Bernard Groethuysen: Quotes about God

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

“In the bourgeois' world, … if some respect was shown to God, it was on condition that he in turn would respect the general laws governing the universe and refrain from acting contrary to the plans of the middle class, who used their reason and demanded their share in the governance of the world.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 15

God , World , Law , Universe

“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

“Since the God of the Christians blessed and rewarded toil, there was nothing, surely, to prevent him from approving the effort of the bourgeois. True, the bourgeois' wealth was often far from being the product of his own labor, but he always liked be told that it was, and if he was to be made a Christian it was necessary to insist on this point.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 171

God , Effort , Wealth

“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 worldly-minded … were unable to see why God should not give men their due if men, on their part, fulfilled their obligations. … A new man had emerged. He was demanding his rights; he was conscious of his importance. As he was before men, so would he be before God. What he had acquired materially or morally was his own, his very own, and neither king nor God might dispute his possession with him. He loved his God as he loved his king, but on condition that both respected his rights.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 89

Love , Men , God , Parting

““They want to find an imaginary mean between cupidity and charity,” says Arnaud, “as though our love could end and rest in any object other than God, this being charity, or in the creature, this being cupidity.” In this “imaginary mean” the new man had now established himself, and spent the greater part of his life; it was his spiritual homeland on earth. There he created habits for himself and made laws; he felt at ease and found ways of being virtuous and useful to his neighbors. God would not be angry with him for acting according to his own rules. Thus the worldly man was able to live perfectly well without thinking of a God who had formerly wanted everything done for his sake alone.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 121-122

Love , Life , God , Law

“Nothing, then, would prevent him henceforth from living his life, a purely secular life, according to his nature and his habits, without having to ask himself at every moment whether what he had done was displeasing to God or not. And since he was no longer the sinner whose life, as soon as he acted by his own powers, was but sin, he would be able to enumerate separately the sins which he had committed on a particular occasion.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 120

Life , God , Nature

“The new man, wishing to enjoy his independence, needed a God with limited powers, a God whose authority was regulated by fundamental laws, so that the sinner, when summoned before the throne of the last judgment, might plead his cause, documents in hand.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 90

God , Law

“We might say that before the French demanded a charter from their sovereign, French Catholics had demanded one of their God. It was understood that God must be just, that he had certain obligations toward men, and that certain reciprocal relations had to be established between creature and Creator.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 87-88

Men , God

“Such, then, was the God of the worldly-minded, who would be grateful that he had organized the things of this world so that everything was in accordance with laws which they could understand, and that he did not interfere in their decisions when, as prudent and reasonable men, they wished to order their own destinies.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 93

Men , God , World , Law

“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

““Scripture and the Fathers recognize only two principles of all human actions,” says Bishop Colbert, “charity, the principle of all good actions; cupidity, the principle of all bad ones. The Jesuits, on the contrary, introduce a host of principles of human actions.” There would thus be actions which were neither good nor evil, “an innumerable multitude of indifferent actions, of no consequence either for good or for ill.”… Thus man would have constituted for himself a sphere where there was no longer any question between himself and God either of sin or of virtue…. God, at the last judgment, would not ask him to account for actions which were unrelated to his salvation and which did not concern the divinity. In that area, the Christian would enjoy a legitimate freedom, without fear of constantly sinning; he would be a sinner only when the occasion of sin arose, in specific cases. The rest of the time he would live between heaven and hell, between charity and concupiscence.”

Bernard Groethuysen

Source: The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), pp. 119-120

God , Fear , Hell , Question