Anathemas and Admirations (14 page)

No clue as to the nature of this prevarication. We shall know little more about it when we are told that it is imputable to an Original Sin of the second order. Is it not too convenient, in order to whitewash Providence, to ascribe to the creature alone the anomalies which abound on earth? If man is degraded in principle, his degradation, like that of the savage, cannot have begun with a sin committed at a given moment — by a prevarication invented, by and large, to consolidate a system and sustain a cause, both highly dubious.

The doctrine of the Fall makes a powerful appeal to reactionaries of whatever stripe; the most hardened and the most lucid among them know, moreover, what recourse it offers against the glamour of revolutionary optimism: does it not postulate the invariability of human nature, irremediably doomed to corruption and collapse? Consequently there is no way out, no solution to the conflicts that desolate societies nor any possibility of a radical change that might modify their structure: history, identical time, context for the monotonous process of our degradation! Invariably the reactionary, that conservative who has dropped the mask, will borrow the worst of traditional wisdom, and the most profound: the conception of the irreparable, the static vision of the world. All wisdom and a fortiori all metaphysics are reactionary, as becomes any form of thought that, seeking constants, emancipates itself from the superstition of the diverse and the possible. Contradiction in terms: a revolutionary sage, or a revolutionary metaphysician. At a certain degree of attachment and clear-sightedness, history has no further value, man himself ceases to count: to break with appearances is to vanquish action and the illusions deriving from it. When you stress the essential misery of beings, you do not stop at the one that results from social inequalities, nor do you strive to remedy them. (Can we imagine a revolution drawing its slogans from Pascal?)

Often the reactionary is merely a cunning, an
interested
sage who, politically exploiting the great metaphysical truths, examines without weakness or pity the underside of the human phenomenon in order to broadcast its horror — a profiteer of the terrible whose thought, paralyzed by calculation or by an excess of lucidity, minimizes or calumniates time. More generous (being more naive), revolutionary thought, on the other hand, associating the erosion of Becoming with the notion of substantiality, discerns in succession a principle of enrichment a fruitful dislocation of identity and monotony, and a sort of continuous perfectibility. A challenge hurled at the notion of Original Sin: such is the ultimate meaning of revolutions. Before liquidating the established order, they seek to release man from the worship of origins to which religion condemns him; they do so only by undermining the gods, by weakening their power over men’s minds. For it is the gods who, by binding us to a world before history, make us scorn Becoming, that fetish of all innovator from the simple grumbler to the anarchist.

Our political conceptions are dictated to us by our sentiment, or our vision, of time. If eternity haunts us, what do we care about the changes taking place in the life of institutions or of peoples? To be interested in them, we must believe, with the revolutionary spirit, that time contains the potential answer to all questions and the remedy to all evils, that its unfolding involves the elucidation of mystery and the reduction of our perplexities, that time is the agent of a total metamorphosis. But here is the most curious thing of all: the revolutionary idolizes Becoming only up to the instauration of the order for which he fought;
subsequently
, for him, appears the ideal conclusion of time, the Forever of Utopias, an extratemporal, unique, and infinite moment, provoked by the advent of a new age, entirely different from the others, an eternity here on earth that closes and crowns the historical process. The notion of a golden age, the notion of paradise pursues believers and unbelievers alike. However, between the primordial paradise of religions and the ultimate one of utopias, there is the interval separating regret from hope, remorse from illusion, perfection achieved from perfection unrealized. On which side effectiveness and dynamism may be found, we realize readily enough: the more specifically a moment is marked by the Utopian spirit (which can very well assume a “scientific” disguise), the more chances it has of triumphing and of lasting. As the fortune of Marxism testifies, one always wins, on the level of action by placing the absolute within the possible, not at the beginning but at the end of time. Like all reactionaries, de Maistre situated it in the past. The adjective
satanic
, which he applied to the French Revolution he might just as well have extended to all events: his hatred of any innovation is equivalent to a hatred of movement as such. What he wants is to nail men to tradition, to deflect them from their need to question the value and the legitimacy of dogmas and institutions. “If He has placed certain objects beyond the limits of our vision, it is doubtless because it would be dangerous for us to perceive them clearly”; “I daresay what we should not know is more important than what we should know.”

Positing that without the inviolability of mystery, order collapses, de Maistre counters the indiscretions of the critical spirit with the bans of orthodoxy, the multiplication of heresies, the rigor of a unique truth. But he goes too far, he begins raving, when he seeks to convince us that “any metaphysical proposition that does notself-evidently emerge from a Christian dogma is and can only be a culpable extravagance.” A fanatic of obedience, he accuses the Revolution of having laid bare the basis of authority and of having revealed its secret to the uninitiated, to the mob. “If you give a child one of those toys which perform movements, inexplicable to him, by means of an internal mechanism, after having played with it for a moment, he will break it to see what’s inside. It is thus that the French have treated their government. They have wanted to see inside; they have laid bare the political principles, they have opened the mob’s eyes to objects that it had never occurred to them to examine, without realizing that there are things that are destroyed by being shown.”

Remarks of an insolent, an aggressive lucidity, which might be made by the representative of any regime, of any party. Yet no liberal (nor any “man of the left”) would ever dare to adopt them. Must authority, to maintain itself, rest upon some mystery, some irrational foundation? The “right” says as much; the “left” denies it. A purely ideological difference; in fact, any order that seeks
to last
succeeds in doing so only by surrounding itself with a certain obscurity, by flinging a veil over its motives and its actions, by generating an aura of the “sacred” that renders it impenetrable to the masses. This is an obvious fact that the “democratic” governments cannot adopt but that, on the other hand, is proclaimed by the reactionaries, who, unconcerned by public opinion and the consent of the crowd, shamelessly offer unpopular truisms, inopportune banalities. By these the “democrats” are scandalized, though they know that “reaction” often translates their hidden thoughts, that it expresses certain of their innermost disappointments, many bitter certitudes of which they can give no public account. Committed to their “generous” program, they may not parade the slightest contempt for the “people.” nor even for human nature; not having the right or the luck to invoke Original Sin, they must cajole and flatter man, must seek to “liberate” him: optimists sick at hearty anguished amid their fervors and their dreams, at once swept away and paralyzed by a uselessly noble, uselessly pure idea. How many times, in their heart of hearts, must they not envy the doctrinal offhandedness of their enemies! The leftist’s despair is to do battle in the name of principles that forbid him cynicism.

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?”