Bossuet on Particular Providence and Nominalism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Friday 27 September 2024 is the 397th anniversary of the birth of Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet (27 September 1627–12 April 1704), who was born in Dijon on this date in 1627, and who came to be known as the Eagle of Meaux, as his diocese was Meaux.
Bossuet is remembered as one of the great providential philosophers of history, and because this tradition begins with Augustine, he is often compared to Augustine. Some commentators have gone so far as to say that Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History is an early modern equivalent of Augustine’s City of God. It isn’t. Augustine’s City of God is a big book with something for everyone in it — there are chapters on history, on philosophy, on theology, on demonology, and more and better besides. Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History is a very different book, much more focused and much more thematically continuous than Augustine’s book. It’s also much more historical and much less philosophical than Augustine’s City of God.
We can say, with some justification, that both Augustine and Bossuet gave an exposition of a providential philosophy of history, but even here there is a difference. Not only do providential philosophies of history originate with St. Augustine, but more-or-less all philosophy of history in the Western tradition begins with Augustine. One could argue that a philosophy of history is implicit in ancient Greek history and philosophy, but, if this was the case, it was not made explicit until post-Scholastic philosophy, i.e., not until after the tradition inaugurated by Augustine had run its course. This means that all subsequent philosophies of history were born from the womb of providential philosophy of history, which incubated all other conceptions of history.
This was essentially Karl Löwith’s claim when he argued that so-called modern philosophies of history were re-purposed Christian eschatology in disguise. Löwith devoted a chapter to Bossuet in his Meaning in History. Löwith writes, “The lesson which Bossuet draws from the fact that the Son of Man and of God died without any visible mark of divine protection is that ordinary man in his extremity should not claim what has not been granted to Christ.” And then Lowith continues:
“It is this very absence of any visible mark of providence in the history of the world which proves the need of faith in things unseen and which evokes it. Faith does not rest on objective certainty or fifty per cent probability but rather on the absence of them. It implies commitment and risk, courage and suspense. It is a belief in what is otherwise unbelievable. To make providence post festum intelligible and transparent in the political history of the world is the attempt of unbelievers, who say, like the devil to Jesus: ‘If you are God’s son, throw yourself down’ (Matt. 4:6).” (p. 143)
I am skeptical that Bossuet would have agreed to this interpretation of his work. In Bossuet’s providential history, the world wears its providential intervention into history on its face, hidden to none:
“God’s judgment on the greatest of the world’s empires, namely, the Roman Empire, is not hidden from us. You have just heard it from the mouth of St. John. Rome itself has felt God’s hand and, like the others, has been an example of his justice. But its fate has been more fortunate than that of other cities. Purged from any remaining idolatry by the disasters it suffered, Rome continues to exist only through Christianity, which it brings to the whole world. Thus all the great empires we have seen on this earth have contributed in various ways to the welfare of religion and to the glory of God, as God himself has told us through his prophets.” (Discourse on Universal History, Part Three, Chapter 1)
The providential conception of history seeks to understand history as a process in which the divine regularly, if not continuously, intervenes in history, so that history bears the evident imprint of the divine hand that has made it so. I said above that all philosophies of history were born from the womb of providential philosophy of history, and Augustine is the source of both. Not only did Augustine, then, inaugurate philosophy of history in the Western tradition, he also gave it its agenda, which it has not managed to shrug off even as it made the transition to modernity and secularism, if Löwith is to be believed. Augustine’s book is explicitly philosophical, and it constitutes not just a philosophy of history, but offers a comprehensive philosophical vision of the world, whereas Bossuet’s book is a history informed by an unstated, implicit providential philosophy of history.
Bossuet’s contribution to the philosophy of history, his Discourse on Universal History, was written to instruct the Dauphin, son of Louis XIV, for whom Bossuet served as tutor for eleven years. Aristotle had Alexander the Great to tutor. Seneca had Nero to tutor. And Bossuet? Bossuet had the dauphin, and the Dauphin was not a promising student. Bossuet’s experience with the Dauphin was described by Philippe Erlanger in his Louis XIV:
“For a preceptor, the heir to the throne had Bossuet, Bishop of Condom and France’s most learned expert in divine right. This qualification had erased the memory of his bold speeches against the King’s adultery. Bossuet overwhelmed his backward pupil with such splendid lessons that the Dauphin developed a lasting horror of books, learning and history. By the age of eighteen, Monseigneur had assimilated almost none of the knowledge amassed to so little purpose, and the apathy of his mind was second only to that of his senses.”
