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+Produced by Paul Murray, Rene Anderson Benitz and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. II.
+
+Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre
+
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
+New York: The MacMillan Company
+1905
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH DE MAISTRE.
+
+
+
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+The Catholic reaction in France at the beginning of the century     257
+
+De Maistre the best type of the movement                            262
+
+Birth, instruction, and early life                                  263
+
+Invasion of Savoy, and De Maistre's flight                          268
+
+At Lausanne, Venice, and Cagliari                                   270
+
+Sent in 1802 as minister to St. Petersburg                          275
+
+Hardships of his life there from 1802 to 1817                       276
+
+Circumstances of his return home, and his death                     285
+
+De Maistre's view of the eighteenth century                         287
+
+And of the French Revolution                                        291
+
+The great problem forced upon the Catholics by it                   293
+
+De Maistre's way of dealing with the question of the divine
+  method of government                                              293
+
+Nature of divine responsibility for evil                            294
+
+On Physical Science                                                 298
+
+Significance of such ideas in a mind like De Maistre's              299
+
+Two theories tenable by social thinkers after the Revolution        303
+
+De Maistre's appreciation of the beneficent work of the
+  Papacy in the past                                                307
+
+Insists on the revival of the papal power as the essential
+  condition of a restored European order                            313
+
+Views Christianity from the statesman's point of view               314
+
+His consequent hatred of the purely speculative temper of
+  the Greeks                                                        316
+
+His object was social or political                                  318
+
+Hence his grounds for defending the doctrine of Infallibility       319
+
+The analogy which lay at the bottom of his Ultramontane
+  doctrine                                                          320
+
+His hostility to the authority of General Councils                  323
+
+His view of the obligation of the canons on the Pope                325
+
+His appeal to European statesmen                                    326
+
+Comte and De Maistre                                                329
+
+His strictures on Protestantism                                     331
+
+Futility of his aspirations                                         335
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH DE MAISTRE.
+
+
+Owing to causes which lie tolerably near the surface, the remarkable
+Catholic reaction which took place in France at the beginning of the
+present century, has never received in England the attention that it
+deserves; not only for its striking interest as an episode in the
+history of European thought, but also for its peculiarly forcible and
+complete presentation of those ideas with which what is called the
+modern spirit is supposed to be engaged in deadly war. For one thing,
+the Protestantism of England strips a genuinely Catholic movement of
+speculation of that pressing and practical importance which belongs to
+it in countries where nearly all spiritual sentiment, that has received
+any impression of religion at all, unavoidably runs in Catholic forms.
+With us the theological reaction against the ideas of the eighteenth was
+not and could not be other than Protestant. The defence and
+reinstatement of Christianity in each case was conducted, as might have
+been expected, with reference to the dominant creed and system of the
+country. If Coleridge had been a Catholic, his works thus newly coloured
+by an alien creed would have been read by a small sect only, instead of
+exercising as they did a wide influence over the whole nation, reaching
+people through those usual conduits of press and pulpit, by which the
+products of philosophic thought are conveyed to unphilosophic minds. As
+naturally in France, hostility to all those influences which were
+believed to have brought about the Revolution, to sensationalism in
+metaphysics, to atheism in what should have been theology, to the notion
+of sovereignty of peoples in politics, inevitably sought a
+rallying-point in a renewed allegiance to that prodigious spiritual
+system which had fostered the germs of order and social feeling in
+Europe, and whose name remains even now in the days of its ruin, as the
+most permanent symbol and exemplar of stable organisation. Another
+reason for English indifference to this movement is the rapidity with
+which here, as elsewhere, dust gathers thickly round the memory of the
+champions of lost causes. Some of the most excellent of human
+characteristics--intensity of belief, for example, and a fervid anxiety
+to realise aspirations--unite with some of the least excellent of them,
+to make us too habitually forget that, as Mill has said, the best
+adherents of a fallen standard in philosophy, in religion, in politics,
+are usually next in all good qualities of understanding and sentiment to
+the best of those who lead the van of the force that triumphs. Men are
+not so anxious as they should be, considering the infinite diversity of
+effort that goes to the advancement of mankind, to pick up the
+fragments of truth and positive contribution, that so nothing be lost,
+and as a consequence the writings of antagonists with whom we are
+believed to have nothing in common, lie unexamined and disregarded.
