Father Berruyer's Biblical novel (cont.)

Illustration from: http://www.18thcenturybibles.org/Welcome.html

Here are a few passages from Father Berruyer's rendition of Genesis. As his critics pointed out, the Patriarchs seem more like 18th-century Frenchmen than Ancient Hebrews. The effect is amplified by Berruyer's typically Jesuit insistence on Divine Mercy and human free will, a theological outlook which doesn't sit happily with the vengeful God of the Old Testament. In Berruyer's version God gives men plenty of time to mend their ways  - if only they would stop and think though their actions more carefully!

Trouble in Paradise

Eve gives the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge
of which she had eaten to her Husband,Genesis 3:6

[God forbids Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge] For Adam, who felt himself to be full of courage, the law of abstinence from a single fruit, seemed a slight test of his virtue...But Adam was still alone, and he did not know what it costs a fond man to ignore the pleas, or to guard against the seductive powers, of a woman...

[God creates Eve] The two rational creatures to whom He had given command of the created world, occupied themselves agreeably with admiring its marvels and giving thanks to its author.  Adam profited from these happy moments to teach his new wife the precepts he had received from God....Adam fulfilled the duties of a good husband, instructing his wife with much care; and the wife for her part was so attentive that she remembered his instruction world for word and repeated them on many occasions.  

[Eve is tempted by the serpent to eat from the forbidden tree - she finds the fruit "as delicious in taste as it was agreeable to the eye" and prevails upon Adam to follow her lead]   ...the caresses, the solicitations, the importuning of a beloved wife, who was afflicted, who gave herself over to despair, who reproached him with indifference towards her, make powerful impressions on the heart of a man.  Adam allowed himself to be conquered and finally bit the fatal morsel" (vol.1, book1,  p.22-29)

Father Berruyer's Biblical novel

Ton livre unit l'amusant à  l'utile

Point ne prétends en critiquer le style,

Et point ne veux en blasonner le plan; 

Mais, Berruyer, si tu voudrais me croire, 

Il te faudroit, au beau titre d'histoire,

Substituter le titre du roman.

[Your books unites the amusing and the useful; No-one  could criticise the style or improve  the plan;  But Berruyer, believe me, you must substitute for the fine title of history the title novel.  Epigram quoted in Iraihl, Querelles littéraires (1761)]

Father Hardouin’s most famous follower was a fellow-Jesuit, Isaac-Joseph Berruyer who between 1728 and 1758 published a history of Biblical times in many volumes entitled The History of the People of God. 

In May 1753 the appearance of the second part of this work caused a furore equal to or greater than any produced by the publications of the philosophes.  It was condemned by the Pope, the Archbishop of Paris, the Sorbonne and the Parlement, and finally ceremonially burnt by the public hangman. The Jesuits of Paris had done their best to limit the damage. Following a conference with Archbishop de Beaumont ten thousand écus had been placed at their disposal to round up all available copies and compensate the booksellers.  However, by October, when the Jesuits issued their formal disavowal, d'Argenson reports that police had already seized four thousand copies at the gates of Paris. Handbills were given out at church doors and other public places stating that the Society had nothing to do with the affair.  

Berruyer himself claimed that he had not been responsible for the work's unauthorised appearance and indeed, Jesuit sources confirmed that he had come from Rouen to Paris to print the Histoire only to find publication blocked by the Jesuit Provincial. The Année Française even claimed that Father Tournemine had kept the only manuscript under under lock and key, amusing himself every so often by bringing it out to read aloud and ridicule. Nonetheless, although Berruyer apparently acquiesced humbly in the condemnation, a third part appeared four years later, raising reasonable suspicions both that he was not really so repentant and that he had influential supporters.

The principal accusation against Berruyer's history was the grave one that he was guilty of substituting his own word for the word of God, a charge lent substance by his method - adopted from Hardouin - of creating a loose paraphrase of the Biblical text. Berruyer modernised the Biblical language, put imaginary conversations into the mouths of the sacred characters, inventing thoughts and motivations and inserting comments to point out the moral of the story. He was criticised for lingering pruriently over the loves of the patriarchs, the passion of Potiphar's wife or Judith's liaison with Holophernes. His New Testament caused even greater offence. The work also betrayed Hardouin's critical idiocyncrases - his exclusive reliance on the Latin Vulgate, his chronological revisions, his heterodox interpretation of Old Testament prophecies as having two literal meanings at once; and in the New Testament his supposedly anti-Trinitarian interpretation of the person of Christ.

The literary wags, of course, had a field day: a Jesuit had turned the Bible into a third rate novel! The Patriarchs were made to think and act, "like men brought up at Court or in the middle of Paris".  Voltaire took pleasure in noting that the Bible had been transformed into "un roman de ruelle" and that Berruyer, "although a Jesuit, was a fool"." In his article "Adam" in the Philosophical dictionary, he reviewed the weird and wonderful contortions of contemporary theological discussions of Genesis and commented ironically that he would leave their resolution to Berruyer:  "He is the most perfect Innocent I have ever known; the book has been burned, as that of a man who wished to turn the Bible into ridicule; but I am quite sure he had no such wicked end in view."

For once Voltaire had totally missed the point.  Berruyer was no fool and it was the very vagaries of critical scholarship and their potential threat to Christianity which, following his mentor  Hardouin, he sought to address.  In controversy Berruyer defended critical freedom but also the need to safeguard faith against the necessary uncertainties of criticism itself. To do so he turned to the usual Catholic appeal to Church tradition, but with a novel twist.  True tradition was to be found not in writings but specifically in the Church's oral tradition - in its everyday teaching rather than in "a mass of prickly discussion":  "It is in the teaching of the Roman Church, and in its present teaching, that I find without risk and at small cost the tradition of all the ages; it is there that the Religion of Christ must be found, even by those who seek to combat it". (Vol. 1,p.263) .

