François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715) was a noted bishop and writer. In 1689, the learned, pious, and zealous priest was appointed tutor of the Duke of Burgundy, the second in line to the French throne. In 1696, he was named bishop of Cambrai. However, he was suspected of holding heretical views on prayer and the spiritual life. Though a supporter of Jeanne Guyon, he submitted along with her to the Articles d’Issy, in which the French bishops condemned some of the spiritual doctrines she was alleged to hold. However, he refused to sign Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s explanation of those articles. He replied with a work of his own, An Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints. This led to his removal as tutor to the king’s grandson and a papal brief condemning certain propositions of his book. However, the Bishop of Cambrai continued to be one of the major intellectual figures of the period throughout Europe, known for his writings on the spiritual life, political philosophy, and education.
Ryan Patrick Hanley, Professor of Political Science at Boston College, will take us through his pick of the five best books by or on Fénelon. Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, Prof. Hanley was the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and held visiting appointments or fellowships at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. A specialist on the political philosophy of the Enlightenment period, he is the author of The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, and a companion translation volume, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings, both of which are published by Oxford University Press.
- Telemachus
by François Fénelon, translated Tobias Smollett, revised by Patrick Riley - Maxims of the Saints
by François Fénelon - Letters of Love and Counsel
by François Fénelon, translated by John McEwen, edited by Thomas Merton - Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings (also available for Kindle)
by François Fénelon, translated by Ryan Patrick Hanley - Francois Fénelon: A Biography (also available for Kindle)
by Peter Gorday
...and for the bonus recommendation... - Le pur amour. De Platon à Lacan
by Jacques Le Brun
We opened with a biographical sketch of Fénelon. What would you add to it?
Something about the significance of his early experiences and his legacy.
Early in his life, Fénelon held some remarkable posts. He was always an educator by profession. Prior to teaching the Duke of Burgundy, he was a very well-known at the court as an educator at other institutions. In the wake of the Edict of Nantes, he worked with young women from newly converted families. He wrote extensively on education and had been thinking about it from his time at the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice. That is an important part of his biography. It shapes so much of his later writing, especially his deep investment as a spiritual counsellor, as well as a formal tutor to the Duke of Burgundy himself.
As to his legacy. Fénelon dies in 1715, pre-deceasing Louis XIV by a matter of months. However, his influence was as significant as it was during his life, perhaps even more so, especially in the later part of the 18th century. Through my work, I hope to contribute to maintaining his visibility and perpetuating that legacy. He is a remarkable thinker, one that is well worth the time of his readers.
Why should we read Fénelon today?
We should read him for several discrete but interrelated reasons. Fénelon deserves our attention for his vision of political life. He had a remarkably humane understanding of what politics could be and how it could be reformed. That part of his vision remains important today, especially in our fraught global political moment.
Ultimately, more important than his political writings are his insights as a spiritual counsellor and advisor. For many generations, up to our own, the faithful have recognised in him a remarkable guide to spirituality and the inner life. Whether reading his words in French, Latin, or in translation, the power comes through. For many, this has been a formative experience. I am delighted to have a chance to talk about those works.
1.
The first work that you have recommended is the one for which Fénelon was best-known during his own lifetime. The Adventures of Telemachus, Son of Ulysses is one of various mirrors for princes that he had written for his pupil, the Duke of Burgundy. It narrates the travels of Telemachus, who is accompanied by his tutor, Mentor. It was published without Fénelon’s authorization and became an international best-seller. Is it still worth reading?
It is worth reading for a variety of reasons.
First, it was a remarkable historical phenomenon. It was written explicitly for the education of the Duke of Burgundy. Here we have a book written for an audience of one, literally. But the manuscript was leaked without Fénelon’s consent or knowledge and published. As you rightly note, it became an international bestseller. Indeed, in 18th century France it was the most widely read book after the Bible. That alone, suggests the degree of influence that Fénelon had. This work is particularly interesting simply from a historical perspective. However, I would be remiss if I were to say that it is only important for history. In the course of the work, Fénelon aspires to provide, as you say, a mirror for princes: what we might call antithesis of Louis XIV, whom Fénelon knew at first hand, from serving in his court.
The sun-king believed himself to be the centre of the universe and dedicated his life to promoting his glory and grandeur and those of the nation. Fénelon believed that the king needed to have a different orientation. His glory should come not from the splendour of his palace, but from the services that he rendered to the least and lowest of his flock. Fénelon’s remarkable portrait of kings good and bad in Telemachus, is meant to clue the Duke of Burgundy, and indeed us, his later readers, into the essential components of good and bad, just and unjust, free and tyrannical government. In our fraught political moment, Fénelon gives us the opportunity for sustained reflection on both the perils of our current political moment, but also some of the promise of the politics, once well and rightly reformed.
