The Revolution, an Episode of the Apocalypse
Since last year, Éditions Saint-Rémi has been publishing the Explication littérale du texte de l’Apocalypse by Fr. Pierre Picot de Clorivière, a great Jesuit mystic with a remarkable personality (5 volumes published to date). The seven-volume leather-bound manuscript was deposited in the French archives of the Society of Jesus. This never-published commentary on the last book of the New Testament was often referred to, quoted in bits and pieces, and had only been the subject of a few typewritten copies before the Second World War within the Institut du Cœur de Jésus, whose distribution was very limited.
Pierre de Clorivière, born in Saint-Malo in 1735, made his final vows in the Society of Jesus on the eve of its suppression in 1773. He remained in France during the Revolution, carrying out a clandestine apostolate. With a number of priests, he set up an institute of religious “in the world”, the Society of the Heart of Jesus, and with Adélaïde-Marie Champion de Cicé a Society of the Heart of Mary. Imprisoned from 1804 to 1809, on suspicion of having participated in the plot of the infernal machine against the First Consul (in which his nephew, Joseph Pierre Picot de Limoëlan, had actually taken part), he was subsequently entrusted with the restoration of the Society of Jesus in France, and died in 1820, leaving a legacy of outstanding spiritual work.
This mystic was also one of France’s counter-revolutionary thinkers, but in a spiritual vein. His Études sur la Révolution were published in 1926 in Pierre de Clorivière, contemporain et juge de la Révolution, 1735-1820, with a preface by René Bazin. In it, Clorivière examined the Declaration of the Rights of Man (in its 1789 and 1798 versions), denouncing in particular the right to the free expression of one’s opinion (“a liberty which liberates us from all duty to God and to ourselves”), the law conceived as the expression of the general will (“our legislators reject natural law, divine law and most human laws”), the assertion that sovereignty resides in the nation (“sovereignty belongs so much to the people that it does not derive from the free will of God”), and concluding with the objectively satanic character of the Revolution: “Since the birth of Christianity, since the beginning of the world, there has never been a revolution in which impiety has been so clearly exposed […]. The French people, in all their public life, no longer know their God.” Such a judgment on the satanic nature of this depredatory event can also be found in other contemporary authors, such as La Harpe in Le triomphe de la Religion ou le Roi martyr (“Et la France sans Roi, sans autel et sans prêtres/Aura pour dieu Satan et ses agents pour maîtres”[1]) or Chateaubriand in Les Martyrs, where he imagines the people of the damned prefiguring that of the Revolution.
The commentary on the Apocalypse, which Fr. de Clorivière calls “the prophetic history of the Church”, written between 1792 and 1808, is an opportunity to take up this theme again with regard to the fifth age[2] and the sixth age[3] of the Church. In the Explanation, the fifth age corresponds to the era Clorivière believes is coming to an end: “Luther’s heresy and a host of other heresies that came in its wake” caused deplorable devastation in the West; the Council of Trent valiantly reacted to this devastation at God’s behest, resulting in an age of saints, with “the practice of prayer, along with the frequentation of the sacraments”; but Protestantism evolved into indifferentism, opening the way to “modern incredulity adorned with the name of philosophy”; and through the latter came the Revolution, with all its devastation, persecution of the Christian faith and official apostasy.
However, “the outpouring of the vial of the fifth age is not yet complete,” wrote Clorivière in 1803. He considered his description of the sixth age, at the time of writing, to be for the future, after a period of respite: there will come a revolution which will go further than that of 1789. “This revolution will not only overthrow the established order of civil society, but will also show no respect for the supernatural and divine society that Jesus Christ has established on earth. Revelation speaks of the sun becoming “black as a cilice”: the light of Jesus Christ will be obscured by the “whirlwinds of dust” raised by the miscreants. Many stars will fall from heaven: the Church is that heaven from which the stars will fall, comments Clorivière, and these falling stars are those men whose functions were superior to those of the angels, in other words the bishops, whom Clorivière avoids referring to as such. These men, whom Jesus Christ “had specially chosen to be his Ministers, his Envoys, his Ambassadors”, will abandon the high rank they hold with God, only to precipitate themselves “into the mire of earthly things”.
Yet not all the stars, “because otherwise the gates of Hell would have prevailed against the Church, which is impossible,” but nevertheless a very large number of leaders. Hence “we can conjecture with some certainty that, among the simple faithful, prevarication will become almost general.”
At the time he was writing, Father de Clorivière, hoping for the return of the Bourbons, was therefore hoping for a period of respite for the Church, which would regain its splendor with pastors fully in line with the Tridentine ideal. Like all counter-revolutionary writers, such as Maistre, he wished to see a rallying around the Church of Rome and an exalting of the infallible pope (the seven thunders of the sixth age, Rev. 10:3, symbolizing the infallible decrees of the Sovereign Pontiffs), sentiments that would set the context for the papacy of the 19th century, especially under Pius IX. In his 7th volume, Clorivière even imagined a general council with a reformative aim like that of Trent. Was he unknowingly announcing the First Vatican Council? Or, in the longer term, a Third Vatican Council? Certainly not the Second.
Don Pio Pace
[1] And France, without a King, without altars or priests,/ Will have Satan for god, his minions as masters.
[2] Explication littérale du texte de l’Apocalypse, op. cit. t. 1, pp. 319-351.
[3] Explication littérale du texte de l’Apocalypse, op. cit. vol. 2, pp. 82-233.