For the Bible there were two crucial consequences.  Firstly, since the Church had pronounced that the Latin Vulgate was the "authentic" version of the Bible, this text alone should be relied upon. "The history of the people of God that I am writing, cannot in any way  be found in the books of Pagans".  It was Hardouin and Berruyer's  contention was that  that an entire history could be constructed from the Vulgate alone, without recourse to rival versions or secular sources -  the divine monuments, when appropriate interpreted and arranged, says Berruyer, "furnish by themselves the most true, the most beautiful and the most interesting history in the world".

The other  consequence was to empty the Bible of doctrinal content : Scripture provided historical testimony to the truth of revelation rather than evelation itself, which should be sought in Church tradition . Thus Moses and the Patriarchs knew nothing of the Christian mysteries, whilst the Prophets foretold only Christ's Messiahship. Jesus's own teaching was often obscure or conditioned by the needs of his immediate audience.  He offered no religious doctrine or ethics but sought only to convince his hearers that he was the Son of God, and to demonstrate his supernatural power through miracles.


Berruyer's summary of the person of Christ as he appears in the New Testament sounds strikingly modern, some might say more appropriate to Voltaire or Rousseau than to a Catholic priest:


" one God,  one Jesus-Christ (son of God (in a manner and in a certain sense), whose life, death Resurrection, miracles and lessons are recounted in the Gospels.  A Messiah and celestial Doctor, sent into the world and authorised by God to abrogate the gross and imperfect religion of the Jews, to cure the world of Idolatry....to furnish to a corrupt world the help and example of a pure morality; to make of men so many Philosophers submissive to the Laws of Reason, to present to them in his person the idea of the spirituality and immortality of the soul, hope of Resurection and perhaps also knowledge of the punishments and rewards of the next life." [Passage from Berruyer's Reflections on faith (1763)]

References

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac-Joseph_Berruyer
Wikipedia article taken from Aloys De Backer, Bibliothèque des écrivains de la Compagnie de Jésus, (1856), p. 144-5.

Isaac Joseph Berruyer (1681-1758) on "Berruyer.com"
http://www.berruyer.fr/celebres/genealogie-3-3-isaac.html

.R. Palmer, Catholics and unbelievers in 18th century France (Princeton 1939), p.68-76.

C.M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment SVEC (1991) p.144-55.

Atheistical forgeries uncovered

Galerie Illustrée de la
Compagnie de Jésus (Paris: 1893)

Epitaph of Father Hardouin:

IN EXPECTATION OF THE JUDGMENT

HERE LIES

THE MOST PARADOXICAL OF MEN

BY NATURE A FRENCHMAN, BY RELIGION A ROMAN, 

THE PORTENT OF THE LITERARY WORLD,

THE WORSHIPPER AND THE DESTROYER OF VENERABLE ANTIQUITY.

FEVERED WITH LEARNING,

HE WOKE TO PUBLISH DREAMS AND THOUGHTS

UNHEARD OF.

HE WAS PIOUS IN HIS SCEPTICISM, 

A CHILD IN CREDULITY, A YOUTH IN RASHNESS, AN OLD MAN IN MADNESS

"In expectatione judicii/ Hic jacet/ Hominum paradoxotatos/ Natione Gallus, Religione Romanus/ Orbis literari portentum:/ Venerandae antiquitatis cultor et destructor./ Docte febricitans/ Somnia et inaudita commenta vigilans edidit/ Scepticum pie egit/ Credulitate poer, audicia juvenis, delirii senex" (composed by Claude Gros de Boze and reproduced as a preface to the Prolegomena - see below)

The Prolegomena of Father Hardouin

In 1766 there appeared in London a seemingly dull book in Latin by a long-dead French Jesuit, Father Jean Hardouin, entitled Ad Censurum Scriptorum Veterum Prolegomena  [An Introduction to the censure of the Ancient writers].  The publication passed scarcely noticed, yet it was a startling work, for in an age of eccentric scholars, Father Hardouin must surely rank as the most eccentric of all. Rumours of his famous “system” had circulated from early in the century but only now was the full extent of his folly revealed.


An English translation of the Prolegomena, published in 1909  is available on the internet, removing the need to struggle with Latin.  Hardouin’s thesis was simple but devastating; his intention, he declares at the outset, is to show that the entire corpus of Ancient texts were forged, "that all writings which are commonly thought to be old, are in fact…supposititious, and the fabrication of an unprincipled crew of literary men" (p.1)  Hardouin's accusation was thoroughgoing. He spared as genuine only the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible and a handful of Classical texts: Homer, a few books of Herodotus and, among the Latins, Cicero, the Elder Pliny, the Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil and the Satires and Letters of Horace.  All other writings and historical records, including the entire corpus of the Church Fathers, were held to be the product of a conspiracy of 13th and 14th-century writers, headed up by one "Severus Archotius" (aka. Emperor Frederick II) bent on spreading atheism in the world and undermining the Catholic faith.  This colossal fabrication was achieved on the basis of the few authentic texts,  plus an almost equally limited number of coins and inscriptions which Hardouin accepted as genuine.  Against the charge of implausibility, Hardouin solemnly observed that the entire library of Ancient texts could well have been created within a generation since it was equivalent in length only to the works of the Protestant Reformers or the combined output of Suarez,.Vasquez and five other (equally prolix) Jesuit theologians

Genesis of the system

Almost as surprising as his conclusions, was the high regard Hardouin had been held in by the scholarly community.  Although prevented from publishing, he had been sheltered  for years in the Jesuit house in Paris, where he continued to be held in esteem for both his piety and learning.  All of which suggests  that there might be more to "Hardouinisme" than mere craziness.

