Note 309 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with his friends to his and his brother’s estate in Brittany, and began his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his determination to place himself “as a writer outside of the Church and Catholicism,” declaring that “outside of Catholicism, outside faith, there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place myself (je me renferme) in this sphere.”309 Still he claimed to be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine “fidelity in obedience with liberty in science.”310 In January of 1834, however, he had ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d’un Croyant, published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned as infidelity.