disciplines of the first category, “it is not possible to add anything,” whereas the other ones are perfected through time.39 In Essai sur les éléments de philosophie, which he published in 1759 and which he meant to serve as a general introduction to the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert likewise explained that érudition and theology were—together with metaphysics, if for a 35. Claude Joly, De verbis Usuardi, quae in martyrologio Ecclesiae parisiensis referuntur in festo Assumptionis B. Mariae Virginis, die xv. mensis augusti, dissertatio (Sens, France, 1669), 147. The controversy is included by Mabillon in his “Liste des principales difficultez qui se rencontrent dans la lecture des Conciles, des Peres, et de l’histoire ecclesiastique, par ordre de siecles,” appended to Traité des études, 405. 36. “Leibnitiana siue Meditationes, Obseruationes et Crises uariae Leibnitianae Gallico et Latino sermone expressae. Ex Otio Hanouerano Felleri” (1718), repr. in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Opera omnia, ed. L. Dutens, 6 vols. (Geneva, 1768), vol. 5, pt. 1, pp. 307–8. 37. ACDF, S.O., Stanza Storica G4-d, fol. 113r. This censura was read at the meeting of the Holy Office of 17 September 1670 (ACDF, S.O., Decreta 1670, fol. 282r–v). See Francisco Suárez, Commentariorum ac Disputationum in tertiam partem D. Thomae, Tomus Secundus (Venice, 1600), disp. 3, sect. 6, p. 32; Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1987), esp. 42–48, and notes, 204–7; Bruno Neveu, L’erreur et son juge: Remarques sur les censures doctrinales à l’époque moderne (Naples, 1993), esp. chap. 2, “Antiquitas redux,” 129–238. On Alberizzi, see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1 (1960), s.v. (by A. Petrucci). 38. See Jean Mesnard’s introduction to this text in Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mesnard, 4 vols. (Paris, 1964–92), 2:775–76. 39. Pascal, “Fragment de préface pour un Traité du vide,” ibid., 2:777–79. ! 408 jean-louis quantin different reason—the only branches of knowledge in which there could be no discovery: érudition “because facts are neither guessed at nor invented,” theology “because the deposit of the faith is unalterable and there could be no new revelation.”40 The parallel is all the more striking as d’Alembert could not have known Pascal’s fragment, which was only published in 1779. Here again, seventeenth-century Augustinians and eighteenth-century philosophes would seem to agree: ecclesiastical scholarship had nothing to do with reason.41 Diderot and d’Alembert ironically invoked the principle of theological fixity, as it had been defended by Bossuet and his like, to explain why the Encyclopédie would devote entries to philosophers but not to the church fathers (whose lives scholars like Tillemont had been at such pains to chronicle): whereas philosophers had been “creators of opinions,” the fathers, “who had been entrusted with the precious and inviolable deposit of faith and tradition, neither could teach, nor ought to have taught, men anything new.” Therefore, they had no place in the Encyclopédie.42 ! Legends and the Argument e Silentio Even Voltaire was willing to concede that Catholicism in Louis XIV’s France had become much less superstitious than it had been in the past (and than it still was in other countries): “supposititious saints, spurious miracles, spurious relics began to be exploded.”43 Voltaire’s examples of exploded beliefs (the coming of Lazarus and Magdalen to Provence, and Dionysius the Areopagite’s having been the first bishop of Paris) allude to the works of the great seventeenth-century scholar and divine Jean de Launoy, whom he described as a “hard-working savant and a fearless critic. He disabused people of several errors, and particularly of the existence of several saints.”44 In his 1762 Treatise of toleration (during the period when his published writings, at any rate, were most favorable to Jansenism), Voltaire credited the Jansenists with having especially contributed to “purifying religion” of “superstitions,” and thus prepared for 40. D’Alembert, Essai sur les éléments de philosophie, ou sur les principes des connaissances humaines, ed. Catherine Kintzler (Paris, 1986), 189. This is the closing sentence of the book, which was first published in 1759, in vol. 4 of d’Alembert’s Mélanges de littérature d’histoire et de philosophie. 41. D’Alembert considered that “the science of historical facts” was connected to philosophy in as much as it was incumbent on philosophy to elaborate the principles of historical criticism—that is, “quels doivent être, suivant la nature des faits, les divers degrés de force dans les témoignages, et d’autorité dans les témoins” (see ibid., 19–20, 22). But, according to him, this was the proper contribution of philosophers, not of érudits—a position that had been anticipated by François Lamy (see note 170 below). 42. “Avertissement des éditeurs,” in Encyclopédie, 3:iv. The Encyclopédie included only a general (and hostile) article “Pere de l’Eglise” by Louis de Jaucourt (12:339–50), which was much indebted to Bayle’s Dictionary. See Pierre Rétat, Le Dictionnaire de Bayle et la lutte philosophique au XVIIIe siècle (Lyon, France, 1971), 412–14. 43. Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV, in Oeuvres historiques, ed. René Pomeau, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1962), chap. 35, p. 1040. 44. Ibid., “Catalogue de la plupart des écrivains français qui ont paru dans le siècle de Louis XIV,” 1180. Cf. Jacques Grès-Gayer, “L’Aristarque de son siècle: Le docteur Jean de Launoy (1601–1678),” in Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu, ed. Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Waquet (Geneva, 2007), 269–85, and “L’électron libre du gallicanisme: Jean de Launoy (1601–1678),” Revue de l’histoire des religions 226 (2009): 517–43. reason and reasonableness ! 409 the ascent of reason.45 Indeed, partly thanks to them, “reason is daily making its way into France, into the shops of tradespeople as well as into the houses of the nobility.”46 The point was reiterated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the last great voltairien of French literature—who was also one of the very first to be called by the newly coined name of intellectuel—Anatole France. In his transparent allegory of French history, Penguin Island, which he published in 1908, Anatole France included a character, Canon Princeteau, whom he clearly modeled on Launoy. Princeteau was “very learned, very austere, and very harsh” and applied “his severe criticism” to Penguin hagiography to such an extent that “he was nicknamed the dislodger of saints.”47 The reference was of burning contemporary relevance. Penguin Island was written not only during the aftermath of the separation of church and state in France but also at the height of the “modernist” crisis, which was largely a crisis about the Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward criticism (primarily, at that time, in biblical exegesis, but also in hagiography).48 Anatole France went on to comment on “the two classic ages of the Penguins” (that is, the French seventeenth and eighteenth centuries): what has not been sufficiently noticed is the way in which rationalist theologians such as Canon Princeteau called into existence the unbelievers of the succeeding age. The former employed their reason to destroy what did not seem to them essential to their religion; they only left untouched the articles of faith strictly speaking. Their intellectual successors, being taught by them how to make use of science and reason, employed them against whatever beliefs remained. Thus rational theology engendered natural philosophy.49 Anatole France’s genealogy is certainly too direct, and the vexata quaestio of the orthodox sources of disbelief would require a long discussion. It will be enough to consider in what sense ecclesiastical scholarship in itself, apart from its unwanted and 45. Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 56C (Oxford, 2000), chap. 20, p. 243. On Voltaire and Jansenism, see Monique Cottret, Jansénismes et Lumières: Pour un autre XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1998), esp. 23–50, and “Voltaire au risque du jansénisme: Le siècle de Louis XIV à l’épreuve du jansénisme,” in Voltaire et le Grand Siècle, ed. Jean Dagen and Anne-Sophie Barrovecchio, SVEC 2006:10 (Oxford, 2006), 387–97. 46. Voltaire, Traité, 244. 47. Anatole France, L’Île des Pingouins, in Oeuvres, ed. Marie-Claire Bancquart, vol. 4, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1994), 103. On Launoy’s nickname, see Jean-Baptiste Thiers, Defensio aduersus Iohannis de Launoy, Constantiensis, Theologi Parisiensis (Paris, 1664), sig. a3v; Menagiana, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (Paris, 1715), 2:210, 4:132–33. 48. The biblical dimension has been most studied: see esp. Émile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste, 2nd ed. (Tournai, Belgium, 1979); François Laplanche, La crise de l’origine: La science catholique des Évangiles et l’histoire au XXe siècle (Paris, 2006); Autour d’un petit livre: Alfred Loisy, cent ans après, ed. François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois (Turnhout, Belgium, 2007). On hagiography, see Bernard Joassart, Hippolyte Delehaye: Hagiographie critique et modernisme, 2 vols. (Brussels, 2002). A. France explicitly referred to the modernist crisis in Île des Pingouins, 105. 49. A. France, Île des Pingouins, 105. ! 410 jean-louis quantin unforeseen consequences, should be regarded, if not as “rationalistic”—the word has too many nineteenth-century overtones—at least as rational. The key notion was indeed criticism, the ascent of which in the last decades of the seventeenth century produced a qualitative mutation in ecclesiastical scholarship. It has already been mentioned that érudition and érudit were not used in French in their modern sense until the eighteenth century. Scholars like Mabillon and Tillemont were normally called critics, and their pursuit criticism, a broad category that comprehended historical as well as textual criticism. In 1713, the Carmelite Honoré de Sainte-Marie defined it in a significantly disorderly fashion: “the art of judging of the facts that make up history, of intellectual works, of the variant readings found in them, of their meaning, of their style, and of their authors.”50 Indeed, the originality of criticism as it was practiced and advocated by Gallican scholars lay more in a general attitude, both intellectual and moral, than in a set of either philological or historical rules. Medieval chroniclers had already practiced source criticism, although, following the model of biblical exegetes, they generally tried to harmonize conflicting accounts rather than to decide which were reliable and which were not.51 Higher criticism was also known. But it was only practiced in polemical contexts, to reject the textual authority produced by an adversary, and when something considerable was at stake. It was definitely not a routine procedure.52 The discrimination between legendary and true accounts, genuine and spurious texts, became a pressing task in the early modern period, in the context of the confessional division of Europe. Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars shared the same critical rules (which often went back to antiquity), although they applied them differently.53 In the preface of his Annales, Baronius assured readers that he had “thoroughly examined” every difficulty, “so that the truth should appear more and more clearly.”54 50. Honoré de Sainte-Marie, Reflexions sur les regles et sur l’usage de la Critique touchant l’Histoire de l’Église (Paris, 1713), 1. Cf. the very similar definition in Louis Moréri, Le Grand Dictionnaire Historique, ou le mélange curieux de l’histoire sacrée et profane, 10 vols. (Paris, 1759), 4:264. 51. See Mireille Chazan, “La méthode critique des historiens dans les chroniques universelles médiévales,” in La méthode critique au Moyen Âge, ed. Chazan and Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout, Belgium, 2006), 223–56; Krzysztof Pomian, “L’histoire de la science et l’histoire de l’histoire” (1975), repr. in Sur l’histoire (Paris, 1999), 121–59 at 133–41; James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal (Baltimore, 2001), 180–87. 52. See François Dolbeau, “Critique d’attribution, critique d’authenticité: Réflexions préliminaires,” Filologia mediolatina 6–7 (1999–2000): 33–61, esp. 40–46. 53. See Anthony Grafton, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus” (1983) and “The Strange Deaths of Hermes and the Sibyls” (1988), repr. in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 145–61, 162–77; Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, N.J., 1990); Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007), esp. 106–12; Gregory B. Lyon, “Baudoin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” in “The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” special issue, Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 2 (2003): 253–72, esp. 265–68; Laplanche, “Controverse.” 54. Baronius, “Praefatio” (1588), in Annalium ecclesiasticorum Caesaris Baronii . . . Apparatus (Lucca, Italy, 1740), 397. reason and reasonableness ! 