Born in in 1646, the son of a printer-bookseller from Quimper in Brittany, Hardouin  had entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1660, become a professed Jesuit in 1770,  and rapidly established himself as one of the leading scholars of his age. His interest in textual criticism and numismatics made him  one of the few Jesuit scholars who could rival the enormous prestige of the Benedictines of St Maur.  In 1684 he was charged with the edition of Pliny “ad usum Delphini” and in 1985 with the highly prestigious commission of an edition of the Councils of the Church, for which he received a royal pension. From 1685 onwards he was also Professor of Scripture at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, though in 1691 he was judiciously removed from his teaching post and made librarian at the Professed Jesuits’ house in the rue Saint-Antoine.

The Jesuit Church of St Louis, rue Saint-Antoine. 
18th century engraving  from the Institut National d' Histoire de l'Art 

Although his work already betrayed a certain eccentricity, it was from1690 onwards that Hardouin began to elaborate his "system".  As the Prolegomena makes clear, his initial suspicions fell on the Church Fathers, chief among them, St. Augustine of Hippo, the great authority of the Jansenists.  For a Jesuit to question Augustine in the early 18th century, was roughly equivalent to presenting his colleagues with an unexploded bomb. At  first Hardouin was pretty effectively muzzled by his superiors, but vague hints of forgery began to appear in two works of chronology published in 1693 and 1697.  Rumour circulated that Hardouin intended to point the finger of accusation at 10th-century Benedictines. In 1707 the former Benedictine La Croze accused him of seeking to undermine Catholic tradition and he was forced to formally retract.  That he had not reformed was made clear when the offending works reappeared as part of a volume of Opera Selecta published in Holland in 1709.  In 1715 Hardouin's massive history of the Church Councils finally appeared, only to be condemned as too favourable to papal authority and prevented from going on sale for another ten years. Although the work was finished according to orthodox scholarship, four volumes of manuscript notes revealed Hardouin's belief that all Councils prior to Trent were fraudulent. When asked how he could have nonetheless laboured on his edition, he replied that "Only God and I know that".

Little more was heard of Father Hardouin until after his death, when his friend the abbé d'Olivet took possession of many of his manuscripts, no doubt for fear they would be destroyed.  The Opera Varia, published by d'Olivet in 1733, reproduced a few completed works, including the "Athei detecti" a mystifying attack on a seemingly disparate list of philosophers and Jansenist theologians,  including Pascal, Descartes,  and the Oratorians Louis Thomassin and Nicolas Malebranche.  The dissertations on secular sources yielded two idiocyncratic allegorical interpretations of Horace and Virgil, which caused Voltaire suitable amusement:  "He believes that Aeneus is Jesus Christ and Lalage, Horace's mistress, is the Christian religion". No doubt it was d'Olivet, who waited over two more decades, until he himself was in his eighties, before daring to publish the Prolegomena.


. The revelations of La Pillonniere

In all this this time the outside world still had no real key to the system.  However, some clarification was provided in 1717 when an erstwhile young disciple, François La Pillonniere converted to Protestantism, fled to London and published his experiences.  Various versions of his account exist, including one in English, which is amusing for its portrait of Hardouin, but also informative about the idea of "atheism" which underpinned the system.

La Pillonniere recounts that, as a new novice, he wasted no time in seeking out the famous Jesuit oracle:

p.7: At length, a dissatisfied and helpless Curiosity moved me to apply to Father Hardouin, whom I thought possessed of the Key of true Knowledge, as he hinted now and then he was, and as every Thing almost induced me to believe; particularly, the Fondness of many Jesuits (and some of Note) for his opinions; his great Piety; his laborious Life beyond Expression, and immense Reading; his being pensioned by the Clergy of France, for writing his unfortunate History of Councils, or his Romance as he was wont to call it; and lastly, the greatest Enchanter of Friendship[.....]

Whether it was that he did not think Me Ripe enough, or that he was afraid of new Storms; Father Hardouin would not for a long while lead me into his Secrets.  He advised me only to improve Myself in Greek, and to learn Hebrew, raising my  Expectation on the one Hand by his Dark Reservedness, and on the other by his wonderful Promises.....

p.8-9:  Finally Hardouin revealed to La Pillonniere his heterodox interpretations of Old Testament prophecies and chronology, and finally something of the basis of the "system":

...I was struck with nothing more than with what he insinuates concerning a Set of Atheists, leagued in order to root out true Religion from amongst Men. This Faction, made up of Ancient and Modern Authors, whom He charged with a very Impious and Atheistical System indeed; but which had Being no where else than in F. Hardouin's crazy Brain; and on which nevertheless he had built his own Imaginations, about the Works of the Fathers, and almost all the profane Authors not being Genuine.  

La Pillonniere now consulted Hardouin's colleague Father Tournemine, editor of the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux and correspondent of Voltaire: 

I desired Father Tournemine to tell Me what was that Atheistical and Chimerical System of which He spake.  F. Tournemine answered that F.H. charged the Authors of those Books with having no other GOD but TRUTH (which was not a SUBSTANCE) and with designing to draw the World into their Atheism, by their damnable Way of Reasning upon that Subject.
F. Tournemine let slip a Word, in the Course of our Conversation, viz. That the two Ancient Books, F. Hardouin had most Spite against, were St. John Damascen and St. Augustin's Second Book about Free-Will.  

