François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon was an Archbishop of Cambrai, tutor to Louis XIV's grandson and eventual heir, the Duke of Burgundy, and classic French writer. His famous quarrel with the great Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, is an important episode in Christian ecclesiastical history epitomized in the contrast between the personalities of the two churchmen, Fénelon, dubbed"the Swan of Cambrai" and Bossuet,"the Eagle of Meaux."
Education
He went to the Jesuit College in Cahors at the age of twelve, and at fifteen he studied philosophy and theology in the Paris College of Plessis, attached to the Sorbonne. Very shortly after he entered the seminary of Saint-Sulpice. Though Fénelon's taste from the start was classical and philosophical, his piety and apostolic interest were outstanding. A traditional sense of the universal Church put him in a different category from the semi-Gallican Bossuet, who supported the claims of the French Church to self-government, or the harsh school of Jansenism, with its emphasis on predestination and divine grace.
Career
The young priest was first appointed to the work of converting the Protestants. In those missions, even after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) which permitted the Huguenots religious freedom, he does not seem to have quarreled with the rigorism and intolerance imposed by the state, but he did his best to soften its application in practice. During this period he cultivated a friendship with Bossuet, becoming one of the intellectual circle that revolved around that great ecclesiastical figure. Bossuet made much of his promising disciple, and their friendship drew Fénelon towards the Court.
In 1679 Fénelon wrote the Dialogues on Eloquence and possibly at about this time the Treatise on the Existence of God, writings which announced a freshness and originality of spirit in pastoral and spiritual writing. At Bossuet's request he wrote a study on the philosopher Malebranche, which showed how much he took account of contemporary thought, but the book was not published in full until 1820. The most original and influential of his early writings was the Treatise on the Education of Girls (1687), which he wrote to help the king's wife, Mme de Maintenon, in her educational work at Reuil, Noisy, and later at Saint-Cyr. An educational psychology far ahead of his own age is revealed in this work. Prudence, study of individual character, accommodation to the weakness of youth - these are some of its principles.
Fénelon's high repute at court at a time when the king - under the prompting of Mme de Maintenon, together with many leading dukes and duchesses - felt the need for religious reform, earned Fénelon in 1689 the all-important post of preceptor or tutor to the young Duke of Burgundy, who became heir apparent to the throne of France after the death of the dauphin. This appointment filled the so-called "Court Cenacle" - a group of devout men and women of high rank who aspired to foster a sense of piety in the leaders of the country - with hope for the future. Fénelon wrote for his pupil, among other things, his best-known work, Télémaque, a half-utopian classical tale meant to teach the young Duke how to govern for the good of his subjects. A prescribed educational text for French youths ever since its publication in 1699, Télémaque anticipated political and social ideas that became current long after Fénelon's death.
The future of this intelligent, learned, holy, and highly attractive priest, still in his thirties, seemed limitless when, in October 1688, he came into contact with a noble widow called Madame Guyon. Though this lady had had a troubled past, she was deeply religious, cultivating and propagating an apparently new form of mystical spirituality of which the aim was a cold, detached will to love God without any thought of self. This was in opposition to the normal desire to take comfort from religious exercise and prayer and to feel its consolations. Mme Guyon's piety was called "pure love." In a treatise called Moyen Court and in endless other writings she had expounded the way to practice it. In fact, she was expressing the spiritual climate of her times since her teaching was a form of "Quietism," especially associated with a Spanish priest, Miguel Molinos, who was arrested and imprisoned in 1685 for alleged immorality. Though Mme. Guyon had never heard of Molinos, she was arrested in January 1688 and kept a prisoner in a convent. It was after her release in October of the same year that she met Fénelon.
Soon Fénelon was deeply attracted by the essence of her spiritual teaching. Nor was this surprising, as the teaching of Mme. Guyon compared with that of the highest mystics of previous ages. But to Bossuet, who had little understanding of these matters, Fénelon'sFenelon's admiration for this strange and, as Bossuet thought, probably heretical woman seemed little short of madness or else bad will. Thus started a quickly growing tension between them in which sides were taken by the great figures of the Court and the high ecclesiastics of the country. Mme. de Maintenon, who at first had shared Fénelon's admiration for Mme Guyon, also took fright.
Though the developing quarrel did not prevent Fénelon from being made archbishop of Cambrai in 1695, he soon lost his appointment at Court and was banished from it. Fénelon's championship was not so much of Mme Guyon as a person, though he remained magnificently loyal to her, as of the doctrine of "pure love," which Bossuet thought to be heretical. Fénelon had expressed his views in a book called Maxims of the Saints (1697). After a fierce war of words in France and in Rome, in which Bossuet and his agents played a far from creditable part, Fénelon's book was condemned in Rome in 1699, against the pope's personal wishes. "Cambrai erred through loving God too much; Bossuet sinned through loving his neighbor too little," Innocent XII said. The moral victory rested with Fénelon who loyally submitted but always maintained that his errors had been defects of expression rather than any belief in the actual points condemned.
After the condemnation Fénelon never left his diocese, but he did not dissociate himself from the Guyon influence and the "Court Cenacle." In his exile, he found himself a magnet, attracting visitors from all over Europe, eager to discuss with him matters of religion and philosophy. Many of them were Protestants. All who came were edified by his piety and dignity and the admirable humility and fidelity with which he lived and ruled his diocese. In an odder and more extravagant way, Mme. Guyon ran a kind of interdenominational spiritual center in Blois. Fénelon, who died on Jan. 7, 1715, died before the lady he had known for so short a time but who had had so profound an influence on his life and destiny.