411 His principles on the hierarchy of sources—to read contemporary writers first and “only to believe recent authors to the extent that they rely on the authority of more ancient ones”—were not different from those of later Gallican scholars.55 When he was accused of being a “hypercritic,”56 Launoy recalled how Baronius had dismissed the medieval legend according to which the Temple of Peace in Rome collapsed on the night that Christ was born. All the ancient historians agreed that the Templum Pacis was only built under Vespasian, after the end of the First Jewish–Roman War. No heed should therefore be paid to a sermon falsely ascribed to Peter Damian, which claimed that there had been such a temple since the days of Romulus. “For what is said by a recent author about such ancient events without the authority of a more ancient author, is despised.”57 Tillemont, one hundred years later, quoted approvingly Baronius’s statement, apropos the legendary martyrdom of Catherine of Alexandria, that it was much better to omit “things that are not altogether certain than to propound one falsehood, even in the middle of true assertions,” since a single falsehood, once detected, was enough to destroy the credit of an historian.58 The principle actually went back to medieval chroniclers.59 Launoy specialized in the argument e silentio—the negative argument, as it was called at the time. Thus, the retreat of St. Bruno and the subsequent foundation of the Carthusian order, in 1086, was said to have been occasioned by the case of a dead Paris doctor, who, in the middle of his own funeral, was heard to confess aloud that he was damned. This dramatic miracle was beloved by Carthusians, who had it painted by Le Sueur about 1645, in the celebrated St. Bruno cycle of the Paris cloister.60 Just at that time, however, Launoy showed that the event was mentioned by none of the ancient authors who had written about Carthusian origins. He compiled a list of seventeen “testimonies,” beginning with Bruno’s own account and ending with Jean de Saint-Victor, in 1322.61 The abbey of Saint-Victor was located in a suburb of Paris, close to where the episode had allegedly taken place, and Jean wrote with care, so that he would “have carefully registered this prodigy, if it had really occurred.”62 He would definitely not have omitted it on purpose, since he belonged himself to a religious order, and members of religious orders are not used to omitting anything that shows 55. Baronius, “Ordo qui seruandus proponitur in historia Ecclesiastica peruestiganda,” in Stefano Zen, Baronio storico: Controriforma e crisi del metodo umanistico (Naples, 1994), 354. On Baronius’s use of historical sources, see Baronio e le sue fonti: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Sora 10–13 ottobre 2007, ed. Luigi Guglia (Sora, Italy, 2009). 56. Launoy was called “Hypercriticus” by Thiers, Defensio, sig. a5r and 169. 57. Baronius, Annales, 1:4 (year 1, § 12). Jean de Launoy, De auctoritate negantis argumenti Dissertatio, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1662), 237. The sermon in question, “Sermo I in Natiuitate Domini,” is in fact by Nicholas of Clairvaux (see §1, PL 184, 827–28, for the passage quoted by Baronius). 58. Annales, 3:445–46 (year 307, § 33); Tillemont, Memoires, 5:447–48. 59. See the texts quoted by Berthold Lasch, Das Erwachen und die Entwickelung der historischen Kritik im Mittelalter (vom VI.–XII. Jahrhundert) (Breslau, 1887), 45, 46, 48, 109. 60. See Alain Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur (Paris, 1987), 186–216, esp. 196–200. 61. Jean de Launoy, Defensa Romani Breviarii correctio circa historiam Sancti Brunonis (Paris, 1646), 11–64. 62. Ibid., 63–64. ! 412 jean-louis quantin the superiority of the religious over the secular life.63 The story had thus appeared more than two hundred and forty years after the foundation of the Carthusian order, and was consequently fabulous.64 Launoy considered that the argument e silentio was conclusive whenever there was no witness to a fact “for more or less two hundred years.”65 The destructive consequences of this rule, if applied indiscriminately, alarmed even some Gallican theologians, such as Jean-Baptiste Thiers, a curé with a keen interest in liturgical and pastoral reform, who was an adept of the so-called rigorist movement, inspired by the penitential discipline of the early church. Thiers protested that “the authority of a single weighty, learned, accurate, and clever writer, however modern, however recent” was enough to establish a fact, since it was “highly probable” (probabilissimum) that this author had used ancient sources unknown to us.66 Such a priori reasoning would have made the argument e silentio practically useless. It was therefore firmly rejected by Mabillon, who argued that “to try to forbid the use of the negative argument was tantamount to disarming truth against lie and error.”67 Mabillon, however, grew more cautious with age. In his Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, he argued that the passage in Prudentius of Troyes’s Panegyric on St. Maura, where “extreme unction” is mentioned, “seems to be interpolated,” as the phrase unctio extrema did not occur in any writer prior to the end of the twelfth century (Prudentius died in 861).68 On this critical question, then, Mabillon had no qualms about siding with the great Huguenot controversialist Jean Daillé.69 In his later Treatise of monastic studies, however, he warned against the “abuse” of the argument e silentio and referred approvingly to Thiers’s work.70 Following Thiers, he stressed 63. Ibid., 64. 64. Ibid., 69–70. See also 147. 65. Jean de Launoy, De auctoritate negantis argumenti, 178. 66. Jean-Baptiste Thiers, Exercitatio aduersus Iohannis de Launoy, 182–83. This was a belated confutation of Launoy’s “Dissertatio, in qua probatur, negatiuum argumentum in quaestionibus ex facto, usu, et traditione pendentibus multum habere roboris,” which had appeared as an appendix to his Dissertatio duplex, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1650), sep. paginated, 1–24. Launoy replied by publishing a separate, enlarged edition, De auctoritate negantis argumenti, with an “Appendix, in qua Ioannis Baptistae Thiers exercitatio adversus eandem Dissertationem expenditur et castigatur,” 179–289. Thiers then published his Defensio (see above, note 47), which mainly consists of personal abuse. On Thiers, see Jean-Louis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les Pères de l’Église: Un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris, 1999), esp. 474–86. 67. Mabillon, Mémoires pour justifier le procédé que j’ay tenu dans l’édition des Vies de nos saints, in Paul Denis, “Dom Mabillon et sa méthode historique: Mémoire justificatif sur son édition des Acta Sanctorum O.S.B.,” Revue Mabillon 6 (1910–11): 23, 50. See also Mabillon, Brieves reflections sur quelques regles de l’histoire, ed. Blandine Barret-Kriegel (Paris, 1990), 126–31 (taking care to correct this faulty edition as noted below, note 97). On this controversy, see below. 68. Mabillon’s preface to Luc d’Achery and Jean Mabillon, Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti. Saeculum I (Paris, 1668), xlviii. The text (BHL 5725) had been published by Nicolas Camuzat, Promptuarium sacrarum antiquitatum Tricassinae dioecesis (Troyes, France, 1610), fols. 40v–47r (see fol. 47r for unctio extrema), to whom Mabillon refers. 69. Jean Daillé, De duobus Latinorum ex unctione Sacramentis, confirmatione et extrema ut vocant unctione disputatio (Geneva, 1659), 78 (where the name “extrema unctio” is only one of the arguments against the text). 70. Mabillon, Traité des études, pt. 2, chap. 13, pp. 295–98 (see also chap. 8, p. 234). The text is identical in the second edition (Paris, 1692), 1:332–33, 2:40–44. reason and reasonableness ! 413 that one should distinguish between “a purely negative argument” and “a negative argument combined with a positive one”: “it is much easier to reason falsely in the first kind than in the second.”71 As an example of a purely negative argument, he instanced his own reasoning about Prudentius’s Panegyric on St. Maura, twenty years earlier.72 Mabillon did not supply a reference, but it is very likely that this tacit retractatio had been influenced by the recent posthumous publication of Jacques de Sainte-Beuve’s reply to Daillé, where the genuineness of Prudentius’s passage was strongly maintained (although without addressing the problem of the phrase extrema unctio).73 Sainte-Beuve, who had died in 1677, was a highly regarded divine of Augustinian and rigorist tendencies. He had been close to the Jansenists, although he had refused to follow them in their open rebellion against church authorities after 1661.74 As a student of theology in Reims, in 1652, Mabillon had been taught the lectures on grace that had previously been dictated by Sainte-Beuve at the Sorbonne.75 Mabillon significantly emphasized that “the purely negative argument” should be used with much caution, “especially on important matters” (“important” in this context clearly referred to theology).76 The historical evolution of extreme unction attracted considerable interest in France at the time, both because of controversies with Protestants and for its pastoral implications.77 These considerations were not enough to make Mabillon reverse his judgment, but they made him pause. His conclusion was that “one may nonetheless doubt reasonably in such cases, until one discovers some new light” to decide either way.78 When he came again to the Laudatio Maurae in his Annales Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, at the very end of his life, he merely pointed out the difficulty without any comment.79 Tillemont, who thought that “negative arguments by themselves hardly amount to demonstrative proofs,” had a similar position.80 Baronius, however, had used the argument e silentio, with very decided intent, on several occasions. The most important was the story of Pope Joan, by which 71. Ibid., 296. Compare Thiers, Exercitatio, 247–52. 72. Mabillon, Traité des études, 295–96, without any reference (and none is provided in Dom Mabillon, Oeuvres choisies, ed. Odon Hurel [Paris, 2007], 562). 73. Jacques de Sainte-Beuve, Tractatus de Sacramentis Confirmationis et Unctionis-extremae (Paris, 1686), 419–20. Mabillon referred twice to the work in Traité des études, in “Liste” and in “Catalogue des meilleurs livres avec les meilleures éditions, pour composer une Bibliotéque ecclesiastique,” 405 and 445. 74. See Lesaulnier and McKenna, Dictionnaire, s.v. “Jacques de Sainte-Beuve” (by Frédéric Delforge), but add to the bibliography the essential study by Robin Briggs, “The Science of Sin: Jacques de Sainte-Beuve and his Cas de conscience,” in Religious Change in Europe, 1650–1914: Essays for John McManners, ed. Nigel Aston (Oxford, 1997), 23–40. 75. Jean Gillot (canon of Reims) to Thierry Ruinart, January 21, 1708, in Henri Jadart, Dom Jean Mabillon (1632–1707): Étude suivie de documents inédits sur sa vie, ses oeuvres, sa mémoire (Reims, France, 1879), appendix, 180. 76. Mabillon, Traité des études, 298. 77. Quantin, Catholicisme, 529–32. 78. Mabillon, Traité des études, 298. See also 235. 79. Mabillon, Annales Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, Occidentalium monachorum Patriarchae, vol. 3 (Paris, 1706), 6. For subsequent discussions, see Acta Sanctorum Septembris, vol. 6 (Antwerp, 1757), 271–72. 80. Tillemont, Memoires, 15:918. See also ibid., 1:660–61; 2:613; 13:287, and compare the use of the argument e silentio, for example, ibid., 1:461, 687–88; 5:479. ! 414 jean-louis quantin Protestants set great store.81 The episode had supposedly taken place in 853. But the first writer to mention it was Marianus Scotus, who died in 1086. According to Baronius, “that such a monstrosity could have remained hidden, ignored, and completely buried for two hundred and thirty years seems a greater prodigy than that such an event could ever have occurred.”82 So long a silence, of friends and foes alike, although there would have been so many occasions to recall the story, had more weight than “a thousand sworn witnesses to convince us with certainty and beyond doubt of the silliness and falsity of this fable.”83 Subsequent Roman Catholic scholars managed to prove, through a thorough examination of manuscripts, that the testimony of Marianus Scotus was itself an interpolation and that the first mention of Pope Joan should be dated even later, to the thirteenth century.84 According to Mabillon, this was actually a case of “a negative argument combined with a positive one”: not only did no writer before the thirteenth century mention Joan, but they all said another pope ruled at the time of her supposed pontificate.85 ! Mabillon and the Generalization of Criticism Baronius, however, like medieval writers, mostly used criticism one-sidedly, as an instrument to explode adverse claims. When he undertook to defend the legend of Constantine’s baptism by Pope Sylvester in Rome, in the baptistery of the Lateran palace—a story that fit perfectly into his Romanocentric view of church history and that provided a useful precedent for papal claims—he forgot all his rules about sources. Constantine’s baptism by Sylvester was first attested by the Acts of Sylvester, which were commonly considered legendary. Eusebius of Caesarea, a contemporary and wellinformed author, testified that Constantine had been baptized at the very end of his life by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. Baronius accepted that the Acts of Sylvester included many obviously false assertions, which he ascribed to later interpolators, so that even the rest “might seem to be brought in some suspicion.” He warned, however, that “to despise and reject them entirely” would be a mark of “presumptuous pride,” since they were already read in the church, in what must have been the original, uninterpolated, version, in the fifth century.86 As for Eusebius, Baronius bluntly rejected this testimony on the basis of a purely theological syllogism: since things are so situated that one must assert, either that Eusebius lied shamelessly, or that Constantine, baptized by an Arian bishop, should be 81. For an overview of the early modern controversy, see Alain Boureau, La papesse Jeanne (1988; Paris, 1993), 259–76. 