La Pillonniere repaired to the Library to consult these works where, "being strongly prepossess'd with some of the dark Notions of the Schools", he came to the conclusion that F. Hardouin was "not so full of Dreams as it was commonly thought".


"Whilst I was revolving these Thoughts, with St.Augustin's Book laid open before Me, F. Hardouin, who was the Library-Keeper, comes in .  Finding me in a very good way, He led Me into his Secrets for the first Time.  He instructed Me for many Hours together, both about the Atheistical Principle, and Heretical Consequences, of the system of the ROGUES.  Les FRIPONS (which was the Name he constantly gave to Thos whom his Adversaries call'd the FATHERS OF THE CHURCH)....He told Me a thousand Things very entertaining, and very worthy to be offered to the Curiosity of the Publick..

La Pillonniere now deviced a strategem.  He transcribed  the offending passages from St Augustine and offered them up to various fellow Jesuits for condemnation.  He claims to have tricked twenty, one of whom asked if the book was not by "some Dutch Protestant" and another why Hardouin  didn't condemn this and leave the Fathers of the Church alone.  A somewhat unguarded Tournemine himself finally admitted "that if F. Hardouin would keep within Bounds, as other Criticks, there would be no great harm in delivering up to him some Books of St. Augustin, which might well enough be looked upon as Young Frolicks, etc." (p.12)

The Jesuit novitiate and its church (now demolished) from
 an 18th-century engraving (http://israel.silvestre.fr)

The serious point of course is that Hardouin's reservations about rationalist theologies - among them the neo-Platonism of Augustine -  was not so very far from those of other Jesuit scholars. He belonged to a close knit lose knit group of associates which including not only Tournemine and d'Olivet, but also  Pierre-Daniel Huet, the former Bishop of Avranches and notorious proponent of scepticism, who had retired to the Jesuit house in the rue Saint-Antoine. Another Jesuit, Father Buffier was one of the first Frenchmen to adopt the empirical philosophy of Locke.  

A coincidence of views is particularly apparent with regard to the philosophy of Malebranche, which became very influential in Paris in the 1700s and even gained adherents among the Jesuits themselves. The Journal de Trévoux readily echoed Hardouin's  hostile verdict, condemning Malebranche's  notions of "vision in God" and God as "indeterminate being" as an erroneous identification of the deity with the totality of the universe.  According to Professor Kors, Hardouin manuscript lectures and expositions of Malebranche's position "termed it atheism pure and simple and, analyzing what "followed" from its premises, gave virtual lessons on how to think atheistically...When the new philosophy says God always understand "the reality of things" or "their truth" or "Nature" or the "Necessity of the laws of motion".  For Malebranche "there is no other God but "Nature", "the reality of things" or "the Necessity of the laws of motion"".


The other key point made by La Pillonniere regards the premise of  Hardouin's critical method:

Some learned Men both Protestants and Papists, have falsely imagined that F. Hardouin's Prepossession for Medals, or his Design to serve some Political End of the Society, had given this strange Turn to his Thoughts.  But it was not so.  His blind Submission to the Church of Rome first, and after that His religious Infatuation for the Tenets of the Schools...are the two Springs of His Exorbitancies.  For Having found in the Ancient Books, hardly anything like the ORTHODOX Doctrines of the CHURCH, and of the SCHOOLS; or rather having found the Reverse; He infers very consistently, that these Books never came from the Pen of pious Men Sainted by the Church and who  were no doubt ORTHODOX.(p.11-12)

Hardouin's conclusion is simple, but devastating: a book in which atheism is established and the idea of God overturned, cannot be the work of a saint which the church has canonised.   

It was of course Hardouin's peculiar misfortune to have formulated so inclusive a definition of atheism and so embracing a theory of forgery and then to have adhered to it in the face of all common-sense probability.  Nonetheless, Huet could perhaps still rightly say that "Father Hardouin worked for forty years to ruin his reputation, without being able to achieve his goal".                              

References

The Prolegomena of Jean Hardouin, tr. by Edwin Johnson (1909)
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015015383212;view=1up;seq=28

Francis De La Pillonniere, An answer to the Reverend Dr. Snape's accusation. , ... Containing an account of his behaviour, and sufferings amongst the Jesuits.......printed for James Knapton, and Tim. Childe (1717)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g9dbAAAAQAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

_____, "L'Harduinisme" in Simon-Augustin Irailh, Querelles littéraires, vol.III (1761) p.19-40.
http://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Page:Irailh_-_Querelles_litt%C3%A9raires,_tome_III.djvu/29&action=edit&redlink=1


Studies:

"Jean Hardouin" Catholic Encyclopedia
http://oce.catholic.com/index.php?title=Jean_Hardouin

"Hardouin" in the Dictionnaire des journalistes: 
http://dictionnaire-journalistes.gazettes18e.fr/journaliste/388-jean-hardouin

R.R. Palmer, Catholics and unbelievers in 18th century France (Princeton 1939), p.65-76

Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France 1650-1729 (1990) p.343-4;366-9.

C.M. Northeast, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment SVEC (1991) p.81-88;116-9.