Presumably Mentor is Fénelon himself; Telemachus the Duke of Burgundy. Why would Fénelon, a bishop, recur to Greek epic poetry and mythology rather than Sacred Scripture to get his message across?
On one hand, his contemporary audience certainly would have recognised that Scripture figures between the lines throughout the work. His use of the characters of classical mythology is informed by a Christian Catholic perspective.
But there is another reason. This is another important part of Fénelon’s life. He is one of the Immortals: one of the members of the Académie Française, right at the time when it is not just publishing its landmark dictionary but is also deeply involved in the great quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. One thing that animated Fénelon’s intense love of classical learning and his interest in Greek and Roman poetry and prose, was that these enabled him to be a conversationalist in such debates. Through his literary prowess, he was able to get a hearing in the secular world. He was speaking not merely to the faithful.
2.
The second book on your list is Fénelon’s Maxims of the Saints. He wrote it as a response to Bossuet’s Instructions on the States of Prayer. Some scholars consider it his finest work. It is certainly an influential work because it gave rise to a major and enduring intellectual debate on the nature of disinterested love (amour pur). However, it has long be taken as an apology of quietism. In 1699, Innocent XI, under pressure from Louis XIV and Bossuet, condemned twenty-three propositions from the book in the motu proprio Cum alias. Can you explain what quietism is and whether Maxims of the Saints endorses it?
This is an extremely important question.
Very willingly, Fénelon recanted the objectionable propositions found by Innocent XI and maintained his position at Cambrai.
"The quietist’s preeminent concern for withdrawal from the world does not capture either Fénelon's deepest commitments or his practical engagement with the world."
The Maxims is the last of Fénelon’s writings on a long and sustained debate that began at least five years earlier and gave rise, from 1694 forward, to voluminous published and unpublished writings. All those writings argue over the orthodoxy of the concept of pur amour: pure love. Fénelon aims to find textual evidence in the writings of the Church Fathers that demonstrates its orthodoxy. Of course, in the ultimate decision, both Bossuet and Innocent XI disagreed. Regardless of whether he succeeded in demonstrating its orthodoxy and that of the propositions that were not censured, the Maxims remains an extremely important book. It presents a particular view of spirituality and pure love, one which is related to but, ultimately, distinct from quietism.
Quietism is the label under which Fénelon laboured in the 1690s because of his association with Madame Guyon and her brand of spirituality. Fénelon’s defence of Guyon got him into a great deal of trouble. I do not know whether, in the end, his system is reducible to Guyon’s. I would say that he separates himself from her more problematic sides. He attempted to develop a spirituality that is not, properly speaking, quietistic. This can be explored in various ways. Part of the evidence lies in his deep interest in practical ethics, indeed, politics. The quietist’s preeminent concern for withdrawal from the world does not capture either Fénelon's deepest commitments or his practical engagement with the world. These extended not just to his political activities, but all through the active charity and deep beneficence that he practised, first as a parish priest and then as bishop of Cambrai.
Fénelon disagreed with his friend and mentor, Bossuet, not only over the concept of pure love. He did not subscribe to the royal absolutism that Bossuet defended. Do you find it curious that he could be friends with Bossuet but also disagree with him strongly on some delicate and important topics?
The trajectory of their relationship is quite remarkable. Earlier, you mentioned that the central character of Telemachus is Athena or Minerva, the goddess who takes the guise of Mentor. In Fénelon, the concept of mentorship is important and is worth bringing up in this context.
Bossuet was his first mentor in many ways. He had great intellectual and personal devotion to Bossuet and the feeling was mutual.
Like many a falling-out, theirs was extremely complex and multi-factorial. Partly, it had to do with their interpretation of the doctrines of the Church Fathers. Partly, it had to do with court politics. Fénelon felt a deep revulsion toward the way that Louis XIV structured life at the court, of which Bossuet was such a central figure. It is fair to say that the friendship and the mentorship ended. By the end, lines had been crossed where there were not just intellectual disagreements but indeed personal ones that were beyond any sort of conventional reconciliation.
"Fénelon was widely esteemed as a gifted spiritual advisor, not just to those who knew him personally, but also to those who knew him through his correspondence."
3.
For your next pick, you stay with Fénelon’s spiritual writings, a collection entitled Letters of Love and Counsel. Why have you chosen this volume?
