A New Heart: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet on Conversion

Abstract

O mon Dieu ... creez en moi un coeur nouveau. LOUISE DE LA VALLIERE (1) TOWARD THE END OF HIS LIFE, Richard Rorty summarized aspiration of his philosophical project with this statement: We hope to do to Nature, Reason and Truth what eighteenth century did to God. We think, he further explained, anything you can do with notions like 'Nature,' 'Reason' and 'Truth' you can do better, with such notions as 'the most useful description for our purposes' and 'the attainment of free consensus about what to believe and to desire.' (2) Both seventeenth-century sermon that is here translated and life of woman whose conversion it reflects upon stand as challenges to Rorty's conviction. (3) They testify that human soul, its inner and most intimate recesses, craves much more than effective therapy or comfort of being outward peace with its neighbors. For human heart belongs to a creature that yearns for nothing less than union with its Creator. There is more than a little irony Rorty's self-description as a philosopher. Denying, as he does, significance of truth and notion that intellect is perfected by knowing, he hardly fulfills any literal interpretation of name. Nor would he be uncomplicated exemplar of a more restricted understanding of craft, for he was as likely to trade story-telling as argument, and if argument, then argument about stories we tell. Darwin's suggestion of the possibility that we may be clever animals trying to reshape environment to our needs, rather than intellects attempting to grasp intrinsic structure of reality served as his first principle. (4) But as a principle, this appeal functioned less as a premise than as a mise-en-scene, a stand-in for upon a time. Darwin, he recounted, made it harder to be a Kantian than it had previously been, and once his apt pupil, Nietzsche had added another chapter to Darwinian story, people--note insouciant generality of sentence's subject--found it very hard to think of themselves as having a transcendental or a noumenal side. What happened next? hundred-odd years spent absorbing and improving on Darwin's empirical story have, I suspect and hope, unfitted us for listening to transcendental stories. And so, in course of those years we have gradually substituted making of a better future for ourselves ... for attempt to see ourselves from outside of time and history. The story's moral, then, is that philosophy is not at all a path toward self-knowledge and truth, but instead an aid to creating ourselves. (5) As a story-teller, Rorty was both captivating and astute. In tale that he would have us tell about the emancipation of thought from obsolete doctrines, he pointed to importance of Montaigne, suggesting that but for overwhelming influence of Cartestianism, it could well have been Montaigne to have set modern philosophy on its path toward a secular world-view. (6) Surely this supposition is reasonable, for spite of Montaigne's famed complexity, it is undeniable that one strand of his influence lay precisely that direction. To libertins of France's Grand Siecle, Montaigne represented very spirit of self-creation that Rorty would later laud; as one commentator put it, Montaigne was to libertins the symbol of a kind of writing about me. (7) Write about themselves they certainly did: My hand is so generous and so free-spirited (libertine) that it will follow only whim of my fantasy, and this with such independence and unrestrained freedom that it glories having no other end view than simple search for truths or what accords with nature, nor any object more important than what pleases me. (8) The reference to nature this passage by Francois de La Mothe Le Vayer was a pointed one, meant to exclude appeal to grace; he had earlier announced that he would philosophize in puris naturibus, and later followed Montaigne's example by praising Julian Apostate, among other pagans, his treatise on LaVertue des Payens [1641]. …