82. Baronius, Annales, 14:424 (year 853, § 56). 83. Ibid., 14:428 (year 853, § 65). For other examples, see Launoy, De auctoritate negantis argumenti, 144–52. 84. See Leo Allatius, De Ioanna Papissa fabula commentatio (Rome, 1630), 3–4; Antonio Pagi’s note in Baronius, Annales, 14:424–25 (year 853, § 14). The first mention of Pope Joan was then ascribed to Martinus Polonus (d. 1279). 85. Mabillon, Traité des études, 295–96. 86. Annales, 3:594–95 (year 315, §§ 10, 14–17). reason and reasonableness ! 415 reckoned among the impious, and as it evidently appears that Constantine is highly praised by the Catholic Church, we are compelled to say that Eusebius fraudulently made such false statements about Constantine.87 Baronius even followed the Acts of Sylvester on Constantine’s leprosy (of which the emperor was supposed to have been miraculously cured at baptism), which some prominent Roman Catholic theologians had denied or doubted. There seemed indeed to be a very strong argument e silentio against the story. As the Spanish Dominican Melchior Cano put it, contemporary writers “would not have omitted it if they had known it, and they would definitely have known it if it had occurred.”88 Baronius argued that the episode had been mentioned by Gregory of Tours (in the late sixth century),89 and that it was perfectly possible, “especially considering that God was used to inflicting leprosy as a punishment for sins, and particularly for the sins of proud kings.”90 This double standard was blatant in the endless and highly revealing disputes between religious orders about their respective antiquity and glories. Thus, the rivalry between the Augustinian canons and the Augustinian hermits, which began in the fourteenth century and was still raging in the seventeenth, involved elaborate critical discussions.91 In 1624, Gabriele Pennotto, a canon of the Lateran congregation, published an erudite tome in which he demonstrated again the spuriousness of the pseudo-Augustinian Sermones ad fratres in eremo and of several other texts that presented Augustine as a hermit.92 He also argued that the chronicles of Dexter and Maximus were fakes (they had been forged at the end of the sixteenth century by the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo de la Higuera, and Pennotto was apparently the first to attack them in print).93 His larger aim, however, was to dispose of adverse claims in order to develop his own fabulous genealogy of his order, beginning with Augustine himself and including as many great men as possible. Mabillon later wrote dismissively of Pennotto “raving in his usual way.”94 It is significant that the so-called Port-Royal Logic, by the two great Jansenist divines, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole—which, as will appear, was an important influence on both Mabillon and Tillemont—used the example 87. Ibid., 4:46 (year 324, § 48). 88. Melchior Cano, De locis Theologicis libri duodecim (Salamanca, Spain, 1563), bk. 11, chap. 5, p. 358. Cano is here developing the arguments of Thomas de Vio Cajetan in his commentary on Aquinas, Summ. theol., pt. 3, q. 69, art. 8, obj. 4 (in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera omnia, Leo XIII edition, vol. 12 [Rome, 1906], 113). 89. Annales, 4:39–40 (year 324, § 30). 90. Ibid., 4:41–42 (year 324, § 36). This was proved by references to Numbers 12, 2 Kings 5, and 2 Chronicles 26 (the story of Uzziah). 91. See Jean-Louis Quantin, “L’Augustin du XVIIe siècle? Questions de corpus et de canon,” in Augustin au XVIIe siècle: Actes du colloque organisé par Carlo Ossola au Collège de France les 30 septembre et 1er octobre 2004 (Florence, Italy, 2007), 3–77 at 35–40 (with references to earlier literature). 92. Gabriele Pennotto, Generalis totius sacri ordinis Clericorum Canonicorum historia tripartita (Rome, 1624), 84–94. 93. Ibid., 168–75. The fundamental study is still José Godoy Alcántara, Historia crítica de los falsos cronicones (Madrid, 1868; repr. Granada, 1999). 94. Jean Mabillon, Annales Ordinis Sancti Benedicti, Occidentalium monachorum Patriarchae, vol. 6 (Paris, 1739), 457. ! 416 jean-louis quantin of biased ecclesiastical scholarship to show how “unreasonable” it was to judge of things according to “interest” instead of “truth”: “I belong to such a country, therefore I must believe that such a saint preached the Gospel there. I belong to such an order, therefore I believe that such a privilege is genuine. These are no reasons.”95 Mabillon’s Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti, the first volume of which appeared in 1668, heralded a new era in ecclesiastical scholarship, not because of Mabillon’s criticism per se—his use of sources was hardly original at that stage—but because he was willing to extend criticism to corporate beliefs of his own order, such as Columbanus’s having supposedly followed the Rule of St. Benedict, which previous Benedictine writers had felt bound to defend at all costs. Throughout the following decade, until silence was imposed on both sides by the general chapter of the Congregation of Saint-Maur in June 1678, Mabillon had to defend himself against fellow Maurists Dom Joseph Mège and Dom Philippe Bastide, who accused him of having betrayed the order.96 The numerous memoirs that he wrote in his defense were circulated in manuscript only within the Congregation of Saint-Maur. None was printed in full before the twentieth century (and then not always satisfactorily); some have remained unpublished to this day.97 As a result, the controversy did not attract the same attention at the time as, for 95. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La Logique ou l’Art de penser, contenant, outre les règles communes, plusieurs observations nouvelles, propres à former le jugement, ed. Pierre Clair and François Girbal, 2nd ed., Le mouvement des idées au XVIIe siècle 3 (Paris, 1981; repr. 1993), pt. 3, chap. 20, p. 262. The Port-Royal Logic was first published in 1662, but it was regularly expanded up to the fifth edition of 1683 (see the list of editions, ibid., 4–5). On authorship of the various parts, see ibid., 365, and E. D. James, Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist: A Study of His Thought (The Hague, 1972), 175–77. 96. On this famous episode, see for example Henri Leclercq, Mabillon, 2 vols. (Paris, 1953–57), 2:722–23. 97. See the list of memoirs written on both sides in Denis, “Mabillon,” 3–6. Denis, 8–51, gives an accurate edition of Mabillon’s Mémoires pour justifier le procédé que j’ay tenu dans l’édition des Vies de nos saints (composed between 1673 and 1677), from three manuscripts, the most important of which is BNF, MS Français 17696, fols. 245r–270v. Another text, which Mabillon called an “ébauchement” of the Mémoires, the Brieves reflections sur quelques regles de l’histoire (ibid., fols. 294r–304r) was “transcribed by M. N. Baudouin-Matusezk” and published with an introduction and notes by Blandine Barret-Kriegel (Paris, 1990); this edition includes a number of mistakes, especially two lacunas that make the text unintelligible at this point. O. Hurel claims to edit the piece anew from the same manuscript in Mabillon, Oeuvres choisies, 932–51. It is unfortunate that this “new” edition reproduces exactly the two lacunas of the earlier one (I put in brackets the words omitted in both cases): “L’argument négatif n’est pas recevable lors qu’il n’est pris que du silence d’un seul historien contemporain contre un Auteur qui sera aussy contemporain: quoy que [l’autre ayt eu l’occasion d’en parler. d’autant que] celuy cy peut avoir sceu assurement ce que l’autre aura ignore” (BNF, MS Français 17696, fol. 303r; ed. Barret-Kriegel, 129; ed. Hurel, 950); “Il est assez plaisant que l’on me demande [des preuves positives pour revoquer en doute] un fait ancien qui n’est appuyé d’aucune bonne preuve: et que l’on n’en demande pas a ces Auteurs pour l’assurer et pour se ranger de leur parti” (fol. 303v; ed. Barret-Kriegel, 130; ed. Hurel, 950). Hurel, ibid., 912–31, also edited the Abrégé de la Réponse au R. P. Bastide. The beginning and end of the full work, Reponse aux remarques que le R. P. Bastide a faictes sur la Preface du IVe Siecle Benedictin (BNF, MS Français 15790, fols. 1r–64v; Français 17696, fols. 1r–141r; Français 19660, fols. 1r–67v; AN, L 810, no. 11), had been published by Alphonse Dantier in Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires, vol. 6 (1857), document no. 32, 358–63. Dantier, ibid., no. 33, 363–67, also published the first part of the Memoires Touchant l’approbation de nostre Regle, qui commence “Ego Gregorius” etc. (AN, L 810, no. 6, fols. 1r–3v). reason and reasonableness ! 417 instance, the polemics between the Jesuit Bollandists and the Carmelites, which were carried out in print and reverberated all over Europe.98 This was, however, a crucial moment in Mabillon’s intellectual biography and more generally in the development of Maurist scholarship. Both the De re diplomatica, Mabillon’s most important work, in which he laid the bases for diplomatics as a discipline, and the edition of Augustine’s Opera omnia, the masterpiece of Gallican patristics, were published in the aftermath of the controversy over the Acta Sanctorum Ordinis S. Benedicti. If the superiors of the congregation had followed Mège and Bastide, Maurist scholarship might well have been nipped in the bud. Mabillon’s opponents claimed that previous Benedictine writers had rightly followed “the laws of historians,” not the “laws of critics.”99 Indeed, according to them, Mabillon did not deserve the name of historian, since he did not write a continuous narrative according to humanist standards.100 Mabillon insisted that his work was “a history, and a history made of original sources,” and that he was therefore obliged to practice criticism.101 This was the historian’s essential duty: The first character of an historian is to love truth and to search for it. He is indispensably obliged to do so, and he makes a public profession of it. Now to search for truth, one should discuss it. It is hidden, it is surrounded with lies and errors, particularly as regards the facts of history, and of ancient history. To discuss truth, one should discriminate between what is true and what is false, what is certain and what is doubtful.102 Mabillon’s opponents claimed that, when something was doubtful, one should always take the side of the order—for instance, writers like Trithemius assert that Columbanus was a Benedictine monk; it cannot be certainly proved that they are wrong; the case is therefore doubtful, and so a Benedictine writer should go on making Columbanus a Benedictine.103 According to Mabillon, 98. The best account is now Jan Marco Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert. Zum Werk der Bollandisten. Ein wissenschaftshistorischer Versuch (Tübingen, Germany, 2009), 673–752. 99. Philippe Bastide, Remarques sur la preface de la premiere partie du 4e siecle des Actes des saints de l’ordre de sainct Benoist, AN, L 810, no. 9, fol. 2. 100. See Dom Joseph Mège’s request to the general chapter (June 1678), published by Delisle, “Mabillon,” 99, who ascribes it wrongly to Bastide (as already pointed out by Denis, “Mabillon et sa méthode,” 6n1). 101. Mabillon, Mémoires pour justifier, 41 (addition in Mabillon’s hand). See also 43–44. Baronius and later Tillemont preferred to disclaim the name of “history” for their works: see Jean-Louis Quantin, “Document, histoire, critique dans l’érudition ecclésiastique des temps modernes,” Recherches de Science Religieuse 92 (2004): 597–635 at 606–7. 102. Mabillon, Mémoires pour justifier, 10. 103. See Bastide to the general of the Maurist congregation, Dom Vincent Marsolle, May 2, 1679, in Denis, “Mabillon,” 62. ! 418 jean-louis quantin this is true when reasons are even on both sides, but when they are so uneven, as to leave almost no probability on the other side, if this may be called a doubt, I maintain that one is then obliged to adopt the more authoritative position. I say, if this may be called a doubt, in as much as, for something to be doubtful, it is not enough that one or even several writers should have held one position, but it must appear that they held it with good reasons. Otherwise their authority does not make a doubt; and the contrary position should be followed, even though it is not obviously true, because it is supported by good reasons, and the other one is not.104 ! Moral Certainty In the first chapter of his De re diplomatica, Mabillon warned that there were two extremes to eschew, that of those who rejected all charters because some were spurious, and that of those who accepted everything indiscriminately. Criticism was the middle way.105 The Port-Royal Logic stressed that “to believe rashly what is obscure and uncertain,” and “to doubt what is clear and certain” were two seemingly opposite defects that both came from a lack of attention “to discerning truth.”106 Indeed, Mabillon’s scholarship, which had first been attacked as hypercritical by Mège and Bastide, was assailed from the opposite quarter at the end of his life. In 1703, a Jesuit, Barthélemy Germon, argued that all the Merovingian charters of De re diplomatica “should be considered uncertain and dubious, until they could be proved by obvious arguments to be true and genuine.”107 Germon accused Mabillon of having traveled in a circle, since his method was based on a number of charters that he used as specimina to authenticate and date others. But these specimina might very well be fakes; they bore no obvious signs of fraudulence, but this might only mean that they were superior fakes.108 It was the beginning of the so-called querelle de la diplomatique, which continued to rage long after Mabillon’s death, and which was itself an episode of the great controversy about historical Pyrrhonism.109 Mabillon lived just long enough to defend his method in his Supplementum, in which he stressed that there were several kinds of certainty. In order to discriminate between genuine and spurious charters, “one should not ask for a metaphysical reason or demonstration, but for a moral one, such as may be achieved in such matters, which is no less certain in its kind than a metaphysical demonstration.”110 Mabillon was using with precision the vocabulary of contemporary scholasticism.111 104. Mabillon, Mémoires pour justifier, 25. 