Anathemas and Admirations Read online

  Such torment was spared a de Maistre, who, dreading above all things the liberation of the individual, was careful to found authority on bases solid enough to resist the “dissolving” principles promulgated by the Reformation and the Encyclopédie. The better to affirm the notion of order, he will attempt to minimize the share of premeditation and of will in the creation of laws and institutions; he will deny that languages themselves have been invented, while conceding that they may have begun; nonetheless speech precedes man, for, he adds, it is only possible by the Word. The political meaning of such a doctrine is revealed to us by Bonald in the Discours préliminare of his Législation primitive. If the human race has received speech, it has necessarily received with it “the knowledge of moral truth.” Hence there exists a sovereign, fundamental law, as well as an order of duties and truths. “But if man, on the contrary, has made his speech himself, he has made his thought, he has made his law, he has made society, he has made everything and can destroy everything, and it is right that in the same party that asserts that speech is of human institution society is regarded as an arbitrary convention. . . .”

  Theocracy, ideal of reactionary thought is based on both contempt for and fear of man, on the notion that he is too corrupt to deserve freedom, that he does not know how to use it, and that when it is granted him, he uses it against himself, so that in order to remedy his failure, laws and institutions must be made to rest on a transcendent principle, preferably on the authority of the old “terrible God,” always ready to intimidate and discourage revolutions.

  The new theocracy will be haunted by the old: the legislation of Moses is the only one, if we follow de Maistre, to have withstood time, it alone emerges “from the circle drawn around human power”; Bonald, for his part, will see in it “the strongest of all legislations,” since it has produced the most “stable” people, destined to preserve the “deposit of all truths.” If the Jews owe their civil rehabilitation to the Revolution, it devolved upon the Restoration to reconsider their religion and their past, to exalt their sacerdotal civilization, which Voltaire had flouted.

  The Christian seeking the antecedents of his God quite naturally comes up against Jehovah; thus the fate of Israel intrigues him. The interest our two thinkers took in Israel was not, however, exempt from political calculations. This “stable” people, supposedly hostile to the craving for innovation that dominated the age — what a reproach to the fickle nations oriented toward modern ideas! A transient enthusiasm: when de Maistre realized that the Jews in Russia, faithless toward their theocratic tradition, were echoing certain ideologies imported from France, he turned against them, calling them subversive spirits and — the depth of abomination in his eyes — comparing them to Protestants. One dares not imagine the invectives reserved for them had he foreseen the role they were later to play in the movements of social emancipation as much in Russia as in Europe. Too concerned by Moses’ tablets, de Maistre could not anticipate those of Marx. . . . His affinities with the spirit of the Old Testament were so deep that his Catholicism seems, so to speak, Judaic, imbued with that prophetic frenzy of which he found but a faint trace in the gentle mediocrity of the Gospels. Tormented by the demon of vaticination, he sought everywhere signs heralding the return to Unity, the final triumph of . . . origins, the end of the process of degradation inaugurated by Evil and Sin; signs that obsess him to the point where he forgets God for them, or ponders Him to penetrate His manifestations rather than His nature, not Being but its reflections; and these appearances by which God is manifested are called Providence — sightings, ways, artifices of the alarming, the unspeakable divine strategy.

  Because the author of the Soirées constantly invokes “mystery,” because he reverts to it every time his reason comes up against some impassable frontier, readers have insisted, despite the evidence, on his mysticism, whereas the true mystic, far from questioning himself upon mystery, or diminishing it to a problem, or making use of it as a means of explanation, on the contrary settles himself within it from the start, is inseparable from it, and lives inside it as one lives inside a reality, his God not being, like that of the prophets, absorbed by time, traitor to eternity, entirely external and superficial, but indeed that God of our soliloquies and our lacerations, the deep God in Whom our outcries gather.

  De Maistre, evidently, has opted for the God of the prophets — a “sovereign” God it is vain to rail against or be offended by, a churchwarden God uninterested in souls — just as he had opted for an abstract mystery, annex of theology or dialectics, a concept rather than an experience. Indifferent to the encounter of human solitude and divine solitude, much more accessible to the problems of religion than to the dramas of faith, inclined to establish between God and ourselves relations that are juridical rather than confidential, he increasingly emphasizes the laws (does he not speak as a magistrate of the mystery?) and reduces religion to a simple “cement of the political edifice,” to the social function it fulfills — a hybrid synthesis of utilitarian preoccupations and theocratic inflexibility, a baroque mélange of fictions and dogmas. If he preferred the Father to the Son, he will prefer the Pope to either — by which I mean that, practical-minded in spite of everything, he will reserve for their delegate the most brilliant of his flatteries. “He has suffered a Catholic stroke”: this witticism to which he was inspired by Werner’s conversion suits de Maistre as well, for it is not God who has stricken him but a certain form of religion, an institutional expression of the absolute. A similar stroke had also affected Bonald, a thinker chiefly concerned with constructing a system of political theology. In a letter of July 18, 1818, de Maistre wrote to him, “Is it possible, Monsieur, that nature has entertained herself by putting two strings as perfectly in tune as your mind and mine! It is the most rigorous unison, a unique phenomenon!” One regrets this conformity of views with a lusterless and deliberately limited writer — of whom Joubert once remarked, “He’s a squireen of great wit and great knowledge, erecting his first prejudices into doctrines” — but ultimately it sheds a certain light on the direction de Maistre’s thought was taking, as on the discipline he had imposed upon himself in order to avoid risk and subjectivism in matters of faith. Yet from time to time the visionary in him triumphs over the theologian’s scruples and, wresting him from the Pope and the rest, raises him to the perception of eternity: “Occasionally I should like to hurl myself beyond the narrow limits of this world; I would like to anticipate the day of revelations and plunge into the infinite. When the double law of man will be erased and these two centers united, he will be ONE: no longer having a war within, how would he have any idea of duality? But if we consider men, comparing them with each other, what will become of them when, Evil being annihilated, there will be no more passion or personal commitment? What will the Self become when all thoughts will be common, like all desires, when all minds will see each other as they are seen? Who can understand, who can represent to himself, that heavenly Jerusalem, where all the inhabitants, penetrated by the same spirit, will penetrate one another, and each reflect the other’s happiness?”