+
+In the case of the group of writers who, after a century of criticism,
+ventured once more with an intrepid confidence--differing fundamentally
+from the tone of preceding apologists in the Protestant camp, who were
+nearly as critical as the men they refuted--to vindicate not the bare
+outlines of Christian faith, but the entire scheme, in its extreme
+manifestation, of the most ancient and severely maligned of all
+Christian organisations, this apathy is very much to be regretted on
+several grounds. In the first place, it is impossible to see
+intelligently to the bottom of the momentous spirit of ultramontanism,
+which is so deep a difficulty of continental Europe, and which, touching
+us in Ireland, is perhaps already one of our own deepest difficulties,
+without comprehending in its best shape the theory on which
+ultramontanism rests. And this theory it is impossible to seize
+thoroughly, without some knowledge of the ideas of its most efficient
+defenders in its earlier years. Secondly, it is among these ideas that
+we have to look for the representation in their most direct, logical,
+uncompromising, and unmistakable form of those theological ways of
+regarding life and prescribing right conduct, whose more or less rapidly
+accelerated destruction is the first condition of the further elevation
+of humanity, as well in power of understanding as in morals and
+spirituality. In all contests of this kind there is the greatest and
+most obvious advantage in being able to see your enemy full against the
+light. Thirdly, in one or two respects, the Catholic reactionaries at
+the beginning of the century insisted very strongly on principles of
+society which the general thought of the century before had almost
+entirely dropped out of sight, and which we who, in spite of many
+differences, still sail down the same great current, and are propelled
+by the same great tide, are accustomed almost equally either to leave in
+the background of speculation, or else deliberately to deny and
+suppress. Such we may account the importance which they attach to
+organisation, and the value they set upon a common spiritual faith and
+doctrine as a social basis. That the form which the recognition of these
+principles is destined to assume will at all correspond to their hopes
+and anticipations, is one of the most unlikely things possible. This,
+however, need not detract from the worth for our purpose of their
+exposition of the principles themselves. Again, the visible traces of
+the impression made by the writings of this school on the influential
+founder of the earliest Positivist system, are sufficiently deep and
+important to make some knowledge of them of the highest historical
+interest, both to those who accept and those who detest that system.
+
+At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were three chief
+schools of thought, the Sensational, the Catholic, and the Eclectic; or
+as it may be put in other terms, the Materialist, the Theological, and
+the Spiritualist. The first looked for the sources of knowledge, the
+sanction of morals, the inspiring fountain and standard of aesthetics, to
+the outside of men, to matter, and the impressions made by matter on the
+corporeal senses. The second looked to divine revelation, authority and
+the traditions of the Church. The third, steering a middle course,
+looked partly within and partly without, relied partly on the senses,
+partly on revelation and history, but still more on a certain internal
+consciousness of a direct and immediate kind, which is the supreme and
+reconciling judge of the reports alike of the senses, of history, of
+divine revelation.[1] Each of these schools had many exponents. The
+three most conspicuous champions of revived Catholicism were De Maistre,
+De Bonald, and Chateaubriand. The last of them, the author of the _Genie
+du Christianisme_, was effective in France because he is so deeply
+sentimental, but he was too little trained in speculation, and too
+little equipped with knowledge, to be fairly taken as the best
+intellectual representative of their way of thinking. De Bonald was of
+much heavier calibre. He really thought, while Chateaubriand only felt,
+and the _Legislation Primitive_ and the _Pensees sur Divers Sujets_
+contain much that an enemy of the school will find it worth while to
+read, in spite of an artificial, and, if a foreigner may judge, a
+detestable style.
+
+De Maistre was the greatest of the three, and deserves better than
+either of the others to stand as the type of the school for many
+reasons. His style is so marvellously lucid, that, notwithstanding the
+mystical, or, as he said, the illuminist side of his mind, we can never
+be in much doubt about his meaning, which is not by any means the case
+with Bonald. To say nothing of his immensely superior natural capacity,
+De Maistre's extensive reading in the literature of his foes was a
+source of strength, which might indeed have been thought indispensable,
+if only other persons had not attacked the same people as he did,
+without knowing much or anything at all at first-hand about them. Then
+he goes over the whole field of allied subjects, which we have a right
+to expect to have handled by anybody with a systematic view of the
+origin of knowledge, the meaning of ethics, the elements of social order
+and progressiveness, the government and scheme of the universe. And
+above all, his writings are penetrated with the air of reality and life,
+which comes of actual participation in the affairs of that world with
+which social philosophers have to deal. Lamennais had in many respects a
+finer mind than De Maistre, but the conclusions in which he was finally
+landed, no less than his liberal aims, prevent him from being an example
+of the truly Catholic reaction. He obviously represented the Revolution,
+or the critical spirit, within the Catholic limits, while De Maistre's
+ruling idea was, in his own trenchant phrase, '_absolument tuer
+l'esprit du dix-huitieme siecle_.' On all these accounts he appears to
+be the fittest expositor of those conceptions which the anarchy that
+closed the eighteenth century provoked into systematic existence.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] See Damiron's _La Philosophie en France au XIXieme Siecle_.