I wanted to put on the list a collection of Fénelon’s spiritual advice to different interlocutors. As I mentioned earlier, Fénelon was widely esteemed as a gifted spiritual advisor, not just to those who knew him personally, but also to those who knew him through his correspondence. There is Jean Orcibal’s wonderful modern scholarly-annotated edition of the eighteen volumes of Fénelon’s correspondence. In this extraordinary set of documents, Fenelon displays, again and again, deep insight into the worries of his interlocutors and guides them towards peace, deeper devotion, and greater faith. He has a real genius for it. The evidence lies not just in watching him do this with his interlocutors, but in the experience of reading him and believing that he is speaking to you.
So, I wanted to include one representative selection so that readers could see and experience the deep power of his direct advice.
Texts of this sort have long been circulating in English. In fact, Fénelon tends to be known in English from volumes that extract brief selections of his spiritual and moral counsel from a broad variety of sources: letters, sermons, and occasional writings. Often, these editions do not provide any context or even citations. While they can be useful to those interested in his spiritual writings, they are frustrating for scholars and those who would like to locate sources.
The volume that I recommended is nice for two reasons. It does reproduce longer extracts from individual letters. Indeed, they are well-chosen and well-translated. Second, it features a lovely introductory essay by Merton. It gives a nice biographical overview, but also speaks specifically of spiritual advising and its centrality in Fenelon’s life. For those reasons, this is one of the best and most accessible of the volumes that address his spiritual writings or collect them.
4.
Fourth is your own anthology of Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings. You recommend the chapters entitled “Examination of Conscience" and "Of Pure Love." Why these two?
I made the translation to bring some of Fénelon’s lesser-known writings to a broader audience. As I mentioned, Fénelon wrote extensively on moral issues in his efforts to advise the Duke of Burgundy, the heir to the throne. He began that process when the Duke was very young, well before he was a teenager. Moreover, as a master of prose, he was very attentive to the various styles in which one could write to appeal to his young interlocutor. We have talked already about Telemachus. Before that, he wrote a series of wonderful fables, as well as a series of imagined dialogues of the dead, dialogues between different historical figures. These are very didactic and present specific lessons. I included them in the translation because they help bring out the ways in which Fénelon used his literary gifts to convince his pupil of certain moral truths. I hope those will be enjoyable and interesting for readers of the volume.
There are two selections from the volume that I recommended. One is the “Examination of Conscience”. This is an extraordinary text for those interested in the relationship between faith and politics. Fénelon wrote it for the Duke of Burgundy when the young man was fighting in the War of Spanish Succession. The idea was that, like a conventional examination of conscience before making penance, the Duke would use this text to reflect upon his sins and failings, but from the standpoint of the obligation that he owes to those he guides and rules over. The full title of the work is “Examination of Conscience on the Duties of Kingship”. It is a helpful place to see how Fénelon’s practical philosophy—his interest in politics and ethics—and his religious and theological commitments are related and come together.
The other text that I recommended is Fénelon’s short essay “On Pure Love”. This essay was the reason why I decided to make the translation in the first place. There was a great scholar of the 17th and 18th centuries, Patrick Riley, whom I came to know in the last years of his life. He was the editor of the modern edition of Telemachus. Once, he casually mentioned to me, “”What a disservice it is to readers of Fénelon who are limited to English that there is no translation of the essay ‘Of Pure Love’”. It was at that moment that I conceived the translation. I believed that he was absolutely correct and wanted to make sure that this extraordinary short essay would be accessible to English language readers.
5.
Finally, you have recommended Peter Gorday’s biography of Fénelon.
This is an outstanding biography. It appeared a few years ago, when I was well into my work on Fénelon. It was such a delightful surprise. Gorday is a fine historian, who does a good job of setting Fénelon in his context as a thinker and a priest. He also captures what is important in the interpretation of his thought and gives a remarkably sensitive picture of the man and his complexity. Gorday’s Fénelon is at once a man deeply active in the world and dedicated to overcoming self-love and cultivating a closer bond with God via pure love.
I do not know of a better book in the English language prior to Gorday’s, one that captures so many different facets of the man and does justice both to his character and his thought. It is a real accomplishment. We are fortunate to have his intellectual biography, an accessible text that provides a wonderful introduction to Fénelon in English.
You are a specialist in Enlightenment political thought and have written on Adam Smith, a figure who is far better known today than Fénelon and, at first sight, vastly different from him. What led you to study Fénelon? Today, we do not tend to regard him as a major figure of Enlightenment political thought.
My interest in Fénelon was twofold.