105. Mabillon, De re diplomatica libri VI (Paris, 1681), 3. 106. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, “Discours I,” 18–19. 107. Barthélemy Germon, De Veteribus Regum Francorum Diplomatibus (Paris, 1703), 38. 108. Ibid., 40. 109. See [René-Prosper Tassin and Charles-François Toustain], Nouveau traité de diplomatique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1750), 8–232; Carlo Corsetti, I bella diplomatica (Rome, 1978); Jean-Louis Quantin, “La philologie patristique et ses ennemis: Barthélemy Germon, S.J., et la tentation pyrrhoniste chez les anti-jansénistes,” in Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu Begriff und Problem frühneuzeitlicher “Philologie,” ed. Ralph Häfner (Tübingen, Germany, 2001), 305–32. 110. Mabillon, Librorum de re diplomatica supplementum (Paris, 1704), 4. 111. See, for example, Étienne Chauvin, Lexicon philosophicum (Düsseldorf, Germany, 1967; reprint of the 2nd ed., 1713; 1st ed., 1692), s.v. “Certitudo,” 97–98. reason and reasonableness ! 419 The notion of “moral certainty” went back to the late medieval schools. It ultimately derived from Aristotle’s warning, in the introduction to the Nicomachean Ethics, that political science could only achieve “that amount of precision which belongs to its subject matter.” But its subjects, “Moral Nobility and Justice,” “involve much difference of opinion and uncertainty.” Therefore, “it is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.”112 It seems that the phrase certitudo moralis was first used by Gerson in the early fifteenth century, in discussing the case of a priest who doubts whether he is in a fit state to celebrate mass. Gerson stresses that “full certainty” on this point is impossible. “Therefore there suffices the kind of certainty we usually look for and accept in moral matters. This certainty can be called moral or civil certainty.”113 Such casuistical problems remained the typical context for discussions of moralis certitudo among later theologians.114 The idea was further refined with the rise of probabilism—the moral system according to which, in case of doubt, it is lawful to follow a probable opinion favoring liberty, even if the opposite opinion is more probable—at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.115 The seventeenth century extended moral certainty to new fields, and especially to history.116 This was felt to be crucial to safeguarding the validity of Christian apologetics, which had traditionally been based on historical evidence such as miracles and the fulfillment of prophecies. In his treatise Of the Truth of the Christian Religion, Grotius insisted that “as there are variety of things which be true, so are there divers 112. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.iii.1–4, 1094b11–27 (trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library). 113. Jean Gerson, De pollutione nocturna et praeparatione ad missam (1412 or 1408), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Glorieux, vol. 9 (Paris, 1973), 36–37, with a reference to Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. See Franklin, Science of Conjecture, 69–70 (whose English translation I use). I first read Franklin’s text under the name of Martin W. F. Stone, “Moral Philosophy and the Conditions of Certainty: Descartes’ Morale in Context,” in Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought: Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji, ed. Ricardo Salles (Oxford, 2005), 508–50 at 520–21. The painful and salutary study by Michael V. Dougherty, Pernille Harsting, and Russell L. Friedman, “40 Cases of Plagiarism,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 51 (2009): 350–91 at 376–77 (case 26), directed me to the real author. Other scholars plagiarized by Stone in that contribution include Ilkka Kantola (see below, note 159) and Vance G. Morgan (below, note 127). 114. See, at the end of the fifteenth century, the distinction of “certitudo supernaturalis,” “naturalis,” and “moralis” by Gabriel Biel, Canonis Misse expositio, ed. Heiko A. Oberman and William J. Courtenay, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1963), lectio 8 (on saying mass), 59, and Collectorium circa quattuor libros Sententiarum: Libri quarti pars secunda (dist. 15–22), ed. Wilfrid Werbeck and Udo Hofmann (Tübingen, Germany, 1977), IV Sent., dist. 16, q. 3, 417–18 (on the obligation to fast). In both cases Biel refers to Gerson and to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. See Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000; 1st ed., 1963), 217–21, 462. 115. See the texts by Suárez and others quoted in Stone, “Moral Philosophy,” 524–28 (Dougherty, Harsting, and Friedman, “40 Cases,” have not identified any verbatim plagiarism in this section); below, note 204. 116. For an overview, see Lorraine Daston, “Probability and Evidence,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1998), 2:1108–44, esp. 1116–22. ! 420 jean-louis quantin wayes of proving or manifesting the truth. Thus is there one way in Mathematicks, another in Physicks, a third in Ethicks, and lastly another kinde when a matter of fact is in question: wherein verily wee must rest content with such testimonies as are free from all suspition of untruth.”117 In the final edition of his work, published in Paris in 1640, Grotius strengthened the point with references to Aristotle’s standard text in Nicomachean Ethics, and also to Metaphysics: “mathematical accuracy is not to be demanded in everything.”118 Grotius was concerned at this stage with the defense of Christianity in general, but his arguments were soon transferred to theological controversies between Christian confessions.119 Grotius himself made the application in the early 1640s, in the course of the polemics that he pursued with the French Calvinist divine André Rivet: he referred to Aristotle to argue that witnesses could give us “sufficient evidence” of apostolic traditions.120 Grotius’s Of the Truth of the Christian Religion was hugely influential all over Europe, including France.121 Mabillon certainly knew it: he included it in his “Catalogue of selected books for an ecclesiastical library.”122 His immediate source, however, was the Port-Royal Logic, especially chapters 12 to 15 of part 4, which are usually ascribed to Arnauld.123 Distinguishing between different types of certainty, on the basis of differ117. Hugo Grotius, De ueritate religionis Christianae, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1629), 97. I quote the contemporary translation, True religion explained and defended against the Arch-enemies thereof in these times (London, 1632), bk. 1, chap. 23, p. 148. 118. Grotius, De ueritate religionis christianae (Paris, 1640), quoting Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.iii.4, and Metaphysics, II.iii.3, 995a15–16 (trans. H. Tredennick, Loeb Classical Library). Grotius also referred to Nicomachean Ethics, I.iii.4, in De iure belli ac pacis (Paris, 1625), bk. 2, chap. 23, p. 475, to show the difference between “moralia” and “mathematicae disciplinae.” 119. This was already done in England by Chillingworth in the late 1630s. See Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009), 225–27. 120. Hugo Grotius, Votum pro pace ecclesiastica contra Examen Andreae Riveti, et alios irreconciliabiles (n.p. [Paris?], 1642), 139–40, quoting Nicomachean Ethics, I.iii.4, and Metaphysics, II.iii.3. 121. It is referred to by Lamy, Entretiens, 83. On the several seventeenth-century French translations, see Jacob ter Meulen and P. J. J. Diermanse, Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague, 1950), 518–20; Heering, Grotius, 223–27, 237. 122. Mabillon, “Catalogue,” 443: Mabillon recommends both the Latin and French editions, “cum Notis et sine Notis.” According to René Prosper Tassin, Histoire littéraire de la Congrégation de SaintMaur (Paris, 1770), 90, “on attribuë” this catalogue to François Delfau, who was the first director of the Maurist edition of Augustine until his exile in Brittany, on the king’s order, in 1675. Henry Wilhelm and Ursmer Berlière, Nouveau supplément à l’Histoire littéraire de la Congrégation de Saint-Maur, 3 vols. (Paris, then Maredsous-Gembloux, 1908–32), 1:153–54 and 3:35, suggest that Mabillon translated into French an Index librorum ad instruendam bibliothecam compiled by Delfau, which is preserved in manuscript (this is copied by Philippe Lenain, Histoire littéraire des Bénédictins de Saint-Maur, vol. 1 [1612–55][Louvain-Brussels, 2006], 548, an unreliable compilation of unverified notices). But Delfau died in 1676, and many books in the “Catalogue” are of a later date: it is conceivable that Mabillon used Delfau’s Index, but the final version is definitely his own. 123. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, 335–51. Mabillon expressly recommends the work in Traité des études, 248, 257 (as already pointed out by Manfred Weitlauff, “Die Mauriner und ihr historischkritisches Werk,” in Historische Kritik in der Theologie: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. Georg Schwaiger [Göttingen, 1980], 202, with other references to Cartesianism at Saint-Maur). See also Jean Boutier, “Étienne Baluze et les ‘Règles générales pour discerner les anciens titres faux d’avec les reason and reasonableness ! 421 ent types of evidence, had become all the more urgent because of the threat of mathematical reductionism raised by Cartesianism.124 Nicole warned in 1667, in his preface to Arnauld’s geometry textbook, that this study was very useful in as much as it provided a model of clarity and evidence, but that it would be very damaging if one were to require geometrical demonstrations everywhere, even in “moral and human matters.”125 Pierre-Daniel Huet, who attacked Cartesianism in order to safeguard the status of historical and philological scholarship, seized on a passage where Descartes appeared to disparage attempts “to buttress the truths of faith through human and merely probable reasons.” According to Huet, this amounted to rejecting all the traditional “motives of credibility” developed by Christian apologetics, from the fathers onward. It is quite clear from the context that this was far from Descartes’s meaning: he was condemning attempts to make plausible the contents, not to prove the fact, of revelation.126 Descartes, in fact, especially in his last works, fully accepted the validity of moral as well as metaphysical certainty, and he defined it in terms, and with examples, very similar to those used by the schoolmen in their discussions of moralis certitudo.127 The disqualification of historical knowledge by Descartes himself and many of his French followers meant, however, that they had no interest in ascribing to it any kind of certainty. Scholarship was left in an epistemological no man’s land. Arnauld was scarcely being innovative when he insisted, in part 4 of the PortRoyal Logic, that human testimony could in some cases provide a certainty equal to that of mathematical demonstrations,128 and that “when we cannot have a full moral certainty, the best course that we can follow, when we are bound to take a stand, is to adopt what is more probable, since to adopt what is less probable would be to overthrow reason.”129 Arnauld’s originality was to illustrate his claims with a series of questions that were currently being debated among ecclesiastical scholars, and that had obvious confessional overtones (the type of questions included by Mabillon in the “List of main difficulties” in ecclesiastical history that he appended to his Traité des études). Thus, it was morally certain that Constantine had been baptized by Eusebius véritables,’” in Étienne Baluze, 1630–1718: Érudition et pouvoirs dans l’Europe classique, ed. Boutier (Limoges, France, 2008), 315–34. 124. See Carlo Borghero, La certezza e la storia: Cartesianesimo, pirronismo e conoscenza storica (Milan, 1983), esp. 102–18. 125. Preface (by Pierre Nicole) to Antoine Arnauld, Nouveaux Elemens de Geométrie (Paris, 1667), sigs. e1r–e2r. On the connection between this work and the Port-Royal Logic, see sig. e4v. 126. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Censura philosophiae Cartesianae (Paris, 1689), 179–80. This clearly refers to Descartes’s letter to Mersenne [May 27, 1630?], AT, 1:153. 127. See esp. Principes, pt. 4, art. 205–6 (French translation of the abbé Picot revised by Descartes and published in 1647), AT, vol. 9, pt. 2, pp. 323–24. Compare the Latin original, AT, vol. 8, pt. 1, pp. 327–28, with editor’s note, 352. For other texts, see the references in Étienne Gilson, Index scolasticocartésien, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1979), s.v. “Certitude,” 45. On Descartes and moral certainty, see Vance G. Morgan, Foundations of Cartesian Ethics (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1994), esp. 25–31 (transcribed by Stone, “Moral Philosophy,” 533–40); Vincent Carraud, “Morale par provision et probabilité,” in Descartes et le Moyen Âge, ed. Joël Biard and Roshdi Rashed (Paris, 1997), 259–79. 128. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, pt. 4, chap. 7, p. 323, and pt. 4, chap. 15, p. 336. 129. Ibid., pt. 4, chap. 15, p. 348. ! 422 jean-louis quantin of Nicomedia, not Sylvester, since, on the one hand, the only ancient writer to have him baptized in Rome was the “fabulous” author of the Acts of Sylvester and, on the other hand, “there is no probability that a man as skilful as Eusebius would have dared to lie” about something which everybody must have known at the time.130 “Every person with common sense, even though they had no piety, should recognize as true” Augustine’s account, in City of God, 22.8, of miracles performed by relics of St. Stephen. (Protestant divines rejected the text as an interpolation.)131 Huguenot scholars claimed “in vain” that the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (in the middle recension) were spurious. There was “no probability” (aucune apparence) that these letters could have been forged before the third century, when they were quoted in their present form. Moreover, they “have a certain character of holiness and simplicity so proper to those Apostolic times, that they defend themselves on their own against these vain accusations.”132 Just after completing the first edition of the Logic, Arnauld and Nicole became engaged in a major controversy on the “perpetuity of the faith of the Catholic Church concerning the sacrament of the eucharist,” in the course of which they repeatedly appealed to the notion of moral certainty.133 Important developments from the Perpétuité de la foi were then incorporated in subsequent editions of the Logic.134 Throughout his huge theological oeuvre, Arnauld aimed at showing that the Gallican and Jansenist position was that of reason.135 Ernest Renan considered that the interest in historical “possibilities,” in alternative narratives, was “the intellectual conquest of the nineteenth century.” Seventeenthcentury scholars such as Tillemont, he thought, only looked for certainty. They reasoned in black and white, “either accepting everything with naive credulity, or eliminating what they felt to be half fabulous.”136 This is hardly true. Tillemont appended minute critical notes to his text, at the end of each volume; these notes, printed in 130. Ibid., pt. 4, chap. 13, pp. 340–41. 131. Ibid., pt. 4, chap. 14, pp. 344–47. See, for example, Pierre Du Moulin, Defense de la foy catholique contenue au livre de trespuissant et Serenissime Jaques I. roy de la grand’Bretagne et d’Irlande (n.p., 1612), 377; Edme Aubertin, L’Eucharistie de l’Ancienne Église (Geneva, 1633), 505. 132. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, pt. 4, chap. 15, p. 350. See references in Quantin, Church of England, 267–68. For Constantine’s baptism and Ignatius’s letters, see Mabillon, “Liste”, 406 and 410, 414 (the problem of the Ignatian letters is also mentioned by Mabillon, Supplementum, 4). Mabillon did not mention City of God, 22.8, but he referred in “Liste,” 414, to the new Maurist edition (which included an elaborate note on the chronology of this chapter) for all difficulties regarding Augustine: see Sancti Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi Opera, vol. 7 (Paris, 1685), col. 669–70, n. f, and also Opera, vol. 5, pt. 2 (Paris, 1683), col. 1277–78, n. a. 133. See Quantin, Catholicisme, 337–38, 346 (where the parallel between La Perpetuité deffendue and Descartes’s Principes, pt. 4, art. 205, AT, vol. 9, pt. 2, p. 323, should have been noted). 134. See esp. Martine Pécharman, “Port-Royal et l’analyse augustinienne du langage,” in Augustin au XVIIe siècle, 124–34. 135. See, for example, [Antoine Arnauld], Fantôme du Jansénisme, ou Justification des prétendus jansénistes, par le Livre même d’un Savoyard, Docteur de Sorbonne, leur nouvel Accusateur (1686), in Oeuvres, vol. 15 (Paris and Lausanne, Switzerland, 1779), 45. 136. Ernest Renan, Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique (1882), in Histoire des origines du christianisme, ed. Laudyce Rétat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1995), 2:780. reason and reasonableness ! 423 smaller type and with a different layout, are the most important “marks of historicity” of his work, since they allow readers to control his conclusions.137 There, he systematically graded sources according to their “degree of certainty,”138 especially in the case of hagiographical documents, which are usually anonymous and cannot be classified as being simply either genuine or spurious. Tillemont never spelled out his complex gradation, which was conveyed instead by subtle changes of vocabulary.139 Parallels with the Port-Royal Logic are, however, unmistakable. This is unsurprising, since Tillemont, in his youth, had been taught logic by Nicole in the “little schools” of Port-Royal.140 At the top of his scale, Tillemont placed such texts as the Martyrium Polycarpi, the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons about the persecution of Christians in ad 177, and the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, “which are generally regarded as indisputable.” They played the same role as the specimina of Mabillon’s Diplomatics, that of touchstones by which to assess other texts.141 Such pieces bore “so much the character of sincerity and of original truth, that this light is enough on its own to inspire us with respect and dissipate every shadow of difficulty that might be opposed.”142 Arnauld had used this argument to defend Ignatius’s letters.143 In the case of charters as well, Mabillon was confident that the proper character of truth was “to shine by itself.”144 The Maurists made the same point about textual criticism when they pointed out that a variant reading might be by itself so “evident” as to leave the critic in no doubt that it was the true one.145 At the other extreme, there were documents that were “absolutely false,” “absolutely” or “manifestly untenable” (insoutenable, a word that recurs time and again in Tillemont), which could “by no means be defended,” “where it would be easy to point out things that have very little probability,” that were so filled with “falsehoods and ridiculous tales” that they were entirely unbelievable.146 This 137. See Krzysztof Pomian, “Histoire et fiction” (1989) and “Le passé: De la foi à la connaissance” (1983), repr. in Sur l’histoire, 15–78 and 81–120; Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London, 1997), esp. 148–89. I am at a loss to understand (apart from supposing that she never looked at Tillemont’s notes and limited herself to the main text) how Chantal Grell, Le dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France, 1680–1789, SVEC 330–31, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1995), 401–3, could claim that Tillemont did not discuss the value of testimonies, so that “le travail de critique auquel il se livra à chaque page n’apparaît jamais au grand jour dans son ouvrage.” 138. According to a report of 1670–71: “Monsieur Tilmont dit . . . qu’il faut laisser les choses au mesme degré de certitude qu’on les trouve” (Jean Lesaulnier, Port-Royal insolite: Édition critique du Recueil de choses diverses [Paris, 1992], fol. 268v). 139. Hence, the complaint of Honoré de Sainte-Marie, Reflexions, 2:240, that critics like Tillemont had no fixed vocabulary. 140. [Michel Tronchay], Vie de M. Lenain de Tillemont (Cologne, Germany, 1711), 2–3. 141. Tillemont, Memoires, 1:xv; 3:3, 5:650. 142. Ibid., 5:615. See also 1:621. 143. See note 132 above. 144. Mabillon, Supplementum, 17. 145. See Pierre Coustant, Vindiciae ueterum codicum confirmatae, in quibus plures Patrum atque Conciliorum illustrantur loci (Paris, 1715), 557. On Coustant, a disciple of Mabillon who intervened to defend him against Germon, see Quantin, “Philologie.” 146. Tillemont, Memoires, 2:657; 5:611, 653; 6:437; 9:617, 681; 7:267; 16:454; 4:511. ! 424 jean-louis quantin was especially the case of the collection of the Byzantine hagiographer Simeon Metaphrastes, a regular target of Tillemont, who coined for its stories the derogatory adjective metaphrastique.147 In between, some documents were not “quite true” or “quite genuine,” but there was a strong presumption “that at least the substance comes from original sources.” It was therefore legitimate to use them, provided the reader were properly warned, since “this is not a dogmatical work,” where only unquestionable proofs are legitimate.148 In some cases—and here again Tillemont took care to “confess” this to his readers—even “eminent authors” could only provide us with “a probable, not a certain” account,149 which he also calls “a strong conjecture.”150 One should proceed by the account that appears to be “most probable,” or, as Tillemont put it elsewhere, “follow the rule that reason makes us judge to be the best,” even though it might well lead us into mistakes.151 When there were two possibilities, neither of which was clearly more probable, Tillemont set out “the strong reasons on both sides” and concluded that “the safer course” was to leave the question undecided.152 In some cases, he disavowed a story in an understated but unmistakable manner, through a personal comment presented in brackets and in the subjunctive: “we should like these facts to be founded on a better authority”; “we should like to find this in better historians.”153 Yet a lower level—the last stage before the infamous insoutenable—was when Tillemont specified that he “did not dare” to use a document, a very common phrase in his works,154 or at least “to use it as an ancient and important text.”155 The middle of the scale was a gray area, and those who accused Tillemont and other Gallican scholars of inconsistency here seemed to have a point.156 Tillemont, however, did not set out to apply his criteria mechanically. He submitted every story to individual scrutiny, taking into account both the antiquity of its source and the intrinsic probability of “the circumstances.”157 This is again an echo of the Port-Royal Logic: “In order to judge of the truth of an event, and to resolve whether to believe it or not, one should not consider it only in itself, as one would consider a geometrical proposition; but one should pay heed to all attending circumstances, whether intrinsic or extrinsic.” “Intrinsic circumstances” concern the fact itself, “extrinsic circumstances” its witnesses.158 The history of this distinction has been much debated, but it seems clear 147. Ibid., 5:634. 148. Ibid., 1:xii. 149. Ibid., 3:727. 150. Tillemont to Mathieu Feydeau, March 3, 1693, UPR 605. 151. Tillemont, Memoires, 3:401; 2:595. See also 16:272. 152. Ibid., 6:421–22, 772–74. See also 8:539–40. 153. Ibid., 11: 284; Tillemont, Histoire, 4:225. See also, for example, Memoires, 4:429; 5:172. 154. See, for example, Tillemont, Memoires, 2:614; 4:29; 5:170, 613. 155. Ibid., 3:730. 156. See Honoré de Sainte-Marie, Reflexions, 1:105, 177–78, 230; 2:32. 157. See, for example, Memoires, 2:615; 6:437; 9:681. 158. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, pt. 4, chap. 13, p. 340, See also Nicole’s preface to Arnauld, Nouveaux Elemens, sig. e1r. reason and reasonableness ! 425 that it originated from the old distinction, which Cicero and Quintilian had taken up from Aristotle, between “technical” (ἔντεχνοι, artificiales) and “nontechnical” (ἄτεχνοι, inartificiales) proofs in rhetoric.159 As will be seen, this classification was essential to the theory of probabilism in moral theology. Mabillon also insisted that “moral certainty” as to “the truth or falsehood of ancient monuments” could “only be achieved after a long and careful examination of all circumstances.”160 Tillemont’s scrutiny consisted in balancing, as it were, the authority of the source against the probability of the narration, especially when it came to miracles. “The more these things are noteworthy, the more they need a proportionate authority to be believed, and even more to be related as credible.”161 Thus, if the miracles of St. Felix of Nola “were not buttressed by the authority of such an author as St. Paulinus, we would have much ground to doubt them.” But they should absolutely be believed, because it would be “extravagant or criminal” to reject Paulinus’s testimony.162 In such cases, one could almost say that Tillemont disregarded the contents of texts entirely. More exactly, the authority of a writer whom he regarded as trustworthy weighed so much with him that, in effect, it outbalanced any difficulty. Tillemont thus accepted Hegesippus’s account of St. James “the Just,” despite the repeated objections of Arnauld himself.163 He clung to the veracity of the correspondence between Christ and Abgarus, which the Dominican Noël Alexandre had recently rejected as apocryphal. Alexandre was a staunch 159. See Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2.2; Cicero, De oratore, 2.27.116; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.1.1; Josef Klein, “Beweis, Beweismittel,” and Walter Veit, “Probatio,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, ed. Gert Ueding, 10 vols. (Darmstadt, Germany, 1992–2011), vol. 2, cols. 1528–48; vol. 7, cols. 123–30. As far as the history of scholarship is concerned, Ian Hacking’s famous claim that the distinction between internal and external evidence was contemporary with the Port-Royal Logic and that “the very concept of internal evidence was new” seems to me untenable. See his The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction, and Statistical Inference (Cambridge, 1975), 32–34, 79–84; Douglas Lane Patey, Probabilism and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge, 1984), esp. “Appendix A. The FoucaultHacking hypothesis,” 270–71; Franklin, Science, 372 (with references); and the discussion by R. W. Serjeantson, “Testimony and Proof in Early-Modern England,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30 (1999): 195–236, esp. 223 and 225. On the relation between subjective and objective probability in the Middle Ages, see also the persuasive analysis by Ilkka Kantola, Probability and Moral Uncertainty in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times (Helsinki, 1994), 15–68 (Hacking’s thesis is explicitly rebuked, 56n16). 