Anathemas and Admirations (11 page)

“If I were assigned to classify human miseries,” writes the young Tocqueville, “I should do so in this order: sickness, death, doubt.” Doubt as scourge: I could never have put forth such an opinion, but I understand it as well as if I had uttered it myself — in another life.

“The end of humanity will come when everyone is like me,” I declared one day in a fit I have no right to identify.

No sooner does the door close behind me than I exclaim, “What perfection in the parody of hell!”

“It is for the gods to come to me, not for me to go to them,” Plotinus answered his disciple Amelius, who had sought to take him to a religious ceremony. In whom in the Christian world could we find a like quality of pride?

You had to let him talk on, talk about everything, and try to isolate the dazzling things that escaped him. It was a meaningless verbal eruption with the histrionic and crazy gesticulations of a saint. To put yourself on his level, you had to divagate in his fashion, to utter sublime and incoherent sentences. A posthumous tête-à-tête, between impassioned ghosts.

At Saint-Séverin, listening to the organist play the
Art of the Fugue
, I kept saying to myself, over and over, “There is the
refutation
of all my anathemas.”

2

Joseph de Maistre

An Essay on Reactionary Thought

A
MONG THINKERS — such as Nietzsche or Saint Paul — with the appetite and the genius for provocation, Joseph de Maistre occupies a place anything but negligible. Raising the most trivial problem to the level of paradox and the dignity of scandal, brandishing anathemas with enthusiastic cruelty, he created an oeuvre rich in enormities, a system that unfailingly seduces and exasperates. The scope and eloquence of his umbrage, the passion he devoted to indefensible causes, his tenacity in legitimizing one injustice after another, and his predilection for the deadly epithet make of him that immoderate disputant who, not deigning to persuade the adversary, crushes him with an adjective straight off. His convictions have an appearance of great firmness: he managed to overpower the solicitations of skepticism by the arrogance of his prejudices, by the dogmatic vehemence of his contempt.

Toward the end of the last century, at the height of the liberal illusion, it was possible to indulge in the luxury of calling him the “prophet of the past,” of regarding him as a relic or an aberrant phenomenon But we — in a somewhat more disabused epoch — know he is one of us precisely to the degree that he was a “monster”; it is in fact by the odious aspect of his “doctrines” that he
lives
for us, that he is our contemporary. Even if he were obsolete, moreover, he would still belong to that family of minds which date
incorruptibly
.

We must envy his luck, his privilege of disconcerting both admirers and detractors, of obliging either party to wonder: did he really produce an apology for the executioner and for war, or merely confine himself to acknowledging their necessity? In his indictment of Port-Royal, did he express what he really thought, or simply yield to a momentary impulse? Where does the theoretician leave off and the partisan begin? Was he a cynic, an enthusiast, or merely an aesthete who strayed into Catholicism?

To sustain the ambiguity, to confound us with convictions as clear-cut as his: this was certainly a tour de force. Inevitably readers began to question the authenticity of his fanaticism, to note the restrictions he himself set upon the brutality of his remarks, and insistently to cite his rare complicities with common sense. We ourselves shall not insult him by supposing him tepid. What attracts us is his pride, his marvelous insolence, his lack of equity, of pro-portion, and occasionally of decency. If he did not constantly irritate us, would we still have the patience to read him? The truths of which he made himself an apostle amount to something only by the impassioned distortion his temperament infected upon them. He transfigured the insipidities of the catechism and imparted to ecclesiastical commonplaces a flavor of extravagance. Religions die for lack of paradox: he knew this, or felt it, and in order to save Christianity, he contrived to inject it with a little more spice, a little more horror. Here he was aided much more by his talent as a writer than by his piety, which, in the opinion of Madame Swetchine, who knew him well, lacked any warmth whatever. Infatuated with corrosive expression, how could he stoop to the flabby phrases of the missal? (A pamphleteer at prayer? Conceivable, though hardly attractive.) Humility, a virtue alien to his nature, he pretends to only when he remembers that he must react
as a Christian
. Some of his exegetes have impugned— not without regret — his sincerity, whereas they ought to have relished the uneasiness he inspired: without his contradictions, without the misunderstandings that he — either by instinct or by design — created about himself, his case would have been dismissed long since, his career been closed, and his work suffered the misfortune of being understood, the worst fate that can befall an author.

A fusion of the acrimonious and the elegant in his genius and in his style evokes the image of an Old Testament prophet
and
of a man of the eighteenth century. In him inspiration and irony are no longer irreconcilable; he allows us to share — by his rages and his repartee — in the encounter of space and intimacy, infinity and the salon. But while he venerated the Bible to the point of admiring indiscriminately its treasures and its trivialities, he thoroughly hated the
Encyclopédie
, though he was attached to it by the form of his intelligence and the quality of his prose.

Imbued with a bracing rage, his books are never boring. In them we see him, paragraph by paragraph immoderately exalt or disparage an idea, an event, an institution adopting toward them the tone of a prosecutor or of a thurifer: “Any Frenchman who is a friend to the Jansenists is a fool or a Jansenist.” “Everything in the French Revolution is miraculously bad,” “The greatest enemy of Europe, a foe to be crushed by all means short of crime, the deadly cancer lodged in all sovereignties and unremittingly feeding on them, the son of pride, the father of anarchy, the universal dissolvent, is Protestantism,” “In the first place, there is nothing so just, so learned, so incorruptible as the great Spanish tribunals, and if, to this general character, we add that of the Catholic priesthood, we shall be convinced, before any experience, that in all the universe there can be nothing more peaceful, more circumspect, more humane by nature than the tribunal of the Inquisition.”

Ignorant of the practice of excess, we could learn it from de Maistre, who is as likely to compromise what he loves as what he loathes. A hoard of panegyrics, an avalanche of dithyrambic arguments, his book
Du Pape
somewhat disconcerted the Sovereign Pontiff, who realized the danger of such an apology. There is only one way to praise: to inspire fear in the figure being extolled, to compel him in fear and trembling to hide himself far away from the statue being erected, to constrain him by generous hyperbole to measure his mediocrity and suffer from it. What is an argument for the defense that neither torments nor troubles — what is a eulogy that fails to kill? Every apology should be a murder by enthusiasm.