Antony Grafton, "Jean Hardouin: the antiquary as pariah", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 62, (1999), pp. 241-267  http://www.jstor.org/stable/751388
Also published as chapter 10 of Bring out your dead: the past as revelation (Harvard: 2001).  [Extracts on Google Books]

There is also a  very good entry on the Jesuit Church of St. Louis in the rue Saint-Antoine and the Jesuits interred there on the Tombes et sepultures site:
http://www.tombes-sepultures.com/crbst_1059.html

Jesuit beaux-esprits sample provincial life

Initial English translations of Bougeant's Amusement claimed enigmatically that he had been "exiled to La Flèche".  By the second edition he is "now confined at La Flèche on account of this work":  

But just what was this terrible Jesuit prison?

In fact it wasn't a prison at all, but the imposing College Henri IV in La Flèche on the River Loir  (a pleasant and architecturally impressive town then as it is today - it certainly deserves better than to be twinned with Chippenham).  The College counted among its former pupils no less a figure than  Descartes.  To be transferred to this provincial backwater was considered by sophisticated Parisian Jesuits to be an ignominious fate; "Quae maxima apud nos infamia est Pariis Flexiam mittor in exilium" wrote one of their number.

Gresset had already suffered a stint at La Flèche after complaints from Chancellor Chauvelin whose sister was Superior of the nuns of the Visitation lampooned in Ver-Vert.  In Gresset's case the punishment  was considerably softened by his promotion to the Chair of Rhetoric there.  He would soon be allowed to finish his theological studies in Paris, where, however, criticism of the Parlement in a subsequent poem finally forced his dismissal. (Gresset himself preferred to maintain he left the Jesuits voluntarily, having joined at too young an age to ensure a true vocation.)

View of the town of La Flèche

He left behind a poem Journey to La Flèche which makes it quite clear what the Jesuit beaux-esprits thought of life en province, with its "drinkable" wine, little concerts and petty gatherings; La Flèche might be agreeable, writes Gresset,  if prisons could be pleasant:. 

La Fleche pourroit être aimable, 

S'il étoit de belles prisons ; 

Un climat assez agréable , 

De petits bois assez mignons , 

Un petit vin assez potable : 

De petits concerts assez bons ,

Un petit monde assez passable. 

La Fleche pourroit être aimable,

 S'il étoit de belles prisons.

The College at La Flèche today

The College in the 17th century

Bougeant thus had every cause to regret his humour when he was made to withdraw to  La Flèche and publically retract his unorthodox account of animal souls.  He was soon restored to Paris but henceforth restricted to strictly scholarly projects - a history of the Treaty of Westphalia and the three-volume  Exposition of Christian doctrine dubbed by some his "amusement théologique".  Gresset wrote an Epistle to Father Bougeant asking whether he was really  going to sacrifice happiness and esprit  for the boring immortality of the College patriarchs - the spirit of a "loveable sage" was not born for such fat, dull works

More unexpectedly, on Bougeant's death in 1743, the future Encyclopédiste d'Alembert lamented the loss to the Republic of Letters of a Jesuit "more enlightenened that his state would seem to permit" who had been confined to La Flèche and forced to "confection" a catechism which led to his premature demise, overwhelmed by disgust and boredom (Oeuvres complètes (1821) ii.26).

References

I haven't been able to find any English translations of Gresset's poems apart from Vers-Vert but there are plenty of French e-books.  There is also a text of a detailed life of Gresset written in 1894 by Jules Wogue  http://archive.org/details/jblgressetsavies00wogu

Pictures are from the article on La Flèche in  http://www.ameriquefrancaise.org.

Father Bougeant's Philosophical Amusement

Here is another literary confection penned by a Jesuit, this time the gloriously named Guillaume Hyacinthe Bougeant, whose  Amusement Philosophique sur le Langage des Bêtes was an instant best seller, translated  into both English and German.

The ostensible aim of Bougeant's ironic little essay was to demonstrate that "Beasts do speak and understand each other every whit as well and sometimes better than we do".  But the real issue was not so much the linguistic abilities of animals as whether or not they have souls. Ever since Descartes had famously claimed that animals are machines, this question had been a solemn theological debating point, replete with threats to Christian orthodoxy - but by the 1730s there was ever sign that controversy was running out of steam ...and dog-lovers were starting to prevail....



Philosophical Amusement upon the Language of Beasts (1739) 

Bougeant begins his philosophical confection with a rapid dismissal of prevailing theories of the animal soul. 

Descartes’s “animal-machine” is an easy target - could you ever love your watch as much as you love your dog? (Personally, I could: I hate dogs)




Boy with a black spaniel by
Francois Hubert Drouais, Met.Mus.

"I see a Dog hastening to me when I call him, caress me when I stroke him, tremble and run away when I rate him, obey me when I command him, and give all the outward Signs of many different Sentiments; of Joy and Sadness, of Grief and Pain, of Fear and Desire, of Passions of Love and Hatred. I immediately conclude from thence, that a Dog has in him a Principle of Knowledge and Sentiment, be it what it will. Though I should Use my utmost Endeavour, to beat it into my Head that he is meer Machine, and though all the Philosophers in the World should attempt to convince me of it, I feel myself hurried away by an inward Conviction, and by I know not what prevailing Force which persuades me to the contrary:……
….

Imagine to yourself a man who should love his Watch as we love a Dog, and caress it so as to think himself dearly beloved by it, and that when it points Twelve or One o'clock, it does it knowingly and out of Tenderness to him. Were Descartes's Opinion true, such would indeed be the Folly of all who believe that their Dogs have and Affection for them, and love them with Knowledge and what we call Sentiment". 