On the one hand, there was as an intellectual puzzle. Fénelon was an important interlocutor for several canonical figures of the Enlightenment. He is mentioned by some figures from Smith’s circle, such as David Hume, who cites Fénelon in different contexts. He becomes especially important for thinkers in the French Enlightenment, such as Rousseau, who was enamoured with Fénelon. It is impossible to understand Rousseau’s thought, indeed the Enlightenment more generally, without an appreciation of Fénelon. So, I wanted to go back to the well, as it were, and see the origin of some crucial political ideas that would percolate throughout the Enlightenment and demand the attention of historians.
That was just one of two sides. In Fénelon's political thought, I was struck by the humanity of his economic vision. You mentioned Adam Smith. Fénelon was a great defender of freedom of international trade and believed that it was necessary to feed the least well off. In so doing, he rebelled against the mercantile assumptions of Colbert, Louis XIV’s finance minister. He was not the only one. So did other figures in his circle. I shall mention two. Both Boisguilbert and Vauban, his contemporaries, are critics of Louis XIV. All were interested in crafting an economic vision that was far from being free-market, capitalist, or liberal, as we think of those things today. Like Adam Smith and the French physiocrats, they anticipated some of the most humane aspects of later 18th-century economics. We owe it to ourselves, both as historians and contemporary citizens, to return to this original vision of what economic life could be. I have enjoyed revisiting Fénelon, especially considering recent Catholic social thought on the economy, ranging from John Paul II's encyclicals up through Francis. Fénelon still has a great deal to offer those who, within the faith, are wrestling with those questions.
"Fenelon was interested, across the different spheres of his work, in distinguishing between the true and the false. Ultimately, this is why I call him a political philosopher."
Is Fénelon a precursor of modern Catholic social thought and can he teach any important lessons for our current situation?
Yes. He is, in certain ways and with due qualification, a predecessor both of modern Catholic social thought and modern liberalism.
I would not call him a liberal. That is a-historic and does not do justice to the full range of his thought. But he gives us a vision of economic and political life, in which the well-being, the decency, and the dignity of the non-elites becomes the most important political objective. In that respect, he is a predecessor of Catholic social thought’s focus on the preferential option for the poor.
He also anticipates the humane economic vision of Adam Smith. Smith is known as the father of capitalism. The truth is that he defended the free market specifically and solely on account of the ways in which it could create a “universal opulence that extends to the lowest ranks of the people.” So, Smith can be a useful voice in studying the principles of Catholic social thought. Several people have been writing on this recently. However, because of his place within the Catholic tradition, perhaps it is even more useful to go back to Fénelon to see how modern liberalism and modern Catholic social thought can coalesce.
You have written The Political Philosophy of Fénelon. Are there any major findings you wish to indicate?
One of the things I try to show is the degree to which Fenelon was interested, across the different spheres of his work, in distinguishing between the true and the false. Ultimately, this is why I call him a political philosopher. All his concerns emanate from a rigorous application of the distinction between the true and the false. He does this with glory, separating true glory from false glory. He does it with wealth and opulence. separating true riches from false riches. He does it with courage, separating true courage from false courage. And so on down the line. This understanding of the significance of philosophy within practical political life is very valuable. It is one of the things that drew me to Fénelon and that I wanted to bring out in the book: the degree to which the rigorous examination of truth and falsity is the unifying principle of his system as a whole.
Finally, you have recommended a book for those who read French: Jacques Le Brun’s, Le pur amour de Platon à Lacan. Is Fénelon a central figure in Le Brun’s story.
He is indeed.
Lebrun passed away recently and by the end of his life was the foremost Fénelon scholar. He was the editor of the extraordinary two-volume Pléiade edition of Fenelon's collected works in French. His annotations to those editions are magisterial. He knew better than anyone the voluminous archival material and Fénelon’s relationships with various figures that he had spent a lifetime studying. His is a very great loss for the scholarly community. I am delighted to recommend, therefore, not just the French edition of Fénelon’s works, published by Gallimard in the Pléiade edition, but also his extraordinary study on the philosophical history of the concept of pure love.
The title is bookended by Plato, on the one hand, and the 20th century psychoanalyst, on the other. Still, Fénelon and the quarrel over pure love occupy the central place in the narrative. The book is extremely valuable for showing that the concept of pure love, aside from debate internal to Catholicism over its orthodoxy, also played a remarkable role in the history of philosophy. The debate goes back to the Platonic dialogues and forward into twentieth-century psychology. There is no better guide than Lebrun, either on Fénelon or the place of pure love within philosophy and theology.
