Humiliation by, and jealousy of, the highborn and well-off haunted him all his life, even into old age. His aversion to noble titles was intense, and the reason for the aversion clear. Without the money needed to compete for a canonry (canonicat) early in his career, he and his father groveled to obtain a miserable benefice. Shortly thereafter, he went north, to Tréguier in Brittany in 1775, beginning there a long association with Bishop Jean-Baptiste de Lubersac that was to end in the diocese of Chartres. Sieyès appears to have been happy there. Though he attended every diocesan chapter meeting, he was never made vicar general of the diocese of Tréguier as he had hoped. More important for his later career was his attendance at the États de Brétagne, a proximate preparation for his maneuvering at the Estates General. Bastid says, “From this moment on, Sieyès embraced the cause of the people. He who disdained history, consecrated two notebooks to a study of the origins of the Estates General.”12 But the great preoccupation and disappointment of his early clerical career was his failure to become chaplain for the king’s aunt, Madame Sophie, in 1778. In a letter to his father, he said, “He [the bishop] is not thoughtful [délicat] enough to help me in any way that does not turn to his own profit....It is the only reason that can have caused him to fail to support me plain and simple, to miss the Madame Sophie appointment, to astonish all who know me.”13
The bishop and the canons of Chartres had different reservations about the man. Lubersac was overheard excluding Sieyès as a potential candidate for an office because he was not a “gentilhomme.” And by 1790, the canons of Chartres wanted him removed as vicar general: “In view of the scandalous principles spread throughout the writings of M. Sieyès, chancellor of this diocese, is it not appropriate to write to the bishop to ask him to withdraw his support from M. Sieyès and to rescind his appointment as vicar general of this diocese?”14 But this was 1790, and Sieyès had a high secular and political profile. In his formative years, religious life was philosophical life and he never envisaged religious activity as anything other than social and political action. One might say that the life and ministry promoted by the Council of Trent mutated into a purposeful living and political engagement, and this did not disqualify someone as a priest in Sieyès’s era. While at Chartres, he participated, naturally, in the ecclesiastical “chamber” in his area, but his political experience of the period came more from membership in the Orléanais provincial assembly.
Interpreting Religion
For Sieyès, religion was one small part, but an important one, of the great world of philosophy, economics, and political thought.15 According to Jacques Guilhaumou, “It is a matter of scattered remarks about religion, unexpected in the Grand cahier métaphysique but which send us to the ‘religious’ manuscripts of Sièyes, that are few in number but quite significant.”16 Sieyès did not ignore the abstractions of metaphysics and the problem of God, keeping over the years the aforementioned Grand cahier. First in line is Condillac and the sensing statue that engendered major discussion of the reality of the self and self-knowledge. Here, Sieyès enthusiastically worked out a philosophical position that owed less to French philosophy than it did to German and Anglo-Scottish empiricism, fashioned in conformity with Sieyès’s long-term understanding of language and rhetoric. At the end of the first half of the Grand cahier, Sieyès limns a set of religious reflections—dating, it would appear, from 1773. On the uselessness and usefulness of religion as such, Sieyès wrote, “Revelation of supernatural dogmas, useless,” and this, for two reasons: (1) the “revelation of truths that are useful in the arts and sciences” belongs to reason; and (2) the “revelation of moral precepts, or ways leading to happiness, founded on the nature of man and of physical laws,” are clear from observation and experience. Religion can be useful as part of an open natural learning experience, but in an informed and ordered society it is not necessary. In such a society, the individual is guided by a combination of self-interest and common interest, and needs no religious sanctions to get him to behave.17 Societies can actually eliminate religion and maintain morality by wholesome teaching about the meaning of human actions. If, however, society does want to make use of the religion in its midst, then that religion should be enlisted in “teaching the means of arriving at natural happiness.” For, on its own, natural religion “has no foundation; everything is false in the exposition and refutation of all that is said to belong to the worship of the divinity.” As far as revealed religion is concerned, Sieyès says that “nothing in all of that can be useful,”18 and that Christianity, in comparison with other religions, “has done the most harm”: “(1) by the dogmas to which people must submit in faith, (2) by its precepts and counsels, (3) because in replacing the natural motives for human actions it has annulled the force [of the actions], (4) by the ignorance of morality that it foments in forbidding the use of reason, (5) by its maintenance of ministers [of religion].”19
The most substantial text for viewing Sieyès’s unique combination of Enlightenment rationalism and vestigial religious sentiment, a formal set of reflections on God, is Sur Dieu ultramètre et sur la fibre religieuse de l’homme (On God beyond Measure and on Man’s Religious Fiber), written, in would appear, around 1780.20 In this work, Sieyès continues to decry “the revelation of useless supernatural dogmas” promoting “natural morality” as the “revelation of moral precepts or the ways leading to happiness.” Only this latter kind of religion is useful because here “man is guided by his own self-interest; in an ordered society, public interest results from individual interests, for which there is no need of religious sanction.” That Sieyès considered ethics to be religion at all is intriguing. He does hold out for calling some good behavior and attitudes “religion.”21 Condemning the standard philosophical and theological presentations of God, he searches for the only type of useful religion, the only God-reality. Although he refuses to promote full-fledged atheism, he sees clericalism as a major obstacle to the functioning of an otherwise healthy society: “Do not tolerate the existence of a clergy, by which I mean a corporation, for every corporation other than the open establishment of a large national alliance [association] is an evil in the social machine.”22
Disarmingly, Sieyès says that he is attacking the opinions of no one. He is only searching, and can make mistakes himself. This being a personal search, he is not trying to become the teacher of all. To the basic question, “Can I come to the knowledge of God without the aid of reason?” he offers sentiment as the alternative to reason and use of cognitive faculties: “Because I cannot understand God, nor come up with any ideas of him, I search to see if one can get there by sentiment.” God is unknowable and no amount of verbal dexterity can make it otherwise: “It is certain and acknowledged that no human idea, supposing even the most exalted, can attain God. You would add if you could infinity to all human faculties and imagining, and you would not have any better idea of God. We have here two different natures. It involves the existence not only of the unknown but of the unknowable.”23
The reality of God is found in the reality of the human being, for the simple reason that there is no reality outside of the world of human beings. Under these conditions, it makes no sense to Sieyès to negate the reality of God: God may be incomprehensible, but he is real.24 Of course, Sieyès would need to push further than this, because a reality in the mind does not necessarily mean a reality outside the mind, although philosophers from Anselm through Descartes to Kant have managed to get to the reality of God from this same starting point. But here Sieyès cleverly sketches a dialogue on the strengths and weaknesses of words to express reality. We note that the Q[uestioner] and the R[esponder] do not always play their roles; it is a mixed-up conversation, cited here at length:
Q. Are you an atheist?
R. What do you mean by that?
Q. In other words, do you believe in an intelligent,