+Introduction to Vol. I. (Fifth edition.)
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Joseph de Maistre was born at Chambery in the year 1754.[2] His family
+was the younger branch of a stock in Languedoc, which about the
+beginning of the seventeenth century divided itself into two, one
+remaining in France, the other establishing itself in Piedmont. It is
+not wonderful that the descendants of the latter, settled in a country
+of small extent and little political importance, placed a high value on
+their kinship with an ancient line in the powerful kingdom of France.
+Joseph de Maistre himself was always particularly anxious to cultivate
+close relations with his French kinsfolk, partly from the old
+aristocratic feeling of blood, and partly from his intellectual
+appreciation of the gifts of the French mind, and its vast influence as
+an universal propagating power. His father held a high office in the
+government of Savoy, and enjoyed so eminent a reputation that on his
+death both the Senate and the King of Sardinia deliberately recorded
+their appreciation of his loss as a public calamity. His mother is said
+to have been a woman of lofty and devout character, and her influence
+over her eldest son was exceptionally strong and tender. He used to
+declare in after life that he was as docile in her hands as the youngest
+of his sisters. Among other marks of his affectionate submission to
+parental authority, we are told that during the whole time of his
+residence at Turin, where he followed a course of law, he never read a
+single book without previously writing to Chambery to one or other of
+his parents for their sanction. Such traditions linger in families, and
+when he came to have children of his own, they too read nothing of which
+their father had not been asked to express his approbation. De Maistre's
+early education was directed by the Jesuits; and as might have been
+expected from the generous susceptibility of his temper, he never ceased
+to think of them with warm esteem. To the end of his life he remembered
+the gloom which fell upon the household, though he was not nine years
+old at the time, when the news arrived of the edict of 1764, abolishing
+the Society in the kingdom of France. One element of his education he
+commemorates in a letter to his favourite daughter. 'Let your brother,'
+he says, 'work hard at the French poets. Let him learn them by heart,
+especially the incomparable Racine; never mind whether he understands
+him yet or not. I didn't understand him when my mother used to come
+repeating his verses by my bedside, and lulled me to sleep with her
+fine voice to the sound of that inimitable music. I knew hundreds of
+lines long before I knew how to read; and it is thus that my ears,
+accustomed betimes to this ambrosia, have never since been able to
+endure any sourer draught.'
+
+After his law studies at the University of Turin, then highly renowned
+for its jurisconsults, the young De Maistre went through the successive
+stages of an official career, performing various duties in the public
+administration, and possessing among other honours a seat in the Senate,
+over which his father presided. He led a tranquil life at Chambery, then
+as at all other times an ardent reader and student. Unaided he taught
+himself five languages. English he mastered so perfectly, that though he
+could not follow it when spoken, he could read a book in that tongue
+with as much ease as if it had been in his own. To Greek and German he
+did not apply himself until afterwards, and he never acquired the same
+proficiency in them as in English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.
+To be ignorant of German then, it will be remembered, was not what it
+would be now, to be without one of the literary senses.
