Fénelon: mystique et politique (1699–1999) — Actes du colloque international de Strasbourg pour le troisième centenaire de la publication du ‘Télémaque’ et de la condamnation des ‘Maximes des Saints’

Abstract

Publiés par François-Xavier Cuche et Jacques Le Brun. Paris, Champion, 2004. 587 pp. Hb €50.00. Bossuet's response to Télémaque was uncharitable. He called it ‘un roman indigne […] d'un prêtre’. But beyond the mildly shocking fact that an ordained Christian tutor should have penned a political allegory in the form of a novel set in pagan antiquity, there lies the huge paradox that the novel was published at precisely the moment when its author was being reprimanded by Rome for the irregularities of his mystical theology, as set out in the Maximes des saints. This Strasbourg conference was convened to mark that paradox. We see the minute-by-minute intertwining of the two events in the careful chronological accounts given here by Jacques Le Brun and Mayumi Murata, the former being the surviving editor of the massive Correspondance de Fénelon, which now provides reliable material for such studies. It is disappointing that so few contributions attempt actually to connect Télémaque and the Maximes des saints. Instead, religious historians explore the one and literary historians the other. Among the former, Jean-Louis Quantin's account of the way Bossuet and Fénelon bandy authorities in their dispute over Quietism characteristically illuminates broad perspectives on the very nature of ‘auctoritas’. On the other side, the great German Fénelon scholar Volker Kapp provides a fascinating scholarly account of the way successive editions of Télémaque were illustrated. A substantial final section explores the novel's remarkable Nachleben, not least as a prescribed text on almost every European syllabus until a century ago. However, two contributors bravely make a stab at the central mystery. Gérard Ferreyrolles explores how Fénelon ingeniously inserts the alien Judaeo-Christian notion of Divine Providence into a pagan moral universe more used to the concepts of nemesis and moira. But it is Alain Niderst's essay on ‘le quiétisme de Télémaque’ which most thoroughly probes the extraordinary coincidence of a royal tutor issuing a thinly veiled critique of the régime at the moment of making a fundamental contribution to the more rarified field of mystical theology. His argument is quite ingenious. If you scan the novel for elements compatible with Christianity, you might find parallels with the Holy Ghost in Minerva, or God the Father in Jupiter. You will not find the figure of Christ. And it was precisely the absence of the Christocentrism characteristic of the mysticism of Teresa of Ávila or Bérulle that the critics of Quietism pointed to. Niderst quotes Archbishop Noailles of Paris to good effect in support of this contention. Furthermore, the novel is suffused by a sense of the higher calm of a rightly ordered universe in terms which echo Fénelon's earlier Traité de l'existence de Dieu. Finally, if Mentor is seen as raising Télémaque from the purgative to the illuminative way, that may suffice for a prince (whether fictional or real) destined to reign, leaving the unitive way for those chosen few who have found the strait gate and the narrow way. And this elitism was, once again, why such as Noailles criticized the Quietists. An interesting hypothesis, and the only one in this otherwise useful but somewhat unadventurous book.