160. Mabillon, Supplementum, 4. 161. Tillemont, Memoires, 5:479. On this principle of proportionality, see also ibid., 1:500 (on the Assumption of the Virgin). 162. Ibid., 4:226. On the “marvellous” miracles of St. Felix of Nola, which were something of an embarrassment for Gallican scholars, see also Honoré de Sainte-Marie, Reflexions, 2:36. 163. See Tillemont to Ernest Ruth d’Ans, February 10, 1689, and January 4, 1693, UPR, no. 1602; Memoires, 1:xvi and 677; “Dissertation sur ce que raconte Hegesippe de S. Jacques Evesque de Jerusalem. Par Monsieur Arnauld . . . avec les remarques de Monsieur de Tillemont,” at the end of Memoires, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1701), sep. paginated, 1–19. On this revealing debate, see Neveu, Tillemont, 228–30, and “La vie érudite à Paris à la fin du XVIIe siècle d’après les papiers du père Léonard de Sainte-Catherine (1695–1706)” (1966), repr. in Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1994), 26. ! 426 jean-louis quantin Gallican, but, as will be seen from his other divergences with Tillemont, a theologian rather than a critic. He had used purely theological arguments in a purely scholastic manner, appealing for instance to the authority of Aquinas, according to whom Christ had written nothing.164 Tillemont stressed that this correspondence had been quoted by both Eusebius and St. Ephraem Syrus: “It seems to me that one would need irrefutable arguments to reject as supposititious such pieces as are buttressed by the authority of two persons so eminent, one in discrimination and science, the other in understanding and piety.”165 When authorities were found wanting, on the other hand, Tillemont laid great stress on intrinsic improbability. “To believe something as scarcely probable” as the existence of three different sets of twins, all physicians and all named Cosmas and Damian—as the Greek Orthodox liturgy would have it—“I should like to have authorities far more considerable than those that we have.”166 ! Critical Taste and Critical Progress Scholars ultimately relied on what they called their taste, le goût, a critical acumen acquired and perfected by experience. In scholastic parlance, this was a habitus, a notion that Descartes used to explain how, through repeated meditation and especially through the practice of geometry, one could hone one’s ability to discern truth.167 The idea was popular with Cartesians, including Nicole.168 The Cartesian and Jansenist Maurist François Lamy even turned it against the practice of history, which, he claimed, accustomed its practitioners to consider only facts and thereby incapacitated them for abstract reasoning.169 Lamy acknowledged that “the study of manuscripts, of criticism, of facts, and, in one word, of everything that is called érudition” was necessary to know the tradition of the church. But one should never embark on such a study before one had trained one’s mind “to discern in every subject what is true, what is false, and what is verisimilar, what makes a proof and what does not.”170 Tillemont and Mabillon, by contrast, considered that scholarship required and nurtured its own specific 164. Noël Alexandre, Selecta Historiae Ecclesiasticae capita, et in loca eiusdem insignia Dissertationes historicae; chronologicae, criticae, dogmaticae (Paris, 1676), 245–47; Aquinas, Summ. theol., IIIa, q. XLIII, art. 4. On Alexandre’s scholastic method, see Jean-Louis Quantin, “Entre Rome et Paris, entre histoire et théologie: Les Selecta Historiae Ecclesiasticae capita du P. Noël Alexandre et les ambiguïtés de l’historiographie gallicane,” Mémoire dominicaine 20 (2006): 67–99 at 77–79. 165. Tillemont, Memoires, 1:662. 166. Ibid., 5:652. See also 5:634, 651; 6:779. 167. Gilson, Index, s.v. “Habitus,” 134–35. See Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago and London, 2006), 31–38, 49–52, 83. 168. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, 22–23 (“Discours I”); Nicole’s preface to Arnauld, Nouveaux Elemens, sigs. a4v–e1r. 169. [François Lamy], De la conoissance de soi-mesme. Suite du troisiéme Traité. De l’être moral de l’homme; ou de la science du coeur, vol. 4 (Paris, 1698), 371–73. See Béatrice Guion, Du bon usage de l’histoire: Histoire, morale et politique à l’âge classique (Paris, 2008), 58–60. On François Lamy (not to be confused with his namesake, Bernard, the Oratorian), see Lesaulnier and McKenna, Dictionnaire, s.v. (by Régine Pouzet). 170. Lamy, Conoissance, 4:336–40, 373–74. reason and reasonableness ! 427 habitus. By reading genuine ancient acts of martyrs, Tillemont explained, “one acquires a taste to distinguish between what looks thus ancient and true, and what smacks of fable or of popular tradition.”171 Mabillon also appealed, first against uncritical hagiography, and later, against historical skepticism, to “a certain taste, which is obtained by assiduous reading.”172 Possession of this taste defined a specialized community of knowledgeable people, those whom Mabillon called periti and Tillemont les habiles. Thus, “all the knowledgeable people will agree” that one only knows how to date ancient manuscripts after one has compared many of them. “It is an established fact that squarely shaped manuscripts are ancient. Should you ask for the reason, Sirmond himself, who was especially fond of such manuscripts, could give no other reason than experience.”173 This community was more specific than the general republic of letters— it was much closer to what we mean today by a disciplinary community—but, like the republic of letters, it transcended confessional boundaries. In his Traité des études, Mabillon cited a number of Protestant works as recommended reading (something for which the Traité des études was denounced to the Roman Congregation of the Index).174 Tillemont insisted, in the case of pseudo-Dionysius, that “in questions that are not decided by authority, but by facts and by wholly human reasons, one is allowed to listen to heretics and to examine whether they are right.”175 The Port-Royal Logic had already pointed out that “on a question of criticism independent of religious controversies,” “reason and truth” might make someone agree with a heretic.176 If criticism is perfected by individuals through experience, it also progresses as a discipline over time. The idea was not entirely new. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Grotius had already regarded criticism as “the only branch of scholarship” in which the moderns were far superior to the ancients.177 Grotius, however, had a purely literary notion of criticism, as the emendatio of classical texts, and the moderns whom he opposed to the ancients were Renaissance humanists. Late seventeenthcentury Gallicans were convinced that ecclesiastical history was now considerably more advanced than it had been in the sixteenth century. They thought of this progress as not merely quantitative, on account of the discovery and publication of many new texts, but also qualitative, because of the progress of criticism.178 Tillemont thought it unnecessary to recapitulate all the arguments against the pseudo-Dionysian corpus, 171. Tillemont, Memoires, 1:xv. 172. Mabillon, Supplementum, 3. Compare Memoires Touchant l’approbation de nostre Regle, AN, L 810, no. 6, fol. 3v; Traité des études, 236. 173. Mabillon, Supplementum, 3. 174. See Basilio Trifone, “Votum du cardinal Tamburini au sujet du Traité des études monastiques de D. Jean Mabillon,” Revue Mabillon 6 (1910–11): 103–6. 175. Tillemont, Memoires, 2:567, referring to Jean Daillé, De scriptis, quae sub Dionysii Areopagitae et Ignatii Antiocheni nominibus circumferuntur, libri duo (Geneva, 1666). See also Memoires, 1:537. 176. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, pt. 3, chap. 20, p. 279. 177. Hugo Grotius, Parallelon Rerumpublicarum liber tertius: De moribus ingenioque populorum Atheniensium, Romanorum, Batauorum (1601–2), ed. J. Meerman, vol. 3 (Haarlem, 1802), 52. 178. See, for example, Quantin, “Bossuet,” 71–72, 78; and, more generally, Krzysztof Pomian, “Le cartésianisme, les érudits et l’histoire,” Archiwum Historii Filozofii y Miśli Społecznej 12 (1966): 175–204. ! 428 jean-louis quantin since “all the persons who know something of antiquity, almost without exception, agree today” that these texts could not have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite.179 Father Alexandre had recently protested that this was one of the theses of Erasmus that had been condemned by the faculty of theology of Paris in 1527.180 Tillemont summarily dismissed the argument: this censure took place “at a time when criticism had not yet illuminated in depth the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite.”181 In order to show the importance of criticism to his superiors, Mabillon recalled that the monks of Monte Cassino had published in 1513 a number of forged charters: “they did this out of ignorance, at a time when one was unable to discover the spuriousness” of those documents.182 In striking contrast to Pascal, Mabillon explicitly assimilated history to the physical sciences in this respect: I do not claim to be personally more enlightened than Trithemius, but I maintain that our century is much more enlightened than his. We have not nowadays a better eyesight than the ancients and yet we see much farther by means of telescopes. The same goes for history, which has been very much clarified in our time.183 Gallican scholarship would thus seem to meet most of d’Alembert’s criteria for a rational branch of knowledge: it appealed to experience; it progressed over time and made discoveries; it cultivated critical acumen—that is, a discriminating faculty— rather than memory; and it was sustained by an elaborate epistemology. ! The Religion of Truth Gallican scholarship, however, was also deeply religious.184 Criticism was felt to be a religious duty. To defend it against its detractors, both Launoy and Mabillon quoted Augustine’s treatises against lying, which rigorist theologians regarded as the last word on the subject:185 “one never errs more safely than when one errs by too much loving 179. Tillemont, Memoires, 2:566–67. Cf. Tillemont to Ruth d’Ans, February 10, 1689, UPR, no. 1602. 180. Alexandre, Selecta capita, 1:796. 181. Tillemont, Memoires, 2:569–70. See also ibid., 517, on the 1521 decree condemning those who asserted that there had been three Marys, not one (against Alexandre, Selecta capita, 1:664–65). For the decrees of the Faculty of theology, see Charles Du Plessis d’Argentré, Collectio iudiciorum de nouis erroribus, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Paris, 1728), pp. vi–vii, 72. On the controversy between Tillemont and Alexandre, see Neveu, Tillemont, 278–79; Quantin, “Entre Rome et Paris,” 85–89. 182. Mabillon, Memoires Touchant l’approbation de nostre Regle, fol. 3v. On the charters involved (fakes of Peter the Deacon, printed in 1513 as an appendix to the Chronicon Cassinense), see Erich Caspar, Petrus Diaconus und die Monte Cassineser Fälschungen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Italienischen Geisteslebens im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1909), 169–70 and appendix 5, 234–35; Herbert Bloch, Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 2:907–8. 183. Mabillon, Mémoires pour justifier, 27–28 (this is an autograph addition by Mabillon). See also ibid., 44; Reponse aux remarques que le R. P. Bastide a faictes sur la Preface du IVe Siecle Benedictin, AN, L 810, no. 11, 76–77. 184. Neveu, Érudition; Quantin, Catholicisme, esp. 249–87. 185. See Louis Thomassin, Traitez historiques et dogmatiques, sur divers points de la Discipline de l’Eglise et de la Morale Chrestienne: Traité de la Verité et du Mensonge; des Juremens et des Parjures (Paris, 1691), 1–237; Mabillon, Traité des études, 414. reason and reasonableness ! 429 the truth, and too much rejecting falsehood”;186 “one should never lie, even in order to convert heretics, because one would thereby lose all credit.”187 These treatises are also referred to in the Port-Royal Logic.188 The “love of truth” had an especially strong religious significance for Tillemont, who famously wrote, in the preface to his Histoire des empereurs (the “profane” part of his work): “although everything that can be said of the heathens is of little importance, it is of no little importance to love truth even in the smallest things.”189 Nicole had made the same point, almost in the same words, about geometry, in Cartesian fashion, and, much more controversially, about the duty to state openly that “the five propositions” were not contained in Jansen’s Augustinus.190 Tillemont accepted that persons who were not, or not yet, members of the church could in some sense love truth. In the case of the Neoplatonist philosopher Ammonius Saccas, he commented that “the love of truth given or fostered by the study of philosophy” had prepared him for conversion, in as much as philosophy “raised people above sensible things.”191 As noted above, he had no qualms about following Protestant scholars on some critical questions. He considered that, in such cases, “one does not follow the heretic, but truth, which speaks to us when it will through the mouth of its own enemies, and which then belongs more to us than to those, by whom it teaches us” (an echo of a famous passage by Augustine).192 As an Augustinian, however, Tillemont did not forget that the love of truth was a gift of God,193 and that all those who were “separated from the bosom” of the Catholic Church “could at the utmost have feelings of a human and moral [that is, natural] virtue.”194 Heretics “well deserve” to be “given over” by God “to the love of lying, in the history of facts as well as in the doctrine of the faith.”195 Henry Dodwell, the great Anglican scholar, had dared to argue, in his 1684 Dissertationes Cyprianicae, that there had been only few Christian martyrs.196 He had thereby “testified against himself that he is not of the Church, which reveres 186. Augustine, De mendacio, 1.1 (CSEL 41, 413–14), quoted by Launoy, De auctoritate negantis argumenti, 138, 179–80, 219. 