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The following is adapted from the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
LAMENNAIS, Félicité Robert de (1782–1854), French religious and political author. He was a member of a well-to-do family of St-Malo. While still a child he read widely, esp. J.-J. Rousseau, whose influence contributed to his loss of religious faith at an early age. But under the guidance of his brother Jean Marie (c. 1780–1860), who had become a priest, he was converted and made his first communion at the age of 22. He was appointed professor of mathematics at the episcopal college of St-Malo in 1804; later he retired to the country house of his grandfather, La Chênaie, which became the centre of his circle of likeminded friends.
In 1808 he published his Réflexions sur l’état de l’Église, written in collaboration with his brother. The book[:]
[a] aimed at showing the futility of trust in individual reason, which led to rationalism, atheism, and intellectual anarchy,
[b] and called for systematic clerical organization.
This demand brought him into conflict with Napoleon’s policy and caused him to flee to London during the Hundred Days in 1815. After his return, against his own inclinations, he became a priest in 1816.
In 1818 he published the first volume of his chief work, the Essai sur l’indifférence en matière de religion. Lamennais here developed
[c] the principle of authority, which he equated with the ‘raison générale’ or ‘sens commun’.
[d] He maintained that the individual is dependent on the community for his knowledge of the truth; [rather than reason]
[e] to isolate oneself is to doubt;
[f] and toleration is an evil.
His eloquence gained him fervent disciples, esp. among the Ultramontanists and Royalists, and effected many conversions; but its ideas were suspect esp. to the Sulpicians and Jesuits and opposed by the Gallicans.
The later volumes of the work (1820, 1823) were still more opposed to the traditional doctrines.
[1] They equated Catholic Christianity with the religion of all mankind,
[2] denied the supernatural, and
[3] proclaimed subjects freed from loyalty to their temporal sovereigns when rulers refused to conform their conduct to Christian ideals.
[4] In order to counteract the evils of the time he desired a theocracy, with the Pope as supreme leader of kings and peoples.
The work received the approval of Pope Leo XII, who possibly intended to make him a cardinal. In Des progrès de la Révolution (1829) he prophesied an impending revolution and demanded
[5] the separation both of the Church
and of the entire educational system from the State,
[6] as well as the freedom of the press.
In order to carry out these ideas he founded a religious congregation, the short-lived Congrégation de St Pierre (1828), an Agence Générale pour la Défense de la Liberté Religieuse (1830), and the paper L’Avenir (1830–1), and won the co-operation of a number of brilliant younger religious thinkers, among them C. de Montalembert and H. Lacordaire. He asserted that the essence of Christianity was freedom, but freedom understood in a political sense and guaranteed by the Papacy. In the last number of L’Avenir he launched the ‘Acte d’Union’, in which he called for the union of all freedom-loving men.
Convinced that the Pope would put himself at the head of this crusade for freedom, he went to Rome in 1832 to defend his ideas before Gregory XVI; they were, however, condemned in the encyclical ‘Mirari vos’ of 15 Aug. 1832. Lamennais, though submitting externally, retired to La Chênaie, where he wrote his reply, the famous Paroles d’un croyant (Words of a Believer -1834). Though admitting the authority of the Church in questions of faith, he denied it in the sphere of politics. In apocalyptic language he presented a picture of the ideal community in which production and consumption were to be harmoniously balanced. The book aroused tremendous excitement throughout Europe; it was condemned in the encyclical ‘Singulari nos’ of 25 June 1834. Lamennais’s friends submitted, but he himself left the Church.
From this time Lamennais’s interests became more and more exclusively political. He gave his views on the social needs of the times in Le Livre du peuple (1837; Eng. tr., 1838) and L’Esclavage moderne (1839; Eng. tr., 1840). The Discussions critiques (1841) marked the final end of his Christian faith. He denied the whole supernatural order together with the doctrinal beliefs of Catholicism and tended more and more to a vague pantheism, expressed also in Esquisse d’une philosophie (4 vols., 1841–6). In 1846 he published a translation of the Gospels with commentary, Les Évangiles, which was placed on the Index. In the Revolution of 1848 he became a member of Parliament, but the political reaction of 1852 completely disillusioned him. All efforts, even those of the new Pope Pius IX, to reconcile him to the Church were in vain. An extraordinarily gifted writer, Lamennais was one of the greatest inspirers of the new social and political ideas of the 19th and 20th cents. as well as a forerunner of Modernism.
Œuvres complètes (12 vols. bound in 6, Paris, 1836–7); Œuvres posthumes, ed. E. D. Forgues (2 vols., ibid., 1856–9); Œuvres inédites, ed. A. Blaize (2 vols., ibid., 1866); Correspondance générale, ed. L. Le Guillou (9 vols., ibid., 1971–81). Also posthumously pub. was his Essai d’un système de philosophie catholique, ed. Y. Le Hir (Rennes, 1954). M. J. Le Guillou [OP] and L. Le Guillou (eds.), La Condamnation de Lamennais (Textes, Dossiers, Documents, 5; 1982). There is a considerable lit. about the various aspects of Lamennais’s life, thought, and influence, esp. in Fr., but no fully documented biog. The two best general studies are C. Boutard, Lamennais: Sa vie et ses doctrines (3 vols., 1905–13); F. Duine, La Mennais: Sa vie, ses idées, ses ouvrages, d’après les sources imprimées et les documents inédits (1922). Further items listed in F. Duine, Essai de bibliographie de Félicité Robert de La Mennais (1923). L. Le Guillou, L’Évolution de la pensée religieuse de Félicité Lamennais (1966); G. Hourdin, Lamennais: Prophète et combattant de la liberté (1982). In Eng. the main items incl. W. Gibson, The Abbé de Lamennais and the Liberal Catholic Movement in France (1896); A. R. Vidler, Prophecy and Papacy: A Study of Lamennais, the Church, and the Revolution (Birkbeck Lectures, 1952–1953; 1954); W. G. Roe, Lamennais and England: The Reception of Lamennais’s Religious Ideas in England in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1966), with bibl. A. Fonck in DTC 8 (pt. 2; 1925), cols. 2473–526, s.v., with detailed biblThis Webpage was created for a workshop held at Saint Andrew's Abbey, Valyermo, California in 1990