Now  for the Aristotelians – “the dark Principles of their unintelligible Philosophy” says our Jesuit, even though Aristotelianism was still standard philosophical fare in the Jesuit Colleges.   By conceding animals a “substantial and material form, distinct from matter”, the Peripatetics are really allowing them a spiritual soul and paving the way for doggy heaven –  ”They should have a paradise and a Hell appointed for them; Beasts should be a Kind of Men, or Men a Kind of Beasts; all which Consequences are unwarrantable by the Principles of Religion."

In good Christian mode, Bougeant is also dismissive of all those Eastern sages, so lovingly anatomised by Jesuit missionaries but even more rated by dodgy freethinkers

Mounted Ceramic Figures, Chinese porcelain,
French flowers and mounts, 1740-45, Getty Museum

"Let me pray you do one Thing. Go to the Indies, to China, orJapan, and there you will find Philosophers of the Heathen, Deist, or Atheist Kind, who will argue, if not with greater Capacity, at least with greater Freedom. One will tell you that God has created several Species of Spirits; some more perfect, such as the good and bad Genii ; some less perfect, which are Men; and others much more imperfect still, which are the Beasts. Another will tell you, that the Distinction of Spirit and Matter is chimerical and impossible to be demonstrated; that he sees no manner of Inconveniency in thinking that there is but one Substance, which you mall call by what name you please; that this Substance has in Beasts as well as Men an Organization, a Modification, a Motion, something, in short, what makes it think more or less perfectly. And these Philosophers acknowledging neither the Principles of the Christian Religion nor the Authority of the Church; you will be under the Necessity (in order to attack them in their Retrenchments) either to begin by making them Christians, or to go back to metaphysical Principles very difficult to be unravelled. But I hope you will spare yourself the Trouble of the Voyage, and chuse, as I myself do, to stick close to this greatest of Principles, viz. All these Systems are contrary to the Christian Religion; of course they are absolutely false".

Animals in the Garden of Eden -
 illustration from a  English refutation of Bougeant
 http://archive.org/stream/freethoughtsupon0102hild#page/n5/mode/2up

How then to accord animals sensitivity and understanding without falling foul of Christian orthodoxy?  The Church, says Bougeant, teaches us that men are saved or condemned at the point of death, but tells us nothing about the fate of Fallen angels waiting Judgment Day. These, then, must be your animal souls, sentient but conveniently already lined up to fry!  ( Bougeant could be right - I always knew dogs were  diabolical...) It does not seem  to  worry the good Jesuit too much that his lady friend might be sharing her bed with a devil incarnate.

Dog on a cushion by Jean Rance

"How ! shall my little Bitch be a Devil that lies with me all Night and caresses me all Day ? I will never grant you that. And I say the same of my Parrot, added a young Lady; it is a charming Creature; but if I were persuaded it was a little Devil, I should no longer indure it. I conceive, said the Author, how great your Aversion to this System must be, and I excuse it: But, give yourself the trouble to reflect upon it, and you shall see that it is only the Result of a Prejudice which must be conquered by Reason. Do we love Beasts for their own Sakes ? No. As they are altogether Strangers to human Society, they can have no other Appointment but that of being useful or amusing. And what care we whether it be a Devil, or some other Being that serves and amuses us ? The Thought of it , far from shocking pleases me mightily. I with Gratitude admire the Goodness of the Creator, who gave me so many little Devils to serve and amuse me. If I am told that these poor Devils are doomed to suffer eternal Torments, I admire God's Decrees; but I have no manner of share in this dreadful Sentence. I leave the Execution of it to the Sovereign Judge, and notwithstanding this I live with my little Devils as I do with a Multitude of People of whom Religion informs me that a great Number shall be damned."

Bougeant says that he wanted merely to amuse and we should take him at his word.  At most he intended  to deflect ridicule from more po-faced ecclesastical debaters. 

Nonetheless,  it is easy to see how the "Amusement" rebounded on its author and failed to amuse either Cartesians (who were notoriously lacking in humour), theJesuit guardians of orthodoxy or even serious defenders of God's Master Plan for the World....but why  it was later to be promulgated approvingly by the Encyclopédistes.

References

English translation of 1739 reproduced on the "Animal Rights history" website, http://www.animalrightshistory.org/animal-rights-c1660-1785/enlightenment-b/bou-father-bougeant/1737-philosophical-amusement.htm

(This site also includes the article "Beasts" from Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary -  Dr Johnson had cats, Rousseau had a dog, but I think Voltaire just liked to tease theologians.)

Ver-Vert, or the Jesuit and the parrot

The Jesuits of eighteenth-century France were not quite the narrow minded anti-philosophes that later stereotypes would have us believe. 

Jean-Baptiste Gresset after he left the Jesuits
Painting in Versailles by Louis Tocqué

Jean-Baptiste Gresset was set to become one of their number -  a junior teacher of twenty-five,  on the road to becoming a full Jesuit  - when he caused a minor literary sensation with his poem Ver-Vert ou les voyages du perroquet de Nevers  in 1734.

The poem was too light of touch to be seriously anti-clerical but it certainly isn't too flattering towards the sisters of the Visitation in Nevers. In fact there is more than a hint of naughty-nun about it. 

Ver-Vert is quite well know - but here is a nice English translation I found.

Ver-Vert, or the Nunnery Parrot

Ver-Vert the parrot, indulged pet of the Visitandine nuns of Nevers, is both beautiful and innocent:

AT Nevers once, some time ago,

     The pet of certain sisters there,

     Flourished a parrot, one so fair,

So trained in all a bird can know,

     As to deserve a better fate —

     Did happiness on merit wait.