  “What will the Self become?” This concern is not that of a mystic, for whom the self, precisely, is a nightmare he intends to be rid of by vanishing into God, where he knows the ecstasy of unity, object and end of his quest. De Maistre seems never to have attained unity by sensation, by the leap of ecstasy, by that intoxication in which the contours of being dissolve; for him unity remained the obsession of a theoretician. Attached to that “self” of his, he had difficulty imagining the “heavenly Jerusalem,” the return to a blessed pre-division identify as well as that nostalgia for paradise he must nonetheless have experienced, if only as a limit-state. In order to conceive how such nostalgia can constitute an everyday experience, we must consider a figure by whom de Maistre was strongly influenced, that Claude de Saint-Martin who admitted to possessing only two things or, to use his own words, two “posts”: paradise and the dust. “In 1817 I saw an old man in England named
Best, who had the faculty of quotings to anyone he met, very appropriate passages of Scripture without his ever having known you before. Upon seeing me, he began by saying, ‘He has cast the world behind him.’” In a period of triumphant ideology, when the rehabilitation of man was noisily undertaken, no one was so deeply anchored in the Beyond as Saint-Martin, nor more qualified to preach the Fall: he represented the other face of the eighteenth century. The hymn was his element, indeed he was the hymn: examining his writings, we have the sensation of finding ourselves in the presence of an initiate to whom great secrets were transmitted and who, exceptionally, did not waste his ingenuity upon them. A true mystic, he disliked irony — antireligious by definition, irony never pays; how could this man who had cast the world behind him have resorted to it, who perhaps knew but one pride, that of the Sigh? “All nature is but a concentrated suffering”; “If I had not found God, my mind could never have attached itself to anything on earth”; “I had the happiness to feel and to say that I would believe myself wretched indeed if something prospered for me in the world.” And let us add this vast metaphysical disappointment: “Solomon reports having seen everything under the sun. I could cite someone who would not be lying if he said he had seen something more: that is, everything above the sun; and that someone is very far from glorying in what he has seen.”

  As discreet as they are profound, such notations (taken chiefly from the posthumously published works) cannot win us over to the intolerable lyricism of L’Homme de Désir, where everything is vexing except the title, and where, unfortunately for the reader, Rousseau is present on every page. A curious fate, let us remark in passing, that of Rousseau, acting on others only by his dubious aspects, and whose windiness and jargon have spoiled the style of a Saint-Martin as much as that of a . . . Robespierre. The declamatory tone before, during, and after the Revolution, everything that heralds, reveals, and disqualifies Romanticism, the horrors of poetic prose in general, stem from this paradoxically inspired and unsound mind, responsible for the generalization of bad taste toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. A deadly influence that marked Chateaubriand and Senancour, and that only Joubert managed to escape. Saint-Martin yielded to it all the more readily because his literary instincts were never very certain. As for his ideas, pastured in the vague, they were capable of exasperating Voltaire, who after reading the book Des Erreurs et de la Vérité wrote to d’Alembert, “I do not believe that anything more absurd, more obscure, more insane, and more foolish has ever been printed,” It is irritating that de Maistre should have shown a pronounced taste for this work, though this appeared, it is true, at a time when he was sacrificing both to Rousseauism and to theosophy. But at the very moment he was renouncing one and the other, moving away from illuminism and, in a spasm of ingratitude and ill humor, taxing Freemasonry with “stupidity,” he kept all his sympathy for the philosophe inconnu whose theses on “primitive knowledge,” matter, sacrifice, and salvation by blood he had adopted and developed. Would the very notion of the Fall have assumed such importance for him had it not been vigorously affirmed by Saint-Martin? The notion was certainly banal, even stale, but in rejuvenating it, rethinking it as a free mind disengaged from all orthodoxy, our theosophist conferred upon it that extra authority which only the heterodox can impart to tired religious themes. He did the same for the notion of Providence, which, preached (thanks to him) in the Lodges of the period, acquired a seductiveness it could have received from no Church. It was also one of Saint-Martin’s merits to have given — in the midst of “endless progress” — a religious accent to the malaise of living in time, to the horror of being imprisoned within it. De Maistre would follow him on this path, though with less exaltation and ardor. Time, he tells us, is “something compelled that asks only to end”; “Man is subject to time, and nonetheless he is by nature alien to time, so much so that the notion of eternal happiness, joined to that of time, fatigues and frightens him.”