187. Mabillon, Mémoires pour justifier, 12, summarizing Augustine, Contra mendacium ad Consentium, 4.7 (CSEL 41, 479). 188. Arnauld and Nicole, Logique, pt. 4, chap. 14, p. 346. 189. Tillemont, Histoire, 1:xiii. 190. Nicole’s preface to Arnauld, Nouveaux Elemens, sig. a4r; [Pierre Nicole], Les Imaginaires, ou lettres sur l’Heresie Imaginaire, 2 vols. (Liege, Belgium, 1667), 1:17, “Lettre I.” 191. Tillemont, Memoires, 3:280. Here again, a close parallel could be made with Nicole’s preface to Arnauld, Nouveaux Elemens, sig. a4r. 192. Tillemont to Noël Alexandre, September 12, 1694, BNF, MS Français 9356 (draft), fol. 222r. Compare Augustine, Confessions, 12.25.34 (CCSL 27, 235). 193. See Tillemont, Memoires, 13:865–66. 194. Ibid., 3:3 (on Joseph Scaliger). My brackets. 195. See ibid., 727, on Leontius, Arian bishop of Antioch and author of a life of St. Babylas about ad 350. Cf. Histoire, 4:382, on Leontius’s lacking “the spirit of God,” which “only animates the Catholic Church.” 196. See Jean-Louis Quantin, “Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity,” in History of Scholarship, ed. Ligota and Quantin, 305–56 at 314–16 (but I now believe that the Dissertationes Cyprianicae were printed simultaneously in octavo and in folio, and came out in both formats in 1684). ! 430 jean-louis quantin martyrs, loves them, and alone makes them. As for us, if we do not find truth, at least we search for it.”197 Truth, ultimately, was God himself. Seventeenth-century Augustinians liked to consider God as Truth. The Port-Royalists, who disclaimed the name “Jansenists,” called themselves “the friends, or the disciples, of truth.”198 Father Hardouin, the conspirationist Jesuit, even believed that most of the major thinkers of the time, from Jansenius to Malebranche through Descartes, Arnauld, Nicole, and Pascal, were parts of a huge atheistic plot to replace the Christian God with the abstract idea of truth. Jansen, for instance, wrote in his Augustinus, on the authority of Augustine: “eternal law is nothing but the truth of God, or, to speak more distinctly, of the Truth-God.”199 “Since God is truth,” Nicole taught in his catechesis on the creed, “to love truth is to love God.”200 Gallican Catholicism represented itself as the religion of truth. Doctors of divinity of the University of Paris, after receiving the insignia of their grade, ritually proceeded to Notre Dame, where they swore at the altar of martyrs that they would shed their blood for the defense of truth. In the speech that he made on this occasion in 1652, the young Bossuet invoked Christ as “the supreme Truth conceived in the bosom of the Father and descended on earth.”201 Tillemont also identified truth by preference with Christ incarnate. Thus, in the preface to his Memoires, he rewrote Christ’s saying (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”) in this startling manner: “Truth is our way and our life, and not the errors of men nor the fictions of impostors.”202 He professed not to fear the Roman Congregation of the Index, which had condemned several works by Gallican scholars: “those who search only for truth . . . await in peace what it will please truth to command or to permit; they are happy provided they might be able to follow truth everywhere and have it always on their side, both in its glory and in its ignominy.”203 More than a historical method, therefore, the Gallican scholars’ insistence on what was “more probable” or “safer” was a moral theology. As noted above, the notion of “moral certainty” had indeed originated in this context. The decade of the 1670s was 197. This passage is part of Tillemont’s history of the persecution of Valerian, first published in Histoire, 3:421, and then repeated in Memoires, 4:7. See also Memoires, 2:614. 198. Letters from Jean-Baptiste Boué (a Jansenist Carthusian) to Florin Périer, January 18 and February 8, 1656, in Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Mesnard, 3:478, 481; Bruno Neveu, “Port-Royal à l’âge des Lumières: Les Pensées et les Anecdotes de l’abbé d’Étemare (1682–1770)” (1977), repr. in Érudition, 277–331 at 282. 199. Jansen, Augustinus, vol. 2, “De statu purae naturae,” bk. 1, chap. 4, col. 696; Augustine, Confessions, 4.9.14 (CCSL 27, 47). Jansen, ibid., col. 694, also quoted Augustine, De libero arbitrio, 2.15.39 (CCSL 29, 264): “ipsa ueritas deus est.” This chapter of the Augustinus is quoted at length by Jean Hardouin, Athei Detecti, in Opera varia (Amsterdam, 1733), 1–2. On this aspect of Hardouin’s system, see Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729, vol. 1, The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 366–69. 200. Pierre Nicole, Instructions théologiques et morales, sur le Symbole, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1707), 1:41. This is quoted by Hardouin, Athei, 169–70. The first edition of Nicole’s posthumous Instructions sur le Symbole appeared in Paris in 1706. 201. François Ledieu, Les dernières années de Bossuet: Journal, ed. Charles Urbain and Eugène Levesque, 2 vols. (Bruges, Belgium, and Paris, 1928–29), 2:4. 202. John 14:6; Tillemont, Memoires, 1:xiv. See also Memoires, 1:1. 203. Ibid., 15:87. See also 13:1035. reason and reasonableness ! 431 a period of strong rigorist reaction against probabilism, which had been especially promoted by the Jesuits and was now made responsible for “lax morality.” The PortRoyalists were at the forefront of this campaign. A growing number of divines now advocated either probabiliorism (one should always follow what is more probable) or tutiorism (one should always follow what is further from sin). In 1679, Pope Innocent XI, spurred on by Jansenist divines from the University of Louvain, condemned the proposition that one may rely “on any probability, whether extrinsic [that is, based on authority] or intrinsic [based on reasons], however slight, provided one is still within the limits of probability.”204 Mabillon expressly denounced probabilism and recommended rigorist books in his Traité des études.205 “Reason” and “truth” were also devotional categories. Gallican bishops were eager to suppress “superstitions” in their dioceses, and scholars fully shared in these campaigns. Tillemont insisted that the liturgy of the church should be purified of “all that has not an authority either certain, or at least well grounded enough to be read with respect and with a reasonable piety, and without giving heretics an opportunity to mock our devotion.”206 He fully sided with Joly on the Assumption of the Virgin: this was “a pious belief ” (une créance pieuse)—that is, a belief conducive to piety—“but if piety is not founded on truth, it is merely superstition and illusion. And truth does not allow us to regard as certain those things of which we are assured neither by authority nor by reason.”207 In his 1698 Epistola de cultu sanctorum ignotorum, Mabillon famously challenged the “immoderate worship” paid to the bodies found in Roman catacombs, which the Roman Curia, using generous criteria, treated en bloc as martyrs’ relics and distributed throughout the Catholic world.208 Saints, Mabillon protested, should be “certain and unquestionable, in as much as they are recognized by certain and unquestionable arguments. For it concerns the sincerity of religion, to hold up to 204. Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, ed. Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer, 36th ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, 1976), no. 2103. For the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic probability, see, for example, Paul Laymann, Theologia moralis (Paris, 1627), 5; Juan Sánchez, Selectae et practicae Disputationes (Madrid, 1624), 337; Zaccaria Pasqualigo, Decisiones morales (Verona, Italy, 1641), 18. See Jean-Louis Quantin, “Le Saint-Office et le probabilisme (1677–1679): Contribution à l’histoire de la théologie morale à l’époque moderne,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée 114 (2002): 875–960; for an overview of the controversy, see Quantin, “Le rigorisme: sur le basculement de la théologie morale catholique au XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 89 (2003): 23–43. 205. See Mabillon, Traité des études, 219–24. On Mabillon’s antiprobabilism, see also Mabillon to Cardinal Colloredo, July 4, 1700, in A. Goldmann, “Dom Jean Mabillons Briefe an Cardinal Leander Colloredo,” Studien und Mitteilungen aus dem Benediktiner- und dem Cistercienser Orden 10 (1889): 464. 206. Tillemont, Memoires, 5:188. On Tillemont and liturgy, see also ibid., 1:495, 499; 2:516; 5:448. 207. Tillemont, Memoires, 1:499–500 (with references to Joly’s works, 498). 208. [Mabillon], Eusebii Romani ad Theophilum Gallum Epistola de cultu sanctorum ignotorum (Paris, 1698), 4, 7. See Leclercq, Mabillon, 2:712–38. On the distribution of bodies from the catacombs, see Antonio Ferrua’s introduction to Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Sulla questione del vaso di sangue (Vatican City, 1944), viii–xxxiii; Hansjakob Achermann, Die Katakombenheiligen und ihre Translationen in der schweizerischen Quart des Bistums Konstanz (Stans, Switzerland, 1979), esp. 5–48; Trevor Johnson, “Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter-Reformation in Bavaria,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47 (1996): 274–97. ! 432 jean-louis quantin the faithful only indisputable examples of a holy life.”209 One should not make too much of the Epistola by itself: here as elsewhere, a semi-hagiographical tradition, which is still alive and well in France, has made the Maurists more innovative than they really were, by isolating them from their predecessors, especially the great Jesuit scholars of the first half of the seventeenth century.210 As early as 1597, after dubious relics from the Roman catacombs had been imported into Spain, Juan de Mariana had written to both the pope and the king of Spain in words strikingly similar to those of Mabillon:211 “It would be noxious to offer to the worship of the people relics, whose truth and certainty may be rightly doubted.” Mariana conceded that “it would be wrong-headed to require mathematical evidence” but thought “that one should take such care not to be mistaken as is required by the condition of the matter and by ecclesiastical laws.”212 Mariana’s letters, however, were confidential and appear to have made no impact, whereas Mabillon’s Epistola was a public manifesto, which found enthusiastic supporters among the French episcopate and which—after narrowly escaping condemnation in Rome—became a reference for enlightened Catholicism all over Europe.213 Gallican scholars believed that their religious ideal had found its best expression ever in Christian antiquity, and particularly in the fourth century, “the happiest time of the Church.”214 When they hunted down spurious martyrdoms or legendary miracles, they aimed at purifying Catholicism from later accretions. This focus had an aesthetic dimension: Nicole (unsurprisingly for an Augustinian) wrote of “the beauty of truth”215 and Tillemont of “the beauty of Christianity.”216 The taste of critics was a good taste, which looked for “nature,” “simplicity,” “purity.”217 Such words recur constantly in Tillemont’s critical notes on hagiographical documents.218 They express a “style” that was indissolubly aesthetic and religious: the literary canons of French clas209. [Mabillon], De Cultu, 7. 210. The point has been well made by François Dolbeau, “Quelques instruments de travail chez les mauristes,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 151 (2007): 1729–78 at 1729–32. 211. Georges Cirot, Mariana historien (Bordeaux, France, 1904), 53–58. 212. Mariana’s memoir to the Pope, BL, MS Egerton 1874, fols. 389r–392v at 389r. This is followed, fols. 394r–398r, by a somewhat free Spanish translation, published by Cirot, Mariana, appendix 3, 418–22 (see 418). 213. For the reception of Mabillon’s Epistola, see the epistolary dossier printed in Ouvrages posthumes de D. Jean Mabillon et de D. Thierri Ruinart, ed. Vincent Thuillier, 3 vols. (Paris, 1724), 1:303–64. For the German katholische Aufklärung, see Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Farnham, U.K., 2009), 262. 214. Tillemont, Memoires, 9:306. See Bruno Neveu, “L’érudition ecclésiastique du XVIIe siècle et la nostalgie de l’antiquité chrétienne” (1981) and “Archéolâtrie et modernité dans le savoir ecclésiastique au XVIIe siècle” (1981), repr. in Érudition, 333–63 and 365–83. 215. Nicole’s preface to Arnauld, Nouveaux Elemens, sig. a4r. For Nicole’s interest in literary aesthetics, see Pierre Nicole, La vraie beauté et son fantôme, et autres textes d’esthétique, ed. Béatrice Guion (Paris, 1996). 216. Memoires, 13:253. 