Ver-Vert, such was the parrot’s name,

     Young yet, and innocent of wrong,

Transplanted from some Indian stream,

     Was placed these cloistered nuns among.

Bright-hued was he, and gay, but sage;

Frank, as befitted childhood’s age,

     And free from evil thought or word:

     In short he was the very bird

To choose for such a sacred cage.

The pampered parrot enjoys free run (flight?) of the convent, including an ample share of sugary treats normally reserved for Father Confessor

Needs not to tell what love he won,

What cares received, from every nun;

How, next to the confessor, he

Reigned in each heart; and though it be

Sinful to weakness to succumb,

Ver-Vert, the bird, was first with some.

Advertisment for Chocolat Guérin-Boutron 

He shared in these serene retreats

The sirups, jellies, and the sweets

Made by the sisters to excite

The holy father’s appetite.

For him ’twas free to do or say

Whate’er he pleased — ’twas still his way.

No circle could be pleasant where

There was not in the midst Ver-Vert.

To whistle, chirrup, sing, and fly;

And all the while with modesty,

Just like a novice, timid yet

And ever fearful to forget,

Never, unquestioned, silence broke,

Yet answered all, though twenty spoke;

Just as great Cæsar, between whiles,

Wrote all at once five different styles.

He even gets to spend the night with young nubile nuns and share the secrets of their toilette

At night his pleasure was to roam

From one to other for a home;

Happy, too happy, was the nun

Whose cell his wayward choice had won.



Jacquand Claude, 1835
Musée de Broution, Bourg-en-Bresse,

He wandered here and wandered there,

But, truth to say, ’twas very rare

That fancy led him to the cell

Where any ancient dame might dwell.

No, rather would his choice be laid

Where some young sister’s couch was made;

There would he sleep the long night through,

Till daylight broke and slumbers flew;

And then, so privileged and free,

The sister’s first toilet might see.

Toilet I say, but whisper low,

Somewhere I’ve read, but do not know,

Nun’s mirrors must be quite as true

As, ladies, is required of you;

And, just a fashion in the world

Must here be fringed and there be curled,

So also in the simple part

Of veils and bands there lies an art;

For that light throng of frivolous imps

     Who scale o’er walls and creep through bars,

Can give to stiffest veils and gimps

     A grace that satin never wears.

Being a parrot, he is a trifle loquacious, but his repertoire is suitably pious:

Of course, you guess, at such a school,

Ver-Vert, by parrot’s instinct-rule,

     Endowed with speech, his ladies took

For pattern; and, except at meat,

Le Perroquet au parloir - Vert-Vert
Jean Michel Moreau,1817 Pen & ink
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vert-vert_au_parloir.jpg.

When all the nuns in silence eat,

     Talked fast and long, and like a book.

He was not, mark, one of these light

And worldly birds, corrupted quite

By secular concerns, and who

Know mundane follies through and through;

     Ver-Vert was piously inclined;

A fair soul led by innocence,

Unsullied his intelligence,

     No rude words lingered in his mind.

But then he knew each canticle,

     Oremus, and the colloquies,

His Benedicite said well,

     The litany, and charities.

Instructed still, he grows more wise,

The pupil with the teacher vies;

He imitates their very tones,

The softened notes, the pious groans,

The long-drawn sighs, by which they prove

How they adore, and how they love;

 And knows at length — a holy part —

The breviary all by heart

The rot sets in when Ver-Vert is packed off  to visit the mother house at Nantes on a Loire boat in the dubious company of “a nurse, a monk, a Gascon pair,  three fair nymphs, two soldiers brave”,  At first he is shocked by their language, but he soon catches on:

     No Christian words are these he hears:

The bold dragoons with barrack slang

     Confused his head and turned his brain;

To unknown deities they sang

     In quite an unaccustomed strain.

The Gascons and the ladies three

Illustration from  La Gazette d'Orléans website
http://www.gazettedorleans.fr/?Le-Perroquet-et-les-Visitandines

Conversed in language odd but free;

The boatmen all in chorus swore

Oaths never heard by him before.

And, sad and glum, Ver-Vert sat still

In silence, though against his will.

But presently the bird they spy,

And for their own diversion try

To make him talk. The monk begins

With some light questions on his sins;

 Ver-Vert looks up, and with a sigh.

“Ave!  my sister,” makes reply:

And as they roar with laughter long,

Suspects, somehow, he’s answered wrong.

Proud was his spirit, until then

Unchecked by scoff of vulgar men;

And so he could not brook to see

His words exposed to contumely.

Alas, with patience, Ver-Vert lost

     The first bloom of his innocence.

That gone, how little did it cost

     To curse the nuns and their pretence

To teach him French? Well might they laugh:

The nuns, he found, had left out half —

The half, too, most for beauty made,

The nervous tone, the dainty shade;

To learn this half — the better lore —

He speaks but little, thinks the more.

     At first the parrot, so far wise,

Perceives that all he learned before,

     The chants, the hymns, the languid sighs,

And all the language of the nuns,

Must be forgotten, and at once.

In two short days the task was done,

And soldier’s wit ’gainst prayer of nun,

So fresh, so bright, so pleasant seemed,

That in less time than could be dreamed

(Too soon youth lends itself to evil)

He cursed and swore like any devil.

     By steps, the proverb says, we go

From bad to worse, from sin to crime;

     Ver-Vert reversed the rule, and so

Served no novitiate’s tedious time.

219 Full-fledged professor of all sin,

Whate’er they said he marked within;

Ran their whole dictionary through.

And all the wicked language knew;

Till one day, at an oath suppressed,

He finished it, with swelling breast.