+
+Like nearly every other great soldier of reaction, he showed in his
+early life a decided inclination for new ideas. The truth that the
+wildest extravagances of youthful aspiration are a better omen of a
+vigorous and enlightened manhood than the decorous and ignoble faith in
+the perfection of existing arrangements, was not belied in the case of
+De Maistre. His intelligence was of too hard and exact a kind to
+inspire him with the exalted schemes that present themselves to those
+more nobly imaginative minds who dream dreams and see visions. He
+projected no Savoyard emigration to the banks of the Susquehanna or
+Delaware, to found millennial societies and pantisocratic unions. These
+generous madnesses belong to men of more poetic temper. But still, in
+spite of the deadening influences of officialism and relations with a
+court, De Maistre had far too vigorous and active a character to subside
+without resistance into the unfruitful ways of obstruction and social
+complacency. It is one of the most certain marks, we may be sure, of a
+superior spirit, that the impulses earliest awakened by its first fresh
+contact with the facts of the outer world are those which quicken a
+desire for the improvement of the condition of society, the increase of
+the happiness of men, the amelioration of human destiny. With this
+unwritten condition of human nature De Maistre, like other men of his
+mental calibre, is found to have complied. He incurred the suspicion and
+ill-will of most of those by whom he was immediately surrounded, by
+belonging to a Reform Lodge at Chambery. The association was one of a
+perfectly harmless character, but being an association, it diffused a
+tarnishing vapour of social disaffection and insurgency over the names
+of all who ventured to belong to it, and De Maistre was pointed out to
+the Sardinian court as a man with leanings towards new things, and
+therefore one of whom it were well to beware. There was little ground
+for apprehension. In very small countries there is seldom room enough
+for the growth of a spirit of social revolution; not at least until some
+great and dominant country has released the forces of destruction. So,
+when the menacing sounds of the approaching hurricane in France grew
+heavy in the air, the little lodge at Chambery voluntarily dissolved
+itself, and De Maistre was deputed to convey to the king, Victor Amadeo
+III., the honourable assurance of its members that they had assembled
+for the last time.
+
+In 1786, at the age of thirty-two, De Maistre had married, and when the
+storm burst which destroyed all the hopes of his life, he was the father
+of two children. In one of his gay letters to a venerable lady who was
+on intimate terms with them both, he has left a picture of his wife,
+which is not any less interesting for what it reveals of his own
+character. 'The contrast between us two is the very strangest in the
+world. For me, as you may have found out, I am the _pococurante_
+senator, and above all things very free in saying what I think. She, on
+the contrary, will take care that it is noon before allowing that the
+sun has risen, for fear of committing herself. She knows what must be
+done or what must not be done on the tenth of October 1808, at ten
+o'clock in the morning, to avoid some inconvenience which otherwise
+would come to pass at midnight between the fifteenth and sixteenth of
+March 1810. "But, my dear husband, you pay attention to nothing; you
+believe that nobody is thinking of any harm. Now I know, I have been
+told, I have guessed, I foresee, I warn you," etc. "Come now, my dear,
+leave me alone. You are only wasting your time: I foresee that I shall
+never foresee things: that's your business." She is the supplement to
+me, and hence when I am separated from her, as I am now, I suffer
+absurdly from being obliged to think about my own affairs; I would
+rather have to chop wood all day.... My children ought to kiss her very
+steps; for my part, I have no gift for education. She has such a gift,
+that I look upon it as nothing less than the eighth endowment of the
+Holy Ghost; I mean a certain fond persecution by which it is given her
+to torment her children from morning to night to do something, not to do
+something, to learn--and yet without for a moment losing their tender
+affection for her. How can she manage it? I cannot make it out.' She was
+laughingly called by himself and her friends, Madame Prudence. It is
+certain that few women have found more necessity for the qualities
+implied in this creditable nickname.
+
+They had not been married many years before they were overtaken by
+irreparable disaster. The French Revolution broke out, and Savoy was
+invaded by the troops of the new Republic. Count De Maistre, with his
+wife and children, fled from Chambery across the Alps to Aosta. '_Ma
+chere amie_,' he said to his wife, by the side of a great rock which he
+never afterwards forgot, 'the step that we are taking to-day is
+irrevocable; it decides our lot for life;' and the presentiment was
+true. Soon the _Loi des Allobroges_ was promulgated, which enjoined upon
+all who had left their homes in Savoy to return instantly, under pain of
+confiscation of all their property. It was the very depth of winter.
+Madame de Maistre was in the ninth month of her pregnancy. She knew that
+her husband would endure anything rather than expose her to the risks of
+a journey in such a season. So, urged by a desire to save something from
+the wreck of their fortune by compliance with the French decree, she
+seized the opportunity of her husband's absence at Turin, and started
+for Savoy without acquainting him with her design. She crossed the Great
+St. Bernard in the beginning of January on the back of a mule,
+accompanied by her two little children wrapped in blankets. The Count,
+on his return to Aosta two or three days afterwards, forthwith set off
+in her steps, in the trembling expectation of finding her dead or dying
+in some Alpine hovel. But the favour of fate and a stout heart brought
+her safe to Chambery, where shortly afterwards she was joined by her
+husband. The authorities vainly tendered him the oath, vainly bade him
+inscribe his name on the register of citizens; and when they asked him
+for a contribution to support the war, he replied curtly that he did not
+give money to kill his brothers in the service of the King of Sardinia.
