English 287:  Great Books

Molière's Tartuffe as a satire on religious fanaticism

Molière's play repeatedly ran into difficulties with the religious censorship. It was only through the direct intervention of his patron, King Louis XIV himself, that he was able to obtain permission for it to be performed. But even so, he had to put it through several revisions, and orchestrate a campaign of pamphlets in its defense.  In his introduction to his translation of the play, Richard Wilbur describes how Molière took the tack of insisting that the target of the play's satire is Tartuffe himself, and that Tartuffe is obviously not an example of religious faith but an example of a religious hypocrite.

• Wilbur seems to me to miss the point in arguing pointing out (in rejoinder to Molière) that Tartuffe is not an instance of religious hypocrisy, since he (Wilbur) proceeds from the premise that that concept can properly apply only to people who are religious but do not act in accordance with their sincere professions.  This seems to amount to a quibble over terminology.  If Wilbur doesn't want to accept Molière's term for what he is pointing to, then we could just as well substitute the term "religious con man" or "religious fraud."  We don't use the latter term, for example, to refer to people who are religious and who also commit fraud, but to designate people who commit fraud under cover of religion - people who use an insincere appeal to religion to commit fraud.  That is clearly what Molière was getting at in characterizing the villain of his play.

But there is something disingenuous about Molière's line of defense that Wilbur doesn't get at, and that should lead us to appreciate that, in an important respect, some of Molière's fervent religious critics had a point.  For the play's comedy does not focus exclusively on Tartuffe.  The most savage butt of the play's comedy is Tartuffe's primary victim, Orgon.  Orgon is, undeniably, an example of a certain kind of traditional Christian.  He is not, of course, the only kind of Christian, nor the only kind of traditional Christian.  Audiences then (and students who have been paying attention in our class) will recognize that Orgon's contempt for reason and for the possibility of good will and good sense on the part of his dependents (his "subjects," the members of his household) is connected with his relish for something that looks like at least a caricature of the Augustinian theory of the effect of Original Sin on human nature.

Orgon is eager to believe in Tartuffe for a variety of reasons, but one of these is that the religion Tartuffe is peddling is a version of Christianity that Molière regards as insane. According to this picture, mankind is totally depraved as a result of Original Sin, and therefore has to be subjected, for its own good, to dictatorial control by divinely appointed authorities (good puritan fathers [heads of households], for example).

Orgon's outlook is recognizably a parody of St. Augustine's authoritarian and misanthropic version of Christianity, which succeeded in imposing itself as orthodoxy towards the end of the Roman empire, and to which the Protestant Reformers Luther and Calvin wanted to return (in the [arguably mistaken] belief that it represented "original" Christianity). In the course of the middle ages, Catholicism moderated this position into the much more tempered picture expounded by St. Thomas Aquinas (d 1274), in the spirit of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). This more "optimistic" picture held that some remnant of the virtue and dignity with which God had originally created man survived the Fall (i.e., was not completely corrupted by Original Sin), so that human beings were able to contribute at least something, by their own efforts, to their salvation, and that some further legacy of Original Sin remained could be washed away in the sacrament of baptism. Individual sin thereafter might be inevitable, but God provided the sacraments of communion and penance for these to be effectively dealt with as well. This is the view the Catholic Church reaffirmed against the Protestants in the Council of Trent (1545-63). Molière and his patron King Louis XIV shared this view. Meanwhile, the Jansenists (a movement within 17^th-century Catholicism often accused of "Protestant tendencies") shared the general attitude of religious Puritanism towards the theater and court life as lax and dissolute.

The character Clèante in Tartuffe defends the King's view as reasonable, arguing that God expects us to enjoy our earthly existence as one of his gifts, not to curse it and spend our life neurotically mortifying the flesh.  Orgon, however, is in the grip of mid-life resentment of the social pleasures enjoyed by his children, and eagerly buys into Tartuffe's mindlessly disciplinary rigor (based on the "extremist" [Augustinian] theory of Original Sin).  He dismisses appeals to reason and common sense as signs of defective intensity of faith.  This is how he rationalizes his spiteful determination to boss his family into abject submission.  This combination of rigorism, elevation of "pure faith" (the sheer will to believe), and towards social and bodily pleasure condemns natural human faculties (the senses, desire, will, reason) as hopelessly corrupt. Against this, Molière maintains that true religion requires respect for these.  The play is thus a way-station on the road to (perhaps we should even say "within") the Enlightenment.

In Molière's day, there was a bitter conflict going on within French Catholicism between the Jesuits and the Jansenists.  One thing, however, that both groups were united in was the conviction that Molière's Tartuffe was irreligious and deserved to be repressed.  The reason is not hard to seek.  The villain Tartuffe comes across as embodying characteristic features that each party, Jansenist and Jesuit, were passionate in attributing the other.

The Jesuits were relentless in their accusation that Jansenist Augustinianism was a form of Protestant Puritanism in disguise, and that their view of human nature was a slander upon God's favorite creature.

The Jansenists were adamant in the picture of the Jesuits as consummate casuists -- artful abusers of reason, skilled in fallaciously reconciling the commands of God with the demands of worldly interest.  (The most skillful and damaging exponent of this view of the Jesuits was the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, in his Provencial Letters.)

Additional resources: 

• xrefer article on casuistry;
• Mortimer Adler on casuistry
• Catholic Encyclopedia article on casuistry
• Robert Boyle's Casuistry Primer
• Albert Johnson and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry:  A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1990).

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

   Contents copyright © 2002 by Lyman A. Baker. 

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  This page last updated 07 October 2002 .