Two Renegade Oratorians

There are many holy names connected to Bérulle's Oratory of Jesus: St. Vincent de Paul; St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort; St. John Eudes; Charles de Condren; Jean-Jacques Olier; Jean-Baptiste Massillon; in recent times, Louis Bouyer. Only some of these were Oratorians proper, yet they all had some connection to Bérulle and his spirituality.

But, as is ever the case with institutions of men, there were bad apples in the Oratory as well. (Bérulle's own history reveals a bad apple among the Carmelites: Francisco de la Madre de Dios, superior general of the Carmelites from 1600 to 1607, who had a vendetta against Bérulle, and continually sought to strip him of his authority over the Carmelites in France.) Here, I want to point out two of these Oratorian bad apples.

Richard Simon
(1638-1712)

Despite his English-sounding name, Simon was a Frenchman and an Oratorian. He early took an interest in Hebrew and other Eastern languages, which was not out of the ordinary for the Oratory: Bérulle did not know Hebrew himself, but he was interested in it, drawing from the insights of Hebrew scholars (such as Gilbert Génébrard (1535-1597)) in his own writings, and ordering Jean Morin (1591-1659), an early Oratorian, to prepare and publish a copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Thus Simon's work on the Hebrew Biblical texts was not unusual for the Oratory: his method, though, was. His most famous (and infamous) publication was a Critical History of the Old Testament, whose underlying principles were inspired by Baruch Spinoza, among others. Though the Oratory and the University of Paris initially gave it an imprimatur, many other theologians were shocked by the work, which included claims such as "Moses is not the author of most of the Pentateuch." The great orator Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, among others, manged to get royal approval to have the whole publication run seized and destroyed.

In the aftermath, Simon was expelled from the Oratory, and, though he continued to write, many of his works were later included on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books. Yet punishment and prohibition did not stop his influence: his theories became well-known in both France and England, where they inspired both rebuke (John Dryden's Religio Laici) and acclaim (John Locke and Isaac Newton were both fans).

Many have called Richard Simon "the founder of historical criticism"; many others give the title to Spinoza or to later German scholars. (Germany became the hotbed of this style of Biblical criticism in the 1800s and thereafter.) As is the case with most scholars, Simon was not wholly original himself, drawing from the works of prior scholars: Louis Cappel (1585-1685) had already written a book entitled Sacred Criticism in the 1630s, and both he and Jean Morin, mentioned above, criticized the historical reliability of the traditional Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Even if he was not wholly original, though, it was Simon who brought this style of Biblical criticism to public attention. Today, he might be lauded more as a trailblazer than as an impious renegade, but it was certainly as the latter that he was viewed in his own day.

Pierre Faydit
(1644-1709)

If modern theologians would have a remarkably different view of Simon than his contemporaries, that is not the case with Pierre Faydit: his rebelliousness would be agreed on by all.

His time in the Oratory was fairly short, being expelled, not for theological error (yet), but for philosophical error: he had written a work entitled On the Human Mind (1671), which was heavily inspired by René Descartes. In his early career, Descartes had been supported by another Oratorian, Guillaume Gibieuf (1580-1650), Bérulle's self-proclaimed successor, who may also have influenced the philosopher; by Faydit's time, though, Cartesian thought was an idea non grata.

After being expelled from the Oratory, Faydit did not recoil from his renegade style, nor even keep to the same train, as Simon did. Instead, he decided to add further controversies: first, political, when he criticized Pope Innocent XI during a spat with the French government; second, theological, when he published an Essay on the Trinity (1696) that was quite clearly tritheist. (Another 1696 work that shows his tritheism is the Clarifications on the Doctrine and the Ecclesiastical History of the First Two Centuries; I'm not sure if the Essay is a separate work, or maybe just a portion of the latter.) The latter was so revolting that Faydit was imprisoned for a few years, before being exiled to his home city of Riom.

Neither expulsion, nor imprisonment, nor exile softened his tongue; persecution made him sharper. Setting aside grander topics, he turned his pen to simpler lambastings of popular works. Most infamous is his two-volume Telemachomany (1700, 1713), which tried to rip apart the didactic novel The Adventures of Telemachus, by François Fénelon (1651-1715), Quietist theologian and Bishop of Cambrai. Rather than injuring the reputation of Fénelon or the Telemachus (which became a beloved classic in France for the next few centuries), Faydit's critique just made him a laughing-stock.

Two "renegades" of very different calibers: many of Simon's controversial points are now common currency in theological circles, even orthodox Catholic ones. (Consider Pope Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), which gave a seal of approval to Biblical textual criticism and the historical-critical method, within limits.) Faydit, though, was more boneheaded, especially in his later years, when he might be rightly given the Internet title of "troll." Perhaps he was over-punished for his initial philosophical work (I have not read it, so I cannot make a claim myself); his theological work, though, is more clearly heretical, and his heckling can probably be safely dismissed, as history has.

Some renegades are certainly unjustly punished trailblazers, but others are simply trolls.

Nota Bene: Faydit is briefly mentioned in my recently-published translation of Chateaubriand's Defense of the Genius of Christianity.

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