Loud was the praise, great the applause;

Ver-Vert duly arrives at Nantes but soon reveals his corruption:

      The sisters, charmed with such a bird,

Press round him, chattering all at once,

As is the way, I’m told, with nuns,

     That even thunder fell unheard.

Jean Michel Roudier,
 L'arrivée the Ver-Vert chez les visitandines de Nantes
After 1847, Musée de la Loire Cosne

He during all the clatter sat,

Deigning no word, or this, or that.

Only with strange, libertine gaze,

     Rolling his eyes from nun to nun.

First scandal. Not without amaze,

     The holy ladies saw how one

So pious could so rudely stare.

Then came the prioress, and there

First questioned him. For answer all,

     Disdainfully he spread his wings,

Careless what horror might befall,

     And thus replied to these poor things,

“Gadzooks! Ods bodikins! What fools!”

At this infringement of the rules

Which mere politeness teaches, “Fie,

     My dearest brother,” one began.

In jeering tones he made reply,

Till cold her very life-blood ran.

Jean-François Millet,1839 (private collection)

“Great Heaven! Is this a sorcerer?

     Is this the saintly praying bird

They boast so much of at Nevers,

     Ver-Vert, of whom so much is heard?

Is this —”  Here Ver-Vert, sad to say,

Took up the tale in his new way.

He imitated first the young,

The novices, with chattering tongue;

Their babble and their little ways,

Their yawning fits at times of praise.

     Then turning to the ancient ones,

Whose virtues brought respect to Nantes,

He mocked at large their nasal chants,

     Their coughs, their grumblings, and their groans.

But worse did follow. Filled with rage,

He beat his wings and bit the cage;

He thundered sacrilegious words

Ne’er heard before from beak of birds;

All that he’d learned on board the ship

Flowed now from that corrupted lip;

Terms fraught with horrid blasphemy

(Mostly beginning with a d...)

Hovered about his impious beak —

The young nuns thought him talking Greek,

Till with an oath so full, so round.

     That even the youngest understood,

He ended. At the frightful sound

     Multivious fled the sisterhood,

All smitten with terrific panic,

Ran pell-mell from the imp satanic;

’Twas by a fall that Mother Ruth

Then lost her last remaining tooth.

Ver-Vert is sent smartly back to Nevers  where the nuns deliberate his punishment

Chapelle Saint-Marie, Nevers
Once part of the Visitandine convent
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sainte-Marie_Nevers.jpg

No good he has to say. They vote. 

     Two sibyls write the fatal word 

Of death; and two, more kindly taught, 

     Propose to send him back again 

To the profane place whence he came, 

     Brought by a Brahman — but in vain: 

The rest resolve, with common sense, 

Two months of total abstinence, 

Three of retreat, of silence four; 

Garden and biscuits, board and bed, 

And play shall be prohibited. 

Nor this the whole; in all the space 

Should he not see a pretty face. 

A gaoler harsh, a guardian grim, 

With greatest care they chose for him, 

The oldest, ugliest, sourest nun, 

An ape in veils, a skeleton, 

Bent double with her eighty years; 

She’d move the hardest sinner’s tears

Poor Ver-Vert! The parrot, suitably penitent, is finally released from his prison

Imprisonment of Ver-Vert 

François-Marius Granet (1775-1849)

 Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence

So passed Ver-Vert his term; in spite

     Of all his gaoler’s jealous care,

The sisters gave him some delight,

And now and then improved his fare

     .

But chained and caged, in dungeon fast,

Bitter the sweetest almonds taste.

Taught by his sufferings to be wise,

Touched, maybe, by their tearful eyes,

The contrite parrot tries to turn

     Repentant thoughts from things of ill;

Tries holiness again to learn

     Recovers soon his ancient skill,

And talks like any pious dean.

     Sure the conversion is not feigned,

The ancient conclave meet again,

     And to his prison put an end.

Oh! happy day, when Ver-Vert, free,

Returns his sisters’ pet to be!

Sadly this is not a tale with a happy ending – no sooner is Ver-Vert restored to favour than he succombs fatally to to a surfeit of sugary indulgence

A festival, a day of joy,

Wit no vexation, no annoy,

 Death of Ver-Vert
Louis Charles Auguste Couder, c.1830
Museum of Beauvais

Each moment given up to mirth,

     And all by love together bound!

But ah! the fleeting joy of earth

     Too soon is untrustworthy found:

The songs, and chants, and cheerful hours,

The dormitory wreathed with flowers,

Full liberty, a tumult sweet,

     And nothing, nothing that could tell

Of sorrow hiding ’neath their feet,

     Of death advancing to their cell.

Passing too quick from diet rude,

From plain dry bread to richer food,

With sugar tempted, crammed with sweets,

Tempted with almonds and such meats,

Poor Ver-Vert feels his roses change

Into the cypress dark and strange.

He droops, he sinks. In vain they try

     By every art to stave off fate.

Their very love makes Ver-Vert worse;

     Their cares his death accelerate.

Victim of love, of love he tires,

And with a few last words expires.

These last words, faint and hard to hear,

Vain consolation, pious were.

References

English translation of Ver-Vert:
 From The World’s Wit and Humor, Volume X, French — Rutebœuf to Balzac; The Review of Reviews Company; New York; 1906; pp. 213-225.

http://www.elfinspell.com/WitandHumor/10French/Gresset.html

The unacknowledged pictures are all taken from the "Gresset" pages on Harry van Boxtel's truly awesome Parrot Museum website 
http://www.cubra.nl/PM/Gresset.htm