This sounds more like Plato trying to made headway with Dionysius of Syracuse — unsuccessfully — than the reasonably cordial relationship between Aristotle and Alexander. At least the Dauphin didn’t sentence Bossuet to commit suicide, as Nero sentenced Seneca. It is worthwhile to recall, in this context, that the following that was attributed to Pascal, a contemporary Bossuet:
“He was often heard to say (in connection with the education of a prince) that there was nothing to which he would sooner contribute if invited, and he would willingly give up his life for something so important.” (Pascal, Pensées, Penguin, 1984, p. 356)
One could rightly say that Bossuet must have had a similar attitude, though it seems to have come to naught, and, historically speaking, as a tradition, royal pedagogy seems to have mostly come to naught. So the tutoring and the Dauphin didn’t amount to much, but the book Bossuet wrote to tutor the Dauphin survives. I can’t help but wonder what divine providence Bossuet saw at work in the Dauphin’s disinterest in his instruction.
A distinction is usually made in discussions of divine providence between general providence and particular providence. General providence is the divine will superintending the order of the universe. Divine providence conceived as general providence is consistent with any scientific account of the universe, and one can promulgate a providential philosophy of history where providence is conceived as general providence at the same time as promulgating a scientific account of the universe. One could even in good conscience present an account of scientific knowledge as an account of divine providence.
Particular providence, also called special providence, on the other hand, is the divine will actively intervening in the processes of history, whether natural history or human history. This can involve, but does not necessarily involve, the suspension of laws of nature, that is to say, miracles. It gets complicated when you get into the details, and, of course, there are disagreements. William Lane Craig, for example, distinguishes among creation, providence, and miracles. Miracles, Craig says,
“…should not be conceived, properly speaking, as violations of the laws of nature, but as the production of events which are beyond the causal powers of the natural entities existing at the relevant time and place.”
According to this definition of miracles, miracles do not necessarily violate the laws of nature, but this puts a lot of explanatory weight on the implied distinction between events that are within the causal powers of nature and events that are beyond the causal powers of nature. In the introduction to the English language translation of Bossuet’s Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, Patrick Riley quotes a letter from Bossuet to his friend Marquis d’Allemans, who was a Malebranchian who argued for general providence:
“There is a great difference in saying, as I do, that God leads each thing to the end which he proposes for it by the means which he [actually] follows, and in saying that he contents himself with giving some general laws, from which result many things which enter only indirectly into his plans . . I turn away from your ideas of general laws.”
And Riley adds,
“Bossuet was perfectly right… in characterizing his own Histoire universelle as a work built on Providence particuliere, not on general laws.”
Riley also quotes from Bossuet’s Funeral Oration for Marie Thérése of Austria (Oraison funebre de Marie Thérése d’Autriche):
“What contempt I have for those philosophers who, measuring the counsels of God by their own thoughts, make him the author of nothing more than a certain general order, from which the rest develops as it may! As if he had, after our fashion, only general and confused views, and as if the sovereign intelligence could not include in his plans particular things, which alone truly exist.”
Thus Bossuet comes down squarely on the side of particular providence, and it is particular providence that informs his Discourse on Universal History. Bossuet also seems to come down on the side of nominalism, since he said that particular things alone truly exist. It would be interesting to look into this further and to better understand his relationship to the Scholastic tradition, but I’m not going to pursue this today, though I did want to mention it.
We could think of the providential conception of history as a narrative structure rooted in a teleological future that provides the ultimate anchor by which all events in the history of the world derive their meaning and significance. In my episode on Danto we saw Danto argued that the logic of narrative sentences is such that new events constitute a further context for past events, so that the past is always read in the light of the present. By moving this present into a future that is by definition the eternal Kingdom of God (when it is achieved on Earth), any events that transpire in the present are understood to take their context from this coming divine social order, which will explain everything and justify everything that precedes it.
This is more than a little of an oversimplification, as the eternal Kingdom of God exists independently of time, so that the only sense in which it could be said to be in the future is its actual realization on Earth. However, if we agree that the Kingdom of God is not at this time exhibited on Earth, but that its coming to being is a providential inevitability, then it will be exhibited on Earth in the future. So even in this model of history, with the goal lying outside history, there is a mundane history of the world that passes through historical stages even as the eternal Kingdom of God remains unchanged, i.e., impassible.
There are, then, two parallel kingdoms: the eternal kingdom and the temporal kingdom — Augustine called them the Heavenly City and the Earthly City, or the City of God and the City of Man — but the temporal kingdom is brought into being and guided in its development by the eternal, which always lies outside it and experiences no temporality. Salvation history, according to this interpretation, is intrinsic to the world and has no part to play in the eternal order. I’m not making any claim to orthodoxy here; I’m just giving an off-the-cuff account of how to seems to me. Joseph Campbell has argued that the historicity of salvation history is a distinctive feature of western society and the Christian tradition in the west, and here we can see how this is driven by the providential conception of history.
If I’m right about this, and if Campbell is right, then this state-of-affairs reflects the actual structure of the temporal in relationship to the eternal. That is to say, under this interpretation the historicity of salvation history has a claim to ontological priority over the ordinary business of life that is not touched by salvation history, but salvation history in turn must cede ontological priority to the eternal, of which it is a reflection. This position is not all that different from McTaggart’s conception of a C-series that is the eternal and unchanging order that appears to us as the B-series and the A-series. It would be interesting to pursue this further, but, as with Bossuet’s apparent nominalism, I will only mention it today.
I said earlier that Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History is primarily a history, and only secondarily a providential philosophy of history. We can place works of history and philosophy of history along a continuum ranging from the nearly purely historical to the nearly purely philosophical. I can’t think of an early modern philosopher of history who gave us the opposite end of the continuum from that of Bossuet, which, if it existed, would tend to the philosophical end of the spectrum, being primarily a philosophical account and only secondarily a history. We have to wait for the Enlightenment, when a flurry of activity in the philosophy of history takes place, and we have the work of Kant, Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, and Guizot, each of whom occupies a distinctive position on the continuum between pure philosophy of history, with minimal historical detail, and pure history, with a minimal philosophical agenda.
Being thin on philosophical exposition, Bossuet may have contributed to the decline of providential philosophies of history at the very time when naturalistic science was pointing to alternative modes of thought. If Bossuet had offered novel arguments he might have shored up the providentialist tradition in his time. Nevertheless, the providential school of philosophy of history continues to have its representatives today, so Bossuet’s weakness in argumentation was no mortal blow to the school.
However, one element that Bossuet brought to his history that was not especially prominent in earlier providential philosophies of history was that of universal history. Near the beginning of Discourse on Universal History Bossuet explains the task of universal history as he sees it:
“…universal history is to the history of every country and of every people what a world map is to particular maps. In a particular map you see all the details of a kingdom or a province as such. But a general map teaches you to place these parts of the world in their context; you see what Paris or the Ile-de-France is in the kingdom, what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the world.”
This is a definition of universal history that even historians who do not share Bossuet’s providential philosophy of history could adopt as their own. Another way of expressing the idea is that universal history gives us a “big picture” conception of history, which may be deficient in some details, but which shows us relationships between disparate parts, which, in a more detailed history, would be lost — crowded out by detail. The Enlightenment philosophers of history would take up this theme of universal history and pursue it without Bossuet’s providentialism.
Near the end of the book Bossuet wrote this:
“Thus God reigns over every nation. Let us no longer speak of coincidence or fortune; or let us use these words only to cover our ignorance. What is coincidence to our uncertain foresight is concerted design to a higher foresight, that is, to the eternal foresight which encompasses all causes and all effects in a single plan. Thus all things concur to the same end; and it is only because we fail to understand the whole design that we see coincidence or strangeness in particular events.”
This shows us how Bossuet brings together universal history and particular providence, which might thought to be antithetical. Both the grand plan of providence and the grand plan of universal history are hidden from us by our parochial view of things. If we understand universal history we see the relation of parts to the whole, which will not be evident in the history of a single kingdom or province. And if we could understand divine providence, we would see the relationship between the particular providence that shapes particular lives, and expressions of a larger providence shaping the universe entire. Given Bossuet’s implied nominalism that I mentioned earlier, if only individuals exist, then the only way that divinity can shape the world is by the work of particular providence in particular lives. It is often argued that Ockham’s late medieval nominalism paved the way for empirical science by shifting theoretical attention from universals to particulars, but in the providential nominalism of Bossuet, the result is not empirical science, but a reinvigorated providentialism perhaps consistent with Ockhamn’s fideism. It would be interesting to research whether Bossuet in this particularist providentialism was responding to the inroads of deism, then gaining traction.
