Réflexions sur le Traité des Apparitions de dom Calmet (review)

This fine edition of an unpublished manuscript by a Benedictine monk should go a long way towards reviving interest in what Gilles Banderier calls eighteenth-century Catholic rationalism. Dom Cathelinot, the author of two editions of Bossuet’s letters, wrote his Réflexions in 1749, as a response to dom Calmet’s controversial Traité des apparitions, also known as Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie, first published in 1746. Dom Calmet’s name is perhaps better known from Voltaire’s description of the abbot as ‘a naïve compiler of imbecilities’, and a man ‘whose simplicity was useful to all those who are ready to laugh at antique foolishness’. Voltaire, who had enjoyed Calmet’s hospitality at the Abbey of Senones where he spent three weeks consulting books, was perhaps not so ungrateful as it appears for he kept his most devastating comments until after the death of the abbot. Although Calmet’s reputation had for the most part assured respectful reactions to his text, eliciting a long review in the Journal des Savans, many readers were taken aback by the Traité. In his Réflexions, Cathelinot gives an accurate measure of the perplexity with which ecclesiastic authorities viewed Calmet’s unconventional work. The goal of the Réflexions is twofold: first, Cathelinot reminds his prospective readers that Calmet did not believe in the tales he so pleasurably recounted; he admits that many readers were ‘revolted’ by the title of his book alone; but one should not reproach its author for anything beyond having enjoyed a little délassement; second, Cathelinot prolongs Calmet’s investigations, though in a more traditional and rigorous vein, by reviewing the texts that discuss apparitions of various kinds from the Gospels to St Augustine. The first section of the book contains, among other things, a discussion of the effect of imagination, the status of apparitions in the Gospels and a critique of Malebranche. The second section deals with St Augustine, Tertullian, the general question of daylight visions, and concludes with theological views on the fate of those ‘morts dans l’impieté’. To some extent, Cathelinot echoes a review of Calmet’s book in the Mémoires de Trévoux, which remarked that man’s desire for immortality no doubt feeds his ingenious speculations about ‘things from the other life’. Although Cathelinot’s commentary is not as entertaining as Calmet’s inventory of ghoulish legends and frightening apparitions, it allows for a better understanding of Calmet’s general purpose. Banderier’s exemplary presentation situates the debates at the crossroads of literary and popular culture, and gives an extensive account of the religious context of the work. His introduction is completed by a dossier that includes eighteenth-century reactions to Calmet’s book, and an extensive bibliography. This edition, and the forthcoming reedition of the first part of Calmet’s Traité (the second part was reedited in1986), will be of great interest to scholars interested in religious controversies in the Age of Enlightenment.