ROUSSEAU Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)

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ROUSSEAU Jean-Jacques (1712-1778)
L.A.S. "JJRousseau", Motiers 22 July 1764, to Sidoine SÉGUIER de SAINT-BRISSON; 3 pages in-4, address with red wax stamp (crushed seal; burnished paper, letter split in the folds, trace of repair with scotch tape). Long letter of advice to a young exalted disciple, and on religion. [The Marquis de Saint-Brisson (1738-1773) had abandoned the seminary for the military career, and also devoted himself to literature. A distraught admirer of Rousseau, he visited him in Montmorency in 1761: "The only Frenchman who seemed to come to see me out of taste was a young officer of the Limousin regiment," Rousseau wrote in Confessions. Seeing himself as the disciple of Jean-Jacques, he wanted, in 1764, to leave the army for letters, and quarreled with his devout mother, unable to wrest her from the influence of the priests, going so far as to break with the Church, which Rousseau dissuaded him from doing in this letter, while calming this exalted young man]. "I am afraid, Sir, that you are going a bit too fast in your projects, and when there is no hurry, you must proportion the maturity of the deliberations to the importance of the resolutions. Why leave so abruptly the state you had embraced when you could at leisure arrange for another, if one state can be called the kind of life you have chosen for yourself, and from which you will perhaps be rejected as soon as the first one? What would you risk by putting a little less impetuosity into your steps and taking advantage of this delay to confirm your resolutions by a more careful study of yourself? I pity you, and that is why I cannot approve of you, since you have wanted to isolate yourself at the moment when it is least convenient for you. If you think you have followed my principles, you are mistaken; you have followed the impetuosity of your age; a step of such brilliance is surely worthy of being weighed carefully before coming to execution. ...] The natural effect of this conduct has been to confuse you with your mother. ...] What is the use of frightening a Mother's conscience by showing her without necessity principles different from her own? It was necessary [...] to keep these feelings within you for the rule of your conduct, and their first effect should be to make you endure with patience the harassments of your Priests and not to change these harassments into persecutions by wanting to shake the yoke of the Religion in which you were born. I think so little like you on this article that, although the Protestant clergy is waging open war on me and I am far from thinking like them on all points, I remain sincerely united to the communion of our Church, determined to live and die there if it depends on me: for it is very consoling for an afflicted believer to remain in community of worship with his brethren and to serve God together with them. I will tell you more: I declare to you that if I am born a Catholic I will remain a good Catholic, knowing full well that your Church puts a very salutary brake on the deviations of human reason, which finds neither bottom nor bank when it wants to probe the abyss of things, and I am so convinced of the usefulness of this brake that I have imposed a similar one on myself by prescribing for the rest of my life rules of faith from which I no longer allow myself to escape. So I swear to you that I have been quiet only since that time, convinced that without this precaution I would not have had the summer of my life. He speaks to her "with an outpouring of heart and as a father speaks to his child. I am sorry for your quarrel with your mother. In my misfortunes I have the consolation of believing that my writings can only do good [...] I know that if they do harm it is only for lack of being heard. [...] a son who is at odds with his mother is always wrong. Of all the natural feelings the least altered among us is maternal affection. Mothers' rights are the most sacred right I know. Under no circumstances can it be violated without a crime. Raccomodize with yours: at whatever cost appease her: be sure that her heart will be reopened to you if yours brings you back to her", even if it means "making the sacrifice of a few useless opinions, or at least hiding them. ...] There are not two morals. That of Christianity and that of Philosophy are the same. Both impose the same duty on you here: you can fulfill it, you must fulfill it, reason, honor, your interest, everything wants it, and I demand it in order to respond to the sentiments you honor me with. If you do so, count on my friendship, on my esteem, on my care [...] If you do not do so, you have only a bad head or your heart is leading you badly, and I want to maintain relations only with people whose heads and hearts are healthy".
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