+As soon as his wife was delivered of their third child, whom he was
+destined not to see again for nearly twenty years, he quitted her side,
+abandoned his property and his country, and took refuge at Lausanne,
+where in time his wife and his two eldest children once more came to
+him.
+
+Gibbon tells us how a swarm of emigrants, escaping from the public ruin,
+was attracted by the vicinity, the manners, and the language of
+Lausanne. 'They are entitled to our pity,' he reflected, 'and they may
+claim our esteem, but they cannot in their present state of mind and
+fortune contribute much to our amusement. Instead of looking down as
+calm and idle spectators on the theatre of Europe, our domestic harmony
+is somewhat embittered by the infusion of party spirit.' Gibbon died in
+London almost at the very moment that De Maistre arrived at Lausanne,
+but his account of things remained true, and political feuds continued
+to run as high as ever. Among the people with whom De Maistre was thrown
+was Madame de Stael. 'As we had not been to the same school,' he says,
+'either in theology or in politics, we had some scenes enough to make
+one die of laughter; still without quarrelling. Her father, who was then
+alive, was the friend and relative of people that I love with all my
+heart, and that I would not vex for all the world. So I allowed the
+_emigres_ who surrounded us to cry out as they would, without ever
+drawing the sword.' De Maistre thought he never came across a head so
+completely turned wrong as Madame de Stael's, the infallible
+consequence, as he took it to be, of modern philosophy operating upon a
+woman's nature. He once said of her: 'Ah! if Madame de Stael had been
+Catholic, she would have been adorable, instead of famous.' We can
+believe that his position among the French _emigres_ was not
+particularly congenial. For though they hated the Revolution, they had
+all drunk of the waters of the eighteenth century philosophy, and De
+Maistre hated this philosophy worse than he hated the Revolution itself.
+Then again, they would naturally vapour about the necessities of strong
+government. 'Yes,' said the Savoyard exile, 'but be quite sure that, to
+make the monarchy strong, you must rest it on the laws, avoiding
+everything arbitrary, too frequent commissions, and all ministerial
+jobberies.' We may well believe how unsavoury this rational and just
+talk was to people who meant by strong government a system that should
+restore to them their old prerogatives of anti-social oppression and
+selfish corruption. The order that De Maistre vindicated was a very
+different thing from the deadly and poisonous order which was the object
+of the prayers of the incorrigible royalists around him.
+
+After staying three years at Lausanne, De Maistre went to Turin, but
+shortly afterwards the Sardinian king, at the end of a long struggle,
+was forced to succumb to the power of the French, then in the full tide
+of success. Bonaparte's brilliant Italian campaign needs no words here.
+The French entered Turin, and De Maistre, being an _emigre_, had to
+leave it. Furnished with a false passport, and undergoing a thousand
+hardships and dangers, he made his way, once more in the depth of a
+severe winter (1797), to Venice. He went part of the way down the Po in
+a small trading ship, crowded with ladies, priests, monks, soldiers, and
+a bishop. There was only one small fire on board, at which all the
+cooking had to be done, and where the unhappy passengers had to keep
+themselves warm as they could. At night they were confined each to a
+space about three planks broad, separated from neighbours by pieces of
+canvas hanging from a rope above. Each bank of the river was lined by
+military posts--the left by the Austrians, and the right by the French;
+and the danger of being fired into was constantly present to aggravate
+the misery of overcrowding, scanty food, and bitter cold. Even this
+wretchedness was surpassed by the hardships which confronted the exiles
+at Venice. The physical distress endured here by De Maistre and his
+unfortunate family exceeded that of any other period of their
+wanderings. He was cut off from the court, and from all his relations
+and friends, and reduced for the means of existence to a few fragments
+of silver plate, which had somehow been saved from the universal wreck.
+This slender resource grew less day by day, and when that was exhausted
+the prospect was a blank. The student of De Maistre's philosophy may see
+in what crushing personal anguish some of its most sinister growths had
+their roots. When the cares of beggary come suddenly upon a man in
+middle life, they burn very deep. Alone, and starving for a cause that
+is dear to him, he might encounter the grimness of fate with a fortitude
+in which there should be many elevating and consoling elements. But the
+destiny is intolerably hard which condemns a man of humane mould, as De
+Maistre certainly was, to look helplessly on the physical pains of a
+tender woman and famishing little ones. The anxieties that press upon
+his heart in such calamity as this are too sharp, too tightened, and too
+sordid for him to draw a single free breath, or to raise his eyes for a
+single moment of relief from the monstrous perplexity that chokes him.
