Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
spiritual vacuum. These heirs of the Enlightenment approached political
reform with a new caution borne out of their memory of the Terror, and
this inspired many liberal thinkers to reconsider the spiritual destruction
it had wrought. The opinion now percolating through the liberal mind was
that it had been futile to tear down the old religion if there was no new
spiritual order to take its place, and thus a true science of society would also
need to build a new religion. One early contributor to this line of thought
was Madame Germaine de Staël (1766-1817), the great
femme lettrées
of the
age, who Saint-Simon is thought to have visited in 1802 during her political
exile in Geneva. While there is no concrete evidence that this audience also
occasioned Saint-Simon's failed effort to win de Staël's hand in marriage,
as his disciples would later claim, the philosopher certainly did share her
expectation that science and religion would soon be joined in a conjugal
union.
21
Europe's emerging civilization was to be grounded in the certainty
of what she now, after Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, called “posi-
tive” knowledge, and thus its moral authority would have to be scientific as
well. This meant that the social scientists who were destined to rule over
this new universe of knowledge would also need to be a spiritual body, a
scientized version of the Catholic Church. Like many kindred thinkers of
her generation, de Staël had begun to abandon the Encyclopedists' rash
disdain for medieval culture and to suppose instead that the old Catholic
order provided the appropriate historical model upon which to construct
this new scientific Christendom.
22
The ideologues, having at first won Napoleon's favor, envisioned them-
selves becoming the priesthood of this new order, only to have these hopes
crushed by the emperor's 1801 Concordat with the Catholic Church. In
restoring the church, the First Consul had found a more expedient shortcut
by which to restore the spiritual bearings of a French public wearied by the
constant erosion of traditional certainties. Robbed of this destiny, the ideo-
logues would soon have to endure further indignity as enemies of the state.
Saint-Simon's belief that the new social order could not exist in a reli-
gious vacuum also brought him into intellectual communion with con-
servative counterrevolutionaries of this period such as Chateaubriand,
Bonald, and Maistre who saw this spiritual crisis as a pretext for restoring
some nominal form of Catholic authority. Saint-Simon agreed with such
conservatives in principle, and for a time had even hoped that France's
clergy could play this part once they came around to the positivist point of
view. But in the end he judged that the Catholic Church was no longer up
to the job. Spiritual order needed to be restored, but only a more evolved