  In de Maistre’s thought, entrance into eternity is effected not by ecstasy, by the individual leap into the absolute, but by the mediation of an extraordinary event, one likely to seal off becoming — and not by the instantaneous suppression of time achieved in delight, but by the end of time, the denouement of the historical process in its entirety. It is — need we repeat? — as a prophet and not as a mystic that de Maistre envisages our relations with the temporal universe: “There is no longer any religion on earth: the human race cannot remain in this state. Dreadful oracles announce, moreover, that ‘the time has come.’”

  Each epoch tends to think that it is in some sense the last, that with it ends a cycle or all cycles. Today as yesterday, we conceive hell more readily than the golden age, apocalypse than utopia, and the idea of a cosmic catastrophe is as familiar to us as it was to the Buddhists, to the pre-Socratics, or to the Stoics. The vivacity of our terrors keeps us in an unstable equilibrium, favorable to the flowering of the prophetic gift. This is singularly true for the periods following great convulsions. The passion for prophesying then seizes everyone; skeptics and fanatics alike delight in the idea of disaster and give themselves up in concert to the pleasure of having foreseen and trumpeted it abroad. But it is especially the theoreticians of Reaction who exult (tragically, no doubt) over the reality or the imminence of the worst — of the worst that is their raison d’être. “I am dying with Europe,” de Maistre wrote in 1819. Two years earlier, in a letter to de Maistre himself, Bonald had expressed an analogous certitude: “I have no news for you; you are in a position to judge what we are and where we are going. Moreover, for me there are certain things that are absolutely inexplicable, escape from which does not seem to me within human power, insofar as men act by their own lights and under the influence of their wills alone; and in truth, what I see most clearly in all this ... is the Apocalypse.”

  After conceiving the Restoration, both men were disappointed to see that once it had become a reality, it failed to erase the vestiges of the Revolution in men’s minds — a disappointment that they anticipated, perhaps, judging from the eagerness with which they abandoned themselves to it. Whatever the case, the course they assigned to history was quite ignored by history itself: it flouted their projects, it belied their systems. De Maistre’s darkest observations, the ones that reveal a “romantic” complacency, date from the period when his ideas seem to have triumphed. In a letter of September 6, 1817, he writes to his daughter Constance, “. . . an invisible iron arm has always been over me, like a dreadful nightmare that keeps me from running, even from breathing.”

  The rebuffs he suffered from King Victor-Emmanuel doubtless had much to do with these fits of depression, but what disturbed him most was the prospect of new upheavals, the specter of democracy. Unwilling to resign himself to the future forming before his eyes, though he had foreseen it, he hoped — with the incurable optimism of the defeated—that since his ideal was threatened, everything else was, too; that along with the form of civilization he approved of, civilization itself was disappearing: an illusion as frequent as it is inevitable. How to dissociate oneself from a historical reality that is collapsing, especially when it was previously in accord with one’s inmost self? Finding it impossible to endorse the future, one lets oneself be tempted by the notion of decadence, which, without being true or false, at least explains why each period, in attempting to achieve its own individuality, does so only by sacrificing certain very real and irreplaceable earlier values.

  The old regime had to perish: a principle of exhaustion had undermined it long before the Revolution came to finish it off. Should we deduce from this the superiority of the Third Estate? Not at all, for-the bourgeoisie, despite its virtues and its reserves of vitality, by the quality of its tastes marked no “progress” over the fallen nobility. The relays occurring down through history reveal the urgency less than the automatism of change. If in the absolute nothing is dated, in the relative, in the immediate, everything risks being so, for the new constitutes the sol
e criterion, metamorphosis the sole morality. To grasp the meaning of events, let us envisage them as a substance offered to the eye of an utterly disabused observer. The makers of history do not understand it, and those who participate in it to any extent are its dupes or its accomplices. Only the degree of our disillusion guarantees the objectivity of our judgments, but “life” being partiality, error, illusion, and will-to-illusion, is not the passing of objective judgments a passage to the realm of death?

  The Third Estate, in asserting itself, would necessarily be impermeable to elegance, to refinement, to a worthy skepticism, to the manners and the style that defined the old regime. All progress implies a retreat, any rise a fall; but if we collapse as we advance, that collapse is limited to a circumscribed sector. The advent of the bourgeoisie liberated the energies it had accumulated during its forced absence from political life; from this perspective, the change provoked by the Revolution incontestably represents a step forward. The same is true of the appearance on the political stage of the proletariat, destined in its turn to replace a sterile and ankylosed class; but it is just here that a principle of retrogradation functions, since the last-comers cannot safeguard certain values that redeem the vices of the liberal era: the horror of uniformity, the sense of adventure and of risk, the passion for a relaxed tone in intellectual matter the imperialist appetite on the level of the individual, much more than on that of the collectivity. . . .