217. See Marc Fumaroli, “Retour à l’Antique: la guerre des goûts dans l’Europe des Lumières,” in the exhibition catalogue L’Antiquité rêvée: innovations et résistances au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2010), 35–37. 218. See, for example, Memoires, 4:592; 5:603, 622, 648. reason and reasonableness ! 433 sicism, to which Tillemont fully adhered,219 as well as the model of Augustinian, Gallican, Catholicism. Tillemont’s rejection of Acts of martyrs that included speeches “full of insults”220 mirrors Pascal’s point that “the style of the Gospel is admirable in so many ways, among other things in that it never inveighs against the murderers and enemies of Christ.”221 The general principle was the classical motto Ne quid nimis: Tillemont notes at various points that “so many miracles sound fictitious” or that “the heavenly voice at the end of the story says too much.”222 The accumulation of miracles was ipso facto “suspect.”223 Such judgments proceeded from a typically Gallican spirituality of Deus absconditus, which preferred to contemplate the mysterious presence of God rather than his visible manifestations.224 Tillemont’s awe for the hidden God also provided him with a universal solution to any problematic passages in stories that he regarded as well attested. Thus, he reproduced, with a pious comment, Pliny the Elder’s story of the remora, the small fish that stopped Caligula’s vessel.225 Arnauld seems to have balked at the story, and Tillemont admitted that it was “absolutely incomprehensible to my reason.” But, he asked, “why could not God have performed even in nature deeds incomprehensible to men, on purpose to humiliate them? And Caligula well deserved to be humiliated.”226 In the case of miracles related by the church fathers, Tillemont believed that the proportionality between the improbability of the events and the authority of the witnesses was an effect of divine Providence. Thus, God, who wanted Simeon Stylites to be an example for posterity, “was careful to have his history written as authentically as it was important and as persuading people of it was difficult.”227 Even in cases where the fathers were far removed from the events, Tillemont was extremely reluctant to accept that they might have reported apocryphal stories. He stated this explicitly in the case of the fight between Saint Peter and Simon Magus (Simon beginning to fly and Peter causing him to crash): [Even if it were true that this story were a fiction, we prefer, as long as there is no clear and convincing proof that it is false, be mistaken with Arnobius, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, the legates of Pope Liberius, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Isidore of Pelusium, Theodoret and several 219. See Tillemont’s severe judgment of the “unnatural” style of pseudo-Dionysius, Memoires, 2:572. See also Memoires, 9:329, on Gregory of Nazianzus, and 16:281, on Sidonius Apollinaris. 220. Memoires, 5:651, 653. 221. Pascal, Pensées, fragment Sellier 658–Lafuma 812. 222. Dolbeau, “Tillemont,” 92nn55–56, 104 (my emphasis). Cf. Memoires, 5:622. 223. Tillemont, Memoires, 8:800. 224. See esp. Bernard Dorival, “L’ex-voto de 1662 par Philippe de Champaigne,” Revue du Louvre 23 (1973): 337–48; Louis Marin, Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée (n.p., 1995), “L’Ex-Voto de 1662,” 299–318; Le Dieu caché: Les peintres du Grand Siècle et la vision de Dieu, ed. Olivier Bonfait and Neil MacGregor (Rome, 2000). 225. Tillemont, Histoire, 1:191. Compare Pliny, Natural History, 32.1.3–4. 226. Tillemont to Ruth d’Ans, January 1, 1690, UPR, no. 1602. 227. Tillemont, Memoires, 15:348. The reference is to Theodoret’s Historia religiosa. ! 434 jean-louis quantin others, rather than be obliged to charge with indiscreet credulity] many of the most illustrious and weightiest masters of the Greek and Latin Church [for no other reason but that it is not absolutely certain that they say the truth].228 Tillemont made a clear distinction between the field of the historian and that of the theologian, and he “did not profess to clarify any difficulty other than those that concern history and chronology.”229 However, theological considerations explicitly influenced his evaluation of the intrinsic probability or improbability of a story. He gave the benefit of the doubt to one hagiographical text that was “beautiful and edifying”230 but rejected another that was “as little edifying as probable.”231 He noted that the Arian historian Philostorgius deserved “little belief, [particularly] in the miracles that he ascribes to members of his sect”; “particularly,” in square brackets, was Tillemont’s addition to his source, according to the principle that heretics cannot perform true miracles.232 He regarded as highly improbable accounts of sudden conversions that appeared to contradict the rigorist pastoral of penance.233 He protested that the Bagaudae of the third century could not have been Christians, since they revolted against the emperor, and “the Gospel teaches us to defend faith against legitimate princes with sufferings and not with arms”—a basic axiom of Gallican political theology. “Therefore we will certainly not ascribe a revolt to the Christians of that time on the authority of a history written in the seventh century at the earliest.”234 Controversial divinity, which was banished from the surface of historical discourse, still lay deep at the core of Gallican scholarship. For those who did not share their patristic myth, the work of Gallican scholars could not but appear utterly unreasonable. In the eyes of their critics, they gave up too many legends in proportion to those they retained, or vice versa. They had thought of themselves as critics, they were put down to the rank of mere compilers. The history of this demotion cannot be traced here, but it owed much to the paradoxical conjunction of the Jesuits and their most brilliant literary pupil, Voltaire.235 The latter always af228. Memoires, 1:187. The unbracketed words are a quotation from Jean-Baptiste Cotelier’s comment in his edition of the apostolic fathers, SS. Patrum qui temporibus apostolicis floruerunt; Barnabae, Clementis, Hermae, Ignatii, Polycarpi; opera edita et inedita, uera et suppositicia, 2 vols. (Paris, 1672), vol. 2, col. 269 (“Notae in constitutiones Apostolicas”). 229. Tillemont, Memoires, 3:626. See also ibid., 1:x, xx, 498; 3:612; 13:253. 230. Ibid., 4:29. See also Tillemont’s preface, ibid., 1:xii. 231. Ibid., 16:808. 232. Tillemont, Histoire, 4:677. Compare Philostorgius, Ecclesiasticae Historiae . . . Libri XII. a Photio . . . in Epitomen contracti, ed. Jacques Godefroy (Geneva, 1642), “Dissertationes,” sep. paginated, 410–11. 233. See Quantin, “Document,” 631–32, adding Tillemont, Memoires, 5:650. 234. Tillemont, Histoire, 4:599. Tillemont was discussing the Life of St. Babolein (abbot of SaintMaur-des-Fossés in the seventh century), extracts from which had been published by André Du Chesne, Historiae Francorum Scriptores coaetanei, ab ipsius gentis origine, ad Pipinum usque Regem, vol. 1 (Paris, 1636), 662. On this Vita Baboleni, which is “mostly a sheer novel,” written in the mid-eleventh century, see P. Séjourné, Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 6 (1932), 24. 235. See Marc Fumaroli, “Voltaire,” Proceedings of the British Academy 87 (1994): 119–34. reason and reasonableness ! 435 fected to despise ecclesiastical érudition. In 1733, he thus announced to a friend the new great work of the Maurists (which was modeled on Tillemont’s Memoires): “the tireless and heavy Benedictines are about to publish the literary history of France in ten foliovolumes, which I will not read. I prefer thirty lines of yours to anything the laborious compilers have ever written.”236 The Jesuits fell out with Voltaire in 1753–54 over the anti-Christian implications of his historical works,237 but they had essentially the same conception of history. Father de Menoux’s 1753 discourse on how to write history hinted that Voltaire did not work enough, but the model he opposed to him was Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle, a providentialist grand récit that, especially in its final edition, expressed Bossuet’s growing mistrust of the rise of biblical criticism.238 Menoux did not mention the Maurists at all and named Tillemont only once, in a list of uncritical compilers, who “have gathered masses of materials without choice, and arranged them without taste”; the utmost that could be said for them was that “the historian might benefit from their learned researches.”239 The Jesuits as well as Voltaire spoke the language of historical criticism, discoursing of “hidden historical truths” to be brought to light, of “discussion,” “proofs,” and “certainty,” but their explanations always had a slightly implausible ring.240 They missed the fundamental point of Gallican scholars: that criticism is not a faculty summoned from outside, as it were, to pass judgment on materials gathered by inferior workers, but that it is honed by an assiduous study of original sources. Voltaire’s protégé, Marmontel, who wrote the article “Criticism” in the Encyclopédie, made a correct use of the standard notions (“authority,” “facts,” “degree of possibility,” “weight of testimony,” and so on).241 But, when he discussed the sources for Justinian’s reign in his historical novel Bélisaire, he categorically denied, without knowing Greek and for purely moral reasons, that Procopius could ever have written the Secret History.242 236. Voltaire to Pierre Robert Le Cornier de Cideville, May 6, 1733, in Correspondence, ed. T. Besterman, vol. 2 (Geneva and Toronto, 1969), D 606, 330–31. See Bruno Neveu, “L’Histoire littéraire de la France et l’érudition bénédictine au siècle des Lumières,” Journal des savants 2 (1979): 73–113. Additional information may be found in Dom Rivet et l’histoire littéraire de la France: Actes du colloque du Mans, Abbaye Saint-Vincent, octobre 1999, ed. Daniel-Odon Hurel and André Levy, special issue, La Province du Maine 104 (2002): nos. 61–62. 237. Louis Châtellier, “Voltaire, Colmar, les jésuites, et l’histoire,” Revue d’Alsace 106 (1980): 69–82; Voltaire en son temps, ed. René Pomeau, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1985–94), 3:201–4. 238. Joseph de Menoux, Discours prononcé le 20 Octobre 1753 à la séance publique de la Société royale et littéraire de Nancy (Nancy, France, n.d.), 11. See Gérard Ferreyrolles, Béatrice Guion, and Jean-Louis Quantin, Bossuet (Paris, 2008), chap. 5, “Le Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle,” 109–30 (by Guion). 239. Menoux, Discours, 14. 240. Ibid., 5, 10, 15, 23–24. Compare Voltaire, “Histoire,” in Oeuvres alphabétiques, vol. 1, ed. Jeroom Vercruysse [Oeuvres complètes, 33] (Oxford, 1987), 164–86, esp. 169, 177, 178, 182: this article, published in vol. 8 of the Encyclopédie in 1765, was written by Voltaire between 1755 and 1758. 241. Jean-François Marmontel, “Critique” (first published in the Encyclopédie in 1754), in Éléments de littérature, ed. Sophie Le Ménahèze (Paris, 2005), 311. See Michael Cardy, The Literary Doctrines of Jean-François Marmontel, SVEC 210 (Oxford, 1982), 3–5. 242. Marmontel, Bélisaire, ed. Robert Granderoute (Paris, 1994), 5–9. ! 436 jean-louis quantin In nineteenth-century France, those who reacted against what they regarded as Voltaire’s superficiality turned to contemporary German universities rather than to the Gallican past for models of the critical study of Christianity. As early as 1810, Germaine de Staël, who exerted a profound influence on the French perception of Germany, explained that “while in France the philosophical spirit made fun of Christianity, it was turned in Germany into an object of érudition.”243 Half a century later, Renan, who thought that “historical criticism is truly the offspring of Protestantism,”244 praised Tillemont’s “solid scholarship”245 but refused to regard him as a critic; his historical works, Renan said, “are masterpieces of conscientiousness, but conscientiousness is not criticism.”246 I would like to thank Moti Feingold and Scott Mandelbrote, as well as Sara K. Austin at the Huntington, for their comments on this essay. ! jean-louis quantin holds the chair of the history of early modern scholarship at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne, Paris) and is especially interested in the reception of the church fathers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. His most recent book, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. 243. Mme de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. Comtesse Jean de Pange, 5 vols. (Paris, 1958–60), 5:42. 244. Ernest Renan, “Port-Royal” (1860), repr. in Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse (1884), in Oeuvres complètes, ed. H. Psichari, 10 vols. (Paris, 1947–61), 7:1000. 245. Renan, Marc-Aurèle, 2:780. 246. Renan, “Port-Royal,” 7:1000. It is interesting to compare Renan’s more balanced judgment on his former professor at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, M. Le Hir, which would in fact apply to Tillemont quite well: “Au fond, il ne lui manqua que ce qui l’eût fait cesser d’être catholique, la critique. Je dis mal: il avait la critique très exercée en tout ce qui ne tient pas à la foi; mais la foi avait pour lui un tel coefficient de certitude, que rien ne pouvait la contrebalancer” (Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse [1883], in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Psichari, 2:858; on Le Hir, see François Laplanche in Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine, vol. 9, Les sciences religieuses. Le XIXe siècle, 1800–1914, ed. Laplanche [Paris, 1996], s.v.).