Bernard Groethuysen: Church

Bernard Groethuysen was French literary historian, translator and writer. Explore interesting quotes on church.
Bernard Groethuysen: 40   quotes 0   likes

“The bourgeois … considered the philosophes to be his true guides, which did not prevent him from taking good care not to adopt their teachings once he realized they might be damaging to the interests of his class. … He seemed quite disposed to make his peace with the Church, now that he was sure of being sufficiently emancipated to be able to live his life as he chose. To go farther, he feared, would to to act contrary to the interests of his class, for disbelief, by spreading among the people, might eventually endanger the principles of the social order which the bourgeoisie needed to establish its domination.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 46

Life , People , Fear , Peace

“Was he a sinner? Possibly. But could his class, the bourgeoisie, be condemned as a whole? The Church did not realize how secure he felt when it spoke to him of damnation. Would God send a whole class to hell, the class of the respectable? Who, then, would be in heaven? The common people? That would be hard to imagine!”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 25

God , People , Imagination , Hell

“The Church must preach to the bourgeois on his duties, must reveal to him values that were more especially his own, must set the seal of divine approval on his efforts, on his work; and, satisfied with himself, he would be no less so with God and with his Church. … The Church must not present him with far-ranging concepts or try to raise him out of his own sphere but, rather, talk to him of the daily round, of the minute concerns of life, and tell him that God required no more of him. That was what the Jesuits realized very clearly.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 160-162

Life , God , Effort

“The Church, sensing that the middle class was slipping out of its grasp, certainly tried to create patterns of living which would enable the bourgeois to remain a bourgeois as well as a Christian; that is, to carry out his economic and social functions while preserving the features of a son of the Church. But it never succeeded in hallowing the aspirations of the new middle class by giving them a religious basis.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 48

Sense

“In its glorification of the spirit of order, the Church seemed to be giving its sanction to the type of bourgeois who was concerned to fulfill his duties scrupulously and content to remain within his own sphere. But this bourgeois, whom modern eighteenth-century society certainly could not dispense with, was far from summing up in himself the whole spirit of his class. There was another type of bourgeois who had nothing about him of a monk transplanted into an office. He was energetic, pushing, by no means content to confine himself to a life rhythmically punctuated by work; rather, he was concerned to grow, to achieve power and wealth through his own effort. But what would the Church say of this bourgeois who was to become the monarch of the modern age? It did not like him; it could not like him; the impulse that moved him was too contrary to its own. He seemed intent on flouting God; trusting in his own strength, he seemed to want to organize his life independently of the plans of Divine Providence.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 177

Life , God , Age , Effort

“The Church would have liked to turn to each of those thousand unbelievers separately, to show him that he was wrong, that he had allowed himself to be led astray by his passions, that he had everything to fear in the next life, and so forth. But it was not he, really, who had become disbelieving, it was his whole class, and it was his class consciousness which replied for him when he was addressed individually.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 25

Life , Fear , Passion