LACORDAIRE, HENRI-DOMINIQUE. — Eminent Dominican orator and apologist, b. at Reccy-sur-Ource (Côte d’Or) on 12 May 1822, d. at Sorèze on 21 Nov. 1862. Orphaned of his father at the age of four, he was educated by his mother at Dijon, where he received an excellent linguistic training in the local lycée. In contact with the Voltairian milieu, he had already lost his faith at the beginning of his legal studies (1819). In Paris, whither he had gone to complete the usual training of a lawyer, he became acutely aware of the social problems then agitating the age, and found their solution only in the Christian faith, which he embraced anew with fervour and enthusiasm. Having entered the Seminary of Issy (1824), from which he passed to that of Saint-Sulpice (1826), he was ordained priest on 22 Sept. 1827. Chaplain to the Visitation Convent in Paris (1828) and to the Lycée Henri IV (1829), he came into contact with F. de Lamennais and became one of the principal editors of L’Avenir.
After the condemnation of the newspaper in 1832, Lacordaire was the first to submit to the Pope, and when Lamennais manifested his rebellion in the notorious pamphlet Paroles d’un croyant and in other writings, he refuted his errors in the Considerations sur le système philosophique de M. de Lamennais (Paris 1834) and in the Lettre sur le Saint-Siège (ibid. 1837).
This trial refined Lacordaire’s spirit. Devoting himself with greater zeal to the interior life, he began that intellectual apostolate which was to characterize his entire career. The religious conferences he delivered in the chapel of the Collège Stanislas (1834) met with great success, and the following year the Archbishop of Paris, Quélen, invited him to preach during Lent in the pulpit of Notre-Dame. It was a triumph, which was repeated in 1836, the year in which the now famous orator decided to enter the Dominican Order. Before carrying out this plan, he published the Mémoire pour le rétablissement en France de l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs (Paris 1839). Having gone to Rome, he received the religious habit at Santa Maria sopra Minerva (9 Apr. 1839), and, after completing his novitiate at the Convent of La Quercia (Viterbo), he made his profession on 12 Apr. 1840. On the same day, his Vie de Saint Dominique (Paris 1840) appeared, a work which created around the adamantine figure of the Saint and the work of his Order an aura of sympathy and admiration.
Returning to France, he inaugurated the golden period of his activity (1841–43): he resumed his conferences at Notre-Dame, delivered acclaimed courses of preaching in the principal cities (Bordeaux, Nancy, Grenoble, Lyon, Strasbourg, Toulon, Toulouse), founded convents and houses of study, and contributed to the full establishment of the French Dominican Province (1850), of which he was named the first superior. This province was divided in 1858, with the exception of that of Lyon. Lacordaire held views differing from those of Fr Danzas and Fr Jandel, his former pupil who had become Master General of the Order. He also founded the Third Order of Teaching Brothers (1854), to which he devoted tireless energy and which always remained his favourite work. It was in the college of this institute, opened at Sorèze (Tarn), that Lacordaire spent his final years, wisely making himself small with the little ones. On 2 Feb. 1860 he was admitted to the Académie Française: once again a stir was made around this man, who, broken by illness and refined by suffering, unmindful of the glory of his time, aspired to that of eternity.
In his last years he wrote: Lettres à un jeune homme sur la vie chrétienne (Paris 1858): an incomplete work, composed at the request of Perreyve, which is a soaring hymn to Christ, of whom the author shows he had felt the irresistible fascination, which he infused into his readers; Vie de sainte Madeleine (ibid. 1860): a work written for the restoration of the sacred sites of Provence, in which a lack of critical sense is compensated by a brilliant style, beneath which vibrate accents of moving piety; De la liberté de l’Église et d’Italie (ibid. 1860); Testament du père Lacordaire (ed. by de Montalembert, ibid. 1870): the memoirs dictated in his last illness, concerning the events of the restoration of the Order in France. Numerous panegyrics, funeral orations, occasional discourses published by the author himself, and many letters and fragments printed posthumously also remain. His complete works (9 vols.) were published several times; his individual works have been translated into almost every language.
Lacordaire’s fame is bound up with his conferences, which unfolded with a strictly logical thread, taking their impetus from the historical and concrete fact of the Church; they may be divided into three groups. Those of 1835–36 form the prologue, in which the Church is presented as the sole authority that can lead man to truth and to God (conferences 1–7); immediately afterwards the hearer is introduced to a consideration of the Church’s doctrine in general, in its nature and in its sources (conferences 8–13). Those of 1843–46 expound the effects of Catholic doctrine on the spirit (conferences 14–20), on the soul (conferences 21–28), and on society (conferences 29–36); suddenly the audience is transported to contemplate the living figure of Christ, the author of the Church (conferences 37–41). Those of 1848–51 bring the soul into contact with the massive block of the Church’s dogma: God (conferences 45–52), man’s relationship with God (conferences 53–59), the Fall and its reparation (conferences 60–66), the providential economy of Redemption (conferences 67–73). The conferences of Toulouse (1854) stand somewhat apart, dealing with morality in its relationship to the supernatural.
The method introduced by Lacordaire in his apologetics was in part new. He himself acknowledged (conference 27) that he had changed his tactics; instead of ascending from the base, he had started from the summit; he did not dig into the foundations of the pyramid, but, considering its apex, he descended slowly to the hidden part that supports the entire edifice. The Apostles saw the Head and believed in the still undeveloped body of the Church; Lacordaire saw the body and induced the men of his time to believe in the invisible Head of the Church. The most beautiful and deeply felt conferences are precisely those that treat of Jesus. The figure of Christ, who in 1823 had overwhelmed the young Voltairian, conquered his ardent spirit, grew and towered in the pen and word of this convert, whose life, like that of St Paul, resolved itself into a lyrical song to the Divine Conqueror. To his song Chateaubriand’s romanticism gave form and splendour, the vigour and strength of St Augustine and St Thomas, colour and life his own genius and the character of his native Burgundy. If his eloquence is not as learned and profound as that of Bossuet and Bourdaloue (nor free from imprecision), it possesses a more human accent, more spontaneous movements, a crystalline transparency of soul, which enters into a lively and personal dialogue, heart to heart, with his audience, who became his interlocutors. Lacordaire’s word, while always keeping our reason pure, touched life, that then tumultuous life in the souls of his hearers, and with a stroke of the wing brought them close to the sources of the Gospel. The men of Romanticism, stirred by the religious and social upheaval provoked by the Revolution, understood, through the winged and imaginative word of a poet turned apostle, that the religion of Christ was not a straitjacket, but a substantial viaticum for the rugged path of life.
Posterity has been divided in its judgment of Lacordaire’s political stance (the phrase “a repentant Christian and an unrepentant liberal” is well known); some of his doctrinal assertions have been deemed questionable, yet no one has ever doubted the nobility of his intentions, and all have admired the rectitude of his character and the austerity of his life.