Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins (review)

Reviewed by: Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France by Daniel J. Watkins Darrin M. Mcmahon Berruyer's Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in France. By Daniel J. Watkins. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2021. Pp. xviii, 325. $130.00 CAD. ISBN 9780228006305.) This is a history of French Catholicism in the long eighteenth century organized around the history and reception of a single book, the French Jesuit Isaac-Joseph Berruyer's Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Published successively in three parts in 1728, 1753, and 1757, the work was a rare, if tremendously popular, French example of what the historian Jonathan Sheehan has described, with reference to the more prevalent varieties in England and Germany, as an "Enlightenment Bible," an attempt to apply Enlightenment scholarly practices, attitudes, and opinions to the hermeneutical investigation and translation of Scripture. In Berruyer's case, the work reflected, as well, the broader Jesuit effort to accommodate time and place in its teaching of the Christian word. Whereas Matteo Ricci and his brethren had famously donned the vocabulary and dress of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to proselytize more effectively there, Berruyer made a similar calculation about eighteenth-century France. "To combat the unbelievers of our day," he insisted, the Church needed "new weapons." Drawing freely on the Enlightenment's own arsenal, Berruyer produced a Bible that aimed to appeal to an [End Page 410] enlightened eighteenth-century public. Employing novelistic conventions (and in a revised edition the illustrations of the great rococo painter François Boucher), the booked aimed to appeal to the sentiments, recounting the Biblical narrative through characters and stories in paraphrase that relegated the actual words of the Vulgate to glosses in the margin. It also stressed that the Bible's chief aim was that great eighteenth-century concern—earthly happiness—and it used sensationalist epistemology, accounts of natural religion, and doctrines of human progress to show Christianity's evolution and consonance with reason. If in this way, as Watkins observes in a nice line, "The Enlightenment became yet another mission field" for Jesuit proselytism, the impact of Berruyer's Bible was decidedly mixed (p. 28). Enlightenment authors like Voltaire predictably mocked it as a "salon novel," while others, like the radical abbé Morellet, hailed its innovative Christology. Yet despite evidence of the work's genuine popularity among the laity (precise publication figures, unfortunately, seem to be lacking), the work irked the Jesuits' Jansenist critics, who drew attention to theological concerns and decried the book's allegedly lax morality and its presumption in substituting the word of man for the word of God. For their part, more traditionally minded figures within the Jesuit order itself worried out loud about dangerous "innovation," and their complaints soon caught the ear of Gallican authorities in the French hierarchy, who detected their own dubious departures from tradition and orthodoxy, as well as hints of ultra-Montanism. Watkins spends the bulk of the book showing how these disputes metastasized into a full-blown affaire, which not only divided Jansenists from Jesuits, and Gallicans from Ultramontanes, contributing ultimately to the expulsion of the order and various official condemnations of Berruyer's book, but drove a further wedge between those ready to accommodate aspects of Enlightenment thought to Catholic teaching and those who saw any such flirtation with Catholic Enlightenment as traffic with the enemy. The upshot of his analysis, Watkins argues, "flips the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment … on its head, by suggesting that the damage that the Enlightenment did to the church had as much to do with internal efforts of Catholic theologians to appropriate it as it do with external assaults by radical, anti-clerical philosophes" (p. 5). Tracing that same tension into the nineteenth century, when various French Catholics attempted to revive Berruyer's book in the effort to better reach the laity, Watkins writes with an admirably limpid style and is well-versed in the relevant scholarship. The consequence is a book about a book, which is also a great deal more. Scholars of Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the interaction of the two over the course of...

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