+The hour of bereavement has its bitterness, but the bitterness is
+gradually suffused with soft reminiscence. The grip of beggary leaves a
+mark on such a character as De Maistre's which no prosperity of after
+days effaces. The seeming inhumanity of his theory of life, which is so
+revolting to comfortable people like M. Villemain, was in truth the only
+explanation of his own cruel sufferings in which he could find any
+solace. It was not that he hated mankind, but that his destiny looked as
+if God hated him, and this was a horrible moral complexity out of which
+he could only extricate himself by a theory in which pain and torment
+seem to stand out as the main facts in human existence.
+
+To him, indeed, prosperity never came. Hope smiled on him momentarily,
+but, in his own words: 'It was only a flash in the night.' While he was
+in Venice, the armies of Austria and Russia reconquered the north of
+Italy, and Charles Emanuel IV., in the natural anticipation that the
+allies would at once restore his dominions, hastened forward. Austria,
+however, as De Maistre had seen long before, was indifferent or even
+absolutely hostile to Sardinian interests, and she successfully opposed
+Charles Emanuel's restoration. The king received the news of the perfidy
+of his nominal ally at Florence, but not until after he had made
+arrangements for rewarding the fidelity of some of his most loyal
+adherents.
+
+It was from Florence that De Maistre received the king's nomination to
+the chief place in the government of the island of Sardinia. Through the
+short time of his administration here, he was overwhelmed with vexations
+only a little more endurable than the physical distresses which had
+weighed him down at Venice. During the war, justice had been
+administered in a grossly irregular manner. Hence, people had taken the
+law into their own hands, and retaliation had completed the round of
+wrong-doing. The taxes were collected with great difficulty. The higher
+class exhibited an invincible repugnance to paying their debts. Some of
+these difficulties in the way of firm and orderly government were
+insuperable, and De Maistre vexed his soul in an unequal and only
+partially successful contest. In after years, amid the miseries of his
+life in Russia, he wrote to his brother thus: 'Sometimes in moments of
+solitude that I multiply as much as I possibly can, I throw my head back
+on the cushion of my sofa, and there with my four walls around me, far
+from all that is dear to me, confronted by a sombre and impenetrable
+future, I recall the days when in a little town that you know well'--he
+meant Cagliari--'with my head resting on another sofa, and only seeing
+around our own exclusive circle (good heavens, what an impertinence!)
+little men and little things, I used to ask myself: "Am I then condemned
+to live and die in this place, like a limpet on a rock?" I suffered
+bitterly; my head was overloaded, wearied, flattened, by the enormous
+weight of Nothing.'
+
+But presently a worse thing befell him. In 1802 he received an order
+from the king to proceed to St. Petersburg as envoy extraordinary and
+minister plenipotentiary at the court of Russia. Even from this bitter
+proof of devotion to his sovereign he did not shrink. He had to tear
+himself from his wife and children, without any certainty when so cruel
+a separation would be likely to end; to take up new functions which the
+circumstances of the time rendered excessively difficult; while the
+petty importance of the power he represented, and its mendicant attitude
+in Europe, robbed his position of that public distinction and dignity
+which may richly console a man for the severest private sacrifice. It is
+a kind destiny which veils their future from mortal men. Fifteen years
+passed before De Maistre's exile came to a close. From 1802 to 1817 he
+did not quit the inhospitable latitudes of northern Russia.
+
+De Maistre's letters during this desolate period furnish a striking
+picture of his manner of life and his mental state. We see in them his
+most prominent characteristics strongly marked. Not even the
+painfulness of the writer's situation ever clouds his intrepid and
+vigorous spirit. Lively and gallant sallies of humour to his female
+friends, sagacious judgments on the position of Europe to political
+people, bits of learned criticism for erudite people, tender and playful
+chat with his two daughters, all these alternate with one another with
+the most delightful effect. Whether he is writing to his little girl
+whom he has never known, or to the king of Sardinia, or to some author
+who sends him a book, or to a minister who has found fault with his
+diplomacy, there is in all alike the same constant and remarkable play
+of a bright and penetrating intellectual light, coloured by a humour
+that is now and then a little sardonic, but more often is genial and
+lambent. There is a certain semi-latent quality of hardness lying at the
+bottom of De Maistre's style, both in his letters and in his more
+elaborate compositions. His writings seem to recall the flavour and
+bouