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TILLEMONT, SEBASTIEN-LENAIN-DE. 



TILLEMONT, SEBASTIEN-LENAIN-DE. 



him tho slightest degree of filial respect. Having been created lord of 

 Sophene and Gordyene, he refused to surrender the treasures of 

 Sophene to Pompey, who suspected him of being in secret communi- 

 cation with Pkraates, the king of the Parthians, whose daughter he 

 had married. Tigraues also became suspected of having formed a 

 plan for seizing or putting to death his father, and accordingly he was 

 arrested by order of Pompey, who sent him to Home. He figured in 

 the triumph of Pompey. 



Appian (' De Bello Mithrid.,' c. 105 and 117) states that Tigranes 

 was afterwards put to death in his prison. [TIGRANES.] 



TILLEMONT, SEBASTIEN-LENAIN-DE, an historical writer of 

 considerable note, was born at Paris on the 30th of November 1637. 

 1 1 e was the son of Jean Lenaiu, master of the requests, and his wife 

 Marie le Ragois. His excellence of character was manifested very 

 early; and even as a child he always abstained from those mischievous 

 pranks in which children commonly indulge. When between nine and 

 ten years of age he was placed under the charge of the members of the 

 religious society then established in the vacant abbey of Port Royal, 

 and under these instructors he devoted himself to the exercises of 

 learning and piety. His favourite author, while at school, was Livy ; 

 a preference indicative of the bias of his mind to historical studies. 

 He studied logic and ecclesiastical history under Nicole ; and his 

 questions on the latter subject at once evinced the earnestness with 

 which be pursued it, and put the knowledge of his instructor to a 

 severe test. He studied the theology of Estius, from which, when 

 about eighteen years of age, he turned with much satisfaction to the 

 Btudy of the Scriptures themselves, and of the Fathers ; and while 

 thus engaged he began to collect the historical notices of the Apostles 

 and Apostolical Fathers, and to arrange them after the plan of Usher's 

 ' Annales.' 



The tenderness of his conscience, and the strictness of his notions of 

 duty, kept him for some time undetermined as to the choice of a pro- 

 fession. At the age of twenty-three he entered the Episcopal seminary 

 of Beauvais, where he was received with such respect from his reputa- 

 tion for historical knowledge, that fearing it might be a snare to 

 his humility, he contemplated leaving it, but was persuaded to remain 

 by Isaac de Sacy, one of the members of the Society of Port Royal, 

 whom he had chosen for his spiritual guide. He remained three or 

 four years iu the seminary of Beauvais, and then spent five or six 

 with Godefroi Hermant, canon of that city. He was much respected 

 and beloved by the bishop of Beauvais, Choart de Buzanval, and 

 fearing still" that this estimation would make him vain, he suddenly 

 left the place and returned to Paris, where he remained two years 

 with his intimate friend and school-fellow at Port Royal, Thomas du 

 Fosse ; but not finding in Paris that retirement which he desired, he 

 withdrew to St. Lambert, a country parish in the neighbourhood of 

 that city. 



In September 1672, at the mature age of thirty-five, he became sub- 

 deacon, and fifteen months after deacon. The following extract from 

 a letter addressed to his brother (Pierre Lenain, then or afterwards 

 subprior of La Trappe) evinces at once his pirty and his humility. 

 After stating that it was at the desire of Isaac de Sacy, his friend and 

 guide, that he had become subdeacon and was about to take on him 

 the deaconship, he goes on, " I assure you, my dearest brother, that it 

 is with great agitation and fear that I have resolved to comply with 

 his wish, for I feel that I am far from those dispositions which I 

 myself see to be necessary for entering upon this office ; and above all, 

 I am obliged to confess that I have profited little from the grace 

 which I might have received from the order and duties of the sub- 

 deaconship. But on the other hand I could not resist one whom I 

 believe I ought to obey in everything, and who, I am well aware, has 

 the greatest love for me. I beg of you then, my dearest brother, to 

 pray to God for me, and to ask him either to cause M. de Sacy to see 

 things in a different light, or to give to me such dispositions that the 

 advice of my friend may be for my salvation, and not for my con- 

 demnation." 



In 1676 he received priest's orders, at the further persuasion of De 

 Sacy, who contemplated making him his successor in the office of 

 spiritual director of the Bernardino nuns, now re-established in their 

 original seat, the abbey of Port Royal, to the immediate neighbour- 

 hood of which establishment Tillemont removed. He was however, 

 in 1679, obliged to remove, and he took up his residence at the estate 

 of Tillemont, a short distance from Paris, near Vincennes, which 

 belonged to his family, and from which he took his name. In 1681 he 

 visited Flanders and Holland; and in 1682 undertook the charge of 

 the parish of St. Lambert, where he had formerly resided, but soon 

 gave it up at the desire of his father, to whom he ever paid the 

 greatest respect and obedience. 



Having prepared the first volume of his great work on ecclesiastical 

 history, he was about to publish it when it was stopped by the censor, 

 under whose notice, as a work connected with theology, it had to pass, 



and who raised some objections of the most frivolous character. 



Tillemont refused to alter the parts specified, deeming them not justly 



within the censor's province ; and chose rather to suppress the work, 



upon which however he continued to labour diligently, though without 



any immediate intention of publishing it. 



This exercise of the censorship led to an alteration of his plan : he 



determined to separate from the rest of his work the history of the 



iioman emperors and other princes whose actions were interwoven 

 with the affairs of the Christian church, and to publish it separately : 

 ;he first volume of this work, which, as not being theological, was 

 exempt from the censorship, appeared in 1690, and was received with 

 jeneral approbation. It excited a desire for the appearance of his 

 Jhurch history, and the chancellor Boucherat, in order to remove the 

 obstacle to its publication, appointed a new censor. Thus encouraged, 

 ne brought out the first volume in 1693, under the title of 'Mdmoires 

 pour servir ti 1'Hiatoire Ecclesiastique des Six Premiers Siecles.' 

 A note to this volume, on the question whether Jesus Christ cele- 

 orated the Passover the evening before his death, in which he 

 examined the views of Bernard Lami, a learned priest of the Oratory, 

 on that question, involved him in a controversy with that writer, who 

 read Tillemont's note before publication, and examined the arguments 

 contained in it in a subsequent work of his own. Tillemont in con- 

 sequence addressed to Lami a letter, which is printed at the close of 

 the second volume of his ' Mdmoires,' and ia remarkable for its spirit 

 of modesty and meekness. Lami replied, but Tillemont declined to 

 continue the discussion, thinking he had said enough to enable those 

 interested in the question to form a judgment. Faydit de Riom, an 

 ecclesiastic whom the Congregation of the Oratory had expelled from 

 bheir body, a man of considerable talent, but of jealous disposition, 

 published at Bale, in 1695, the first number (28 pp. 4to.) of a work, to 

 be continued every fortnight, entitled ' Me"moires contre les Memoires 

 de M. Tillemont.' It contained several violent and unjust strictures 

 on the work, to which Tillemont did not reply, though some of his 

 friends with needless apprehension procured the stopping of Faydit's 

 work, which never proceeded beyond the first number. Faydit 

 repeated his attack in a subsequent work, but it produced little 

 effect. 



The remainder of Tillemont's life was passed in the quiet pursuit of 

 bis studies. He was attacked by a slight cough at the end of Lent, 

 1697, and in the course of the summer was seized with fainting, 

 owing to a sudden chill while hearing mass in the chapel of Notre 

 Dame des Anges : toward the end of September his illness increased 

 go as to excite the anxiety of his friends. He consequently removed 

 to Paris for the sake of medical advice ; and there, after an illness 

 which rendered his piety and submissiveness to the divine will more 

 conspicuous, he breathed his last, on Wednesday, 10th January 1698, 

 aged sixty years. He was buried in the abbey of Port Royal, in 

 which the Bernardino or Cistertian nuns, to whom the abbey had 

 originally belonged, were now again established. 



The works by which Tillemont is known are, his 'Histoire des 

 Empereurs,' and his ' Memoires pour servir b, 1'Histoire Eccle'siastique.' 

 The first was published in 6 vols. 4to; the first four during the 

 author's life, at intervals from 1690 to 1697 : the remaining two after 

 his death, in 1701 and 1738. The earlier volumes were reprinted 

 at Brussels in 12mo, in 1707, et seq., and a new edition appeared at 

 Paris, in 4to, in 1720-23, with the author's latest corrections. He 

 explains his plan in the ' Avertissemcnt' to the first volume: his 

 intention was to illustrate the history of the Church for the first six 

 centuries ; but instead of commencing with the first persecutor, Nero, 

 he goes back to Augustus, whose edict occasioned the journey of 

 Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, and thus determined the place of our 

 Lord's nativity. The history ends with the Byzantine emperor 

 Auastasius (A.D. 518). The style is unpretending, and consists for the 

 most part of a translation of the original writers with slight modifica- 

 tions, and with such additions (marked by brackets) as were needed to 

 form the whole into one continuous narrative, or such reflections as 

 the author deemed requisite to correct the false morality of heathen 

 writers. To each volume are appended notes relating to difficulties of 

 history or chronology which require discussion of a kind or extent 

 unsuited for insertion iu the body of the work. " There is nothing," 

 says Dupin, " which has escaped the exactness of M. Tillemont ; and 

 there is nothing obscure or intricate which his criticism has not 

 cleared up or disentangled." 



The 'Memoires,' &c., extend to 16 vols. 4to, of which the first 

 appeared in 1693; three volumes more during the author's lifetime, in 

 1694-5-6 ; and the fifth was in the press at the time of his death. 

 These five volumes came to a second edition in 1701-2, and were 

 followed in 1702-11 by the remaining eleven, which the author had 

 Jteft in manuscript. This great work is on the same plan as the former, 

 being composed of translations from the original writers, connected by 

 paragraphs or sentences in brackets. Dupin characterises it as being 

 not a continuous and general history of the Church, but an assemblage 

 of particular histories of saints, persecutions, and heresies, a description 

 accordant with the modest title of the work, 'Me'moires pour servir a 

 I'Histoire," &c. The author concerns himself chiefly with facts, with- 

 out entering into questions of doctrine and discipline ; and notices not 

 all the saints in the calendar, but only those of whom there are some 

 ancient and authentic records. Each volume has notes of similar 

 character to those given in ' L'Histoire des Empereurs.' 



Tillemont supplied materials for several works published by others, 

 as for the Life of St. Louie, begun by De Sacy and finished and pub- 

 lished by La Chaise ; for the lives of St. Athanasius and St. Basil, by 

 Godefroi Hermant; of Tertullian and Origen, by Du Fosse", under the 

 name of La Mothe, &c. 



( Vie de M. Lemain de Tillemont, by his friend Trouchay, afterwards 



