Introduction

Introduction

François Fénelon wrote at the peak of religiously informed political philosophy, when religiosity was not merely acknowledged but was actively incorporated into political thinking. But it was only a few decades before the philosophes would expressly reject not only the incorporation of religious principles into political philosophy, but religious principles themselves as dangerously false and hostile to progress.

In this spirit, in his introduction to the Political Philosophy of Fénelon (PPF), Ryan Patrick Hanley observes that the largely secular Anglophone world has largely forgotten Fénelon (PPF, pp. 1–2). He explains that one of the main reasons for this is that the philosophes, and the liberal tradition they inspired, ultimately triumphed—that “a political philosopher whose faith commitments shape and inform his political philosophy as a whole” has become “a prima facie reason for his exclusion from the liberal canon” (PPF, p. 240). It would not be the likes of Fénelon cited by Madison, Tocqueville, and eventually Rawls—so much as Hume, Montesquieu, and Kant.

Yet Hanley suggests that there are good reasons to challenge the present indifference to Fénelon: “[I]n a century like ours,” he writes, “which is compelled to grapple with a resurgence of the nationalism, authoritarianism, and antiglobalism characteristic of illiberal conceptions of power, to fail to attend to Fénelon … would be to do ourselves a manifest disservice” (PPF, pp. 3–4). And in these remarkable new volumes, Hanley makes a compelling case for reconsidering the bishop’s ignored texts.

The Political Philosophy of Fénelon and its companion volume, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings (MPW), represent a momentous achievement for early modern scholars—an overdue call to reconsider one of the most strikingly original thinkers of his era. One hopes that it inspires a new generation of Anglophone research on the bishop.

The following articles interrogate Hanley’s work on Fénelon with attention to different issues discussed throughout the Political Philosophy of Fénelon. My own contribution explores Hanley’s treatment of the religious question in Fénelon’s thought, as well as comparing Fénelon’s use of divine justice as a means of curbing the effects of amour-propre with that employed by Rousseau in the Social Contract. Brandon P Turner explores Hanley’s portrait of Fénelon’s moderation—and questions whether the depiction of a moderate bishop captures the essence of a thinker who has long been appreciated as somewhat radical. Alexandra Oprea wonders if Fénelon might be better understood as a political theologian than a political philosopher, while also challenging Fénelon’s antiquated views on the education of women. Gianna Englert is sympathetic to Hanley’s Fénelon, but argues that his philosophy cannot transcend the culture and institutions imbedded in his own times. Geneviève Rousselière, like Turner, is skeptical of the “moderate” Fénelon and further of the continuing relevance of someone she understands to be a radically dangerous conservative, fatally detached from modern commitments to political liberty—to the point of undermining his larger goals. This is followed by Hanley’s response to the reviewers’ comments.

Hanley’s Fénelon and the relationship between religion and politics

Hanley’s chapters on Fénelon and religion address three classic Christian virtues: faith, hope, and love. Chapter 5, “Faith, or On Religion,” explores Fénelon’s case for co-mingling religion and politics. Hanley frames the problem of politics in Hobbesian terms: that the goal of political institutions is not so much to achieve perfection, which is impossible in the City of Man, but rather to avoid the summum malum, which for Fénelon, contra Hobbes, is not the state of war, but rather tyranny. What facilitates tyranny, according to Fénelon, is human nature—especially amour propre. Princes are particularly prone to “false glory”—the excessive love of self. As Fénelon addressed Louis XIV, “You love only your glory and your ease. You refer everything to yourself as if you were the god of the world, and all the rest had been created only to be sacrificed to you” (PPF, p. 153).

Fénelon’s solution to the problem of “false glory” is to substitute “true glory” in its place, or to replace the love of self with the love of God. For him, faith leads to humility, and humility weakens the pride that fuels tyranny (PPF, p. 155). While many religions tend to direct their adherents from self-love to a love of the divine, according to Fénelon, the Gospels particularly stress the humility necessary for this kind of transformation. As such, his aim is to “discourage those political abuses that necessarily follow from self-love and self-aggrandizement” (PPF, p. 158).

But it is not only princes who require constraints on their tendency to self-love. Citizens can also be seduced by self-love and pride. For this reason, anticipating and surely influencing Rousseau, Fénelon argues in his Telemachus for the importance of a religion with divine rewards and punishment. To be sure, Fénelon does not think that citizens must be motivated by a pure love of God. They will almost surely continue to be selfish. But their selfishness can and should be appropriated by a state in order to secure more reliably sociable behavior.

Chapter 6 addresses hope, which Hanley describes as “indispensable” for “both political reformers and political actors,” and which Fénelon himself describes in Telemachus as “the life of the heart of man” (PPF, p. 171). Hanley draws attention to the effects of hopelessness, as depicted in Telemachus. When Telemachus washes up on the island of Calypso, he has “lost hope” that he would ever see his father again. In this condition, Hanley sketches a disposition in which “succumb[ing] to hopelessness would be to substitute a passive acquiescence to temptation for the active performance of the duties to family and country” (PPF, p. 172). It is only with hope that one is able to tackle one’s duties and get on with the business of improving one’s life and political institutions.

Hope is also essential, argues Hanley’s Fénelon, for ascending love’s ladder. As the “final destination of the human being” (PPF, p. 178), individuals must seek to shed their selfishness in favor of what Fénelon calls “pure love”—a divine love entirely unmixed with amour-propre. But they can only climb the ladder with the benefit of hope—the hope of becoming more perfectly Christian.

All of this being said, I would like to explore the broad themes of these chapters with special attention to two issues raised in Hanley’s analysis. These include amour-propre and Fénelon’s attention to divine justice.

Recent work has drawn growing attention to amour-propre, particularly in Rousseau (e.g. Cooper, 1999; Dent and O’Hagan, 1999; Neuhouser, 2008; McLendon, 2018). It is, for him, a “universal desire for reputation, honors, and preferment, which devours us all, trains and compares talents and strengths … by turning all men into competitors, rivals, or rather enemies” (Rousseau, 2018 [1754]: 158). And as Neuhouser has argued, taming and channeling this passion becomes Rousseau’s central political problem. Scholars differ on whether Rousseau thought it was possible to domesticate amour-propre, and even whether or not amour-propre was either ultimately more a force for good or evil. ¹

Rousseau considers several strategies by which society might mitigate or even capitalize on amour-propre. These include the general will, patriotism, administrative promotions for civic-minded behavior, education, economic and civic equality, provincialism, and even retreat from society altogether (e.g. Dent and O’Hagan, 1999: 100–106; McLendon, 2018, 111–126; Nehouser, 2008: ch. 5). Yet none have sought to understand civil religion as part of Rousseau’s solution to the problem of amour-propre. So I would like to sketch out Rousseau’s and Fénelon’s invocation of divine justice as part of their solutions to the problem of amour-propre, compare their respective approaches, and then draw attention to what we might still learn from Fénelon’s conceptualization of these problems.

Hanley draws attention to Fénelon’s definition of amour-propre in his chapter on “Love, or on the Best Life”:

Amour-propre is impetuous, restless, reckless, and ensnaring …. As soon as an ear is lent to the cries of amour-propre, the tranquil and modest voice of holy love can no longer be heard. Each love speaks only of its object. Amour-propre speaks only of the self, which it thinks is never treated well enough. It thinks only of regard, consideration, and esteem. It is put in despair by all that fails to flatter it. (PPF, p. 204)

Amour-propre, pride, and vanity play a significant role in Fénelon’s pedagogical adventure, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses (1699). Fénelon portrays a boy of talent and good intentions, yet in poor control of himself. His own Mentor describes him as having been born “hard and haughty,” his heart “touched only by your own interest and convenience” (Fénelon,1994 [1699]: 311). Among his flaws was the fact that:

he had never been taught by ill fortune. His disposition, naturally good, had been poisoned by the flattery of his masters. He was intoxicated with his power and good fortune …; his furious pride metamorphized him into a savage beast. (Fénelon,1994 [1699]: 28)

For Fénelon, amour-propre is the root of vice. The remaining question is how does Telemachus shed it? Fénelon’s answer may well include his presentation of divine justice in the novel’s following chapter on the afterlife. Telemachus’s young hero travels to the underworld in search of his father, only to encounter both Tartarus and the Elysian Fields. In Tartarus, he finds the wicked—those prone to jealousy, rage, hatred, avarice, ambition, treachery, and envy. The worst among those are abusive tyrants, who have succumbed to an “excessive vanity that greedily swallowed the most gross and fulsome flattery,” those who “dread of hearing the truth; their partiality to worthless men and flatterers; their pomp and ostentation; their boundless magnificence, supported by oppression and ruin of their people.” They are to be punished for their vanity, and their torment is to exploit their self-love by exposing their “deformities” and reversing their position as dominators. In Tartarus, their former victims now become their tormenters, who make them “groan like the anvil under the strokes of the hammers of the Cyclops.” To make matters worse, “they are doomed to a slow vengeance, that distills upon them drop by drop, and will never be exhausted” (Fénelon, 1994 [1699]: 248–249).

By contrast, those able to ascend the “steep path of virtue,” and “who maintain a “purity of manners and the love of justice,” are to receive rewards in the Elysian Fields.

Rousseau’s account of the afterlife in his Social Contract is more compact. He asserts a “powerful, intelligent, beneficent, provident, and foreseeing god,” who will see to “the happiness of the just, [and] the punishment of the wicked.” This is almost the whole sum of Rousseau’s account of divine justice in his most celebrated political text. He does not describe the nature of the rewards and punishments. But he stresses throughout that this civil religion is, in fact, “purely a civil profession of faith,” one measured by “sentiments of sociability” (Rousseau, 2018 [1762]: 317).

To be sure, Fénelon’s and Rousseau’s accounts of divine justice are broadly similar. Both presume a god capable of measuring the moral worth of individuals and an attending exercise of divine justice. Further, both seek to curb amour-propre.

Politics and morality, on the one hand, and religion, on the other, are clearly important to both Fénelon and Rousseau. Yet they differ significantly in emphasis. For Rousseau, religion serves his politics, stripped to its bare essentials in order to eliminate unnecessary controversies, quarrels, and conflict—the point of the civil religion, he suggests in his Letters Written from the Mountain, is to establish peace and civil harmony, where “one ought to serve God, love one’s neighbor, obey the Laws, and [presume] that the essence of all good Religion consist[s] in that alone” (Rousseau,2001 [1764]: 227). For Rousseau, the proof of faith in the civil religion is merely adherence to the general will.

Fénelon, by contrast, as Hanley stresses (PPF, pp. 158–159), emphasizes piety in his conception of divine justice. For him, “there is no true virtue without love and reverence for the gods” (Fénelon, 1994 [1699]: 247). One can imitate and play the role of a virtuous citizen, for Fénelon, and yet fall short. Those who practice “virtue” without piety have “practiced it only for the reputation and advantage of it” and not properly. Again, as Hanley observes, piety “induces a humility that checks pride” (PFF, p. 155). In checking this pride, Fénelon stresses the centrality of the Gospels’ emphasis on humility.

This marks a decisive difference between Fénelon and Rousseau. Whereas Rousseau calls on his readers to choose their religion rationally but not to get too fussy about it, Fénelon stresses the particular elements of his Catholicism to curb the excesses of amour-propre. The difference amounts to this: a thin theology, achievable by most citizens, while relying heavily on their reason to keep them in check; or a thick theology, achievable by relatively few, relying more on its specific doctrines to motivate sociable behavior.

Of course, in the 21st century, there is far less religious consensus than there was in Fénelon’s France. And even though there was extended conflict between the Catholics and the Huguenots, these differences did not primarily concern the value of humility.

By contrast, Rousseau’s civil religion might seem to capture the religious pluralism of our moment better. He makes no demands on citizens beyond belief in a god, divine justice, and, further, a commitment to tolerance of opposing views.

Given established traditions respecting freedoms of religion and conscience, it is a non-starter to demand specific religious beliefs of citizens. Yet perhaps here it is appropriate to consider other measures that might influence citizens. One such method would be to empower those who possess the virtues Fénelon seeks, especially humility. In fact, as Hanley’s texts reveal, Fénelon thought such measures were crucial. In his “Examination of Conscience,” Fénelon warns, “Consider … the scandal of a king who allows himself to be seen sitting with vice on the throne …. Vice is itself a contagious poison. The human race is always ready to catch this contagion” (MPW, p. 146). It stands to reason, then, that if a vice-laden leader can infect the people, then perhaps a series of noble leaders can have the opposite effect—infecting people, as it were, with the humility that Fénelon sought not only from leaders, but from those who take their cues from leaders.