Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/251

 L A M L A M 239 formerly a Moorish mosque, and, though intrinsically com monplace, enjoyed for a long time an undeserved fame as the meeting place of the cortes said to have been convened in 1143 or 1144 by Alphonso Henriquez, the first king of Portugal, to settle the royal succession and to determine the laws of the country. But within the last forty years it has been pretty clearly demonstrated that no such cortes ever met. To archaeologists the ancient bath preserved at Lamego will afford more interest than the old Moorish castle, which crowns the hill on which the city stands. Numbers of swine are reared in the neighbourhood, which furnish the well-known Lisbon hams. The old name of Lamego was Lama or Larnacoeni. Under the Moors, who were driven out in 1038 by Ferdinand of Castile, it was a leading city. The population in 1878 was 8383. LAMENNAIS, HUGUES FELICITY ROBERT DE (1782- 1854), French theologian, philosopher, and political writer, was born at St Malo in Britaimy. His father, Pierre Louis Robert, merchant and shipowner, had been ennobled by Louis XVI. because of aid to royal naval armaments and for importing and selling corn at easy prices in a time of public distress. His property of La Mennais, with the feudal prefix De, gave him a new .surname. His wife was as noted for her saintly temper as her humane husband for scepticism. The death of his mother and his father s bankruptcy deprived young Lamennais early of regular education. An eccentric uncle got charge of him, and for years the freedom of this uncle s library was all his training. His elder brother Jean, priest, educationist, and author, had taught him the elements of Latin, and by his own further efforts he comprehended Livy at ten. Well read in Rousseau at twelve, he criticized religion so adroitly with the parish priest that he could not be admitted to communion. In 1796 ho sent a discourse combating modern philosophy to a provincial academy. He visited Paris with his father next year, where he wrote democratic letters to the news papers. On his return he joined his brother for study at a house near Dinan called La Chenaie, built by their maternal grandfather. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, modern languages, the church fathers, the controversialists, and historians occupied him. Religious struggle, and an intense melancholy, aided it may be by the malheureuse passion which he is said to have suffered from, account for the fact that he was twenty-two before taking his first communion, though in direct preparation for the clerical life. In 1808 his hand found its proper work. His Reflexions on the State of the Church during the 18//i Century and on the Actual Situation, published anonymously at Paris, was the first important theological stand made against the materialistic philosophy which had its apotheosis in im perialism. Napoleon s police seized the book as dangerously ideological, with its eager recommendation of religious revival and active clerical organization. It awoke the ultra montane spirit which has played so great a part since in the politics of churches and states. But Lamennais was not yet ready for the contest. Pious exaltation of spirit was his prevailing mood, as is shown by his translation next year of the Sinritual Guide of the ascetic Blosius. Indeed, to the end of his life there is recurrence to what may bo called poetic religious feeling, one of his latest reliefs from the storms of political struggle being a translation of the Gospels. In 1811 he took the tonsure, but shortly after became teacher of mathematics in the seminary founded by his brother at St Malo. Theological politics had large discussion after the concordat of 1802, by which the Gal- lican Church was re-established ; and the brothers joint work, Tradition upon the Institution of Bishops, which was published a few days after the restoration, condemns the Gallican principle which allowed bishops to be created irrespective of the pope s sanction. The revival of the Bourbon monarchy drew Lamennais to Paris, and the Hundred Days sent him to exile. The abbe Carou gave him work in his school for French exiles in London ; and he also became tutor at the house of Lady Jerningham, whose first impression of him as an imbecile changed into friendship. In 1815 he returned with the abbe&quot; to Paris, where his seeming fatuity cost him much misery as a seminarist of St Sulpice ; but with Caron s aid, whom he called his spiritual father, he took full sacerdotal ordination next year, though with reluctance, as a letter to his sister shows. He enjoyed much peace with his friend at the Maison des Feuillautes, and finished there the first volume of his great work, the Essay on Indifference in the Matter of Religion. Published in 1817, it affected Europe like a spell. Since Bossuet no clergyman wielded such power as he gained at a blow. He denounced tolera tion, and advocated a Catholic restoration to belief. The right of private judgment, introduced by Descartes and Leibnitz into philosophy and science, by Luther into religion, and by Rousseau and the Encyclopedists into politics and society, had, he contended, terminated in prac tical atheism and spiritual death. Ecclesiastical authority, founded on the absolute revelation delivered to the Jewish people, but supported by the universal tradition of all nations, he proclaimed to be the sole hope of regenerating the European communities. In 1824 the fourth volume completed the work, and the Defence of the same date indi cates the violent opposition he met with, not only from his natural enemies, the lovers of personal freedom in thought, science, and politics, sacred or civil, but from the Gallican bishops and monarchists, because he argued that all authority rests in the Holy See, and from his ultramontane friends, because he dared to support the Christian revelation by an analysis of human, or, as they considered, profane tradition. Meanwhile Lamennais had become journalist on the Conservateur, with Chateaubriand, De Bonald, and De Villele for his fellows in essentially political work. When in 1820 De Villele became the chief of the ultras, or friends of absolute monarchy, Lamennais, who was not the mon archist they thought him, left the Conservateur with other contributors, named &quot;the incorruptibles,&quot; and in the Drapeau Blanc and in the Memorial Catholique he opposed his previous comrade. His principles compelled him to draw a firm line as to the divine right of even legitimate kings, especially in connexion with church supremacies. In 1823 he was before the tribunals for an article in the Drapeau Blanc. He went to Rome in 1824, and Pope Leo. XII., his admirer, offered him the cardinal s hat, which he refused. On his return he published Religion in its Relations to Civil and Political Order, the first volume of which was a picture of the religious state of France, and the second an attack on the competence of the assembly of the clergy in 1682 to decree the liberties of the Gallican Church. The law accepting these liberties, Lamennais was summoned before the state courts, and with all France keenly interested was condemned to pay a fine. From this time he broke with the legitimists and the liberals, and Rome became to him the only seat of the social problem. His ideal was a pure theocracy. But in the Progress of the Revolution and War against the Church the element of popular political liberty began to appear, modifying such infallibility of the head of the church as deposing of princes and dispensing with oaths of allegiance taken by their subjects implied. The revolution of 1830 increased his popular leanings, and in the journal L Avenir, which he founded in September with the mottoes &quot; God and Liberty,&quot; &quot; The Pope and the People,&quot; theories strange to ultramontanism were broached. With Lacor- daire, Montalembert, Gerbet, and other disciples, he de manded rights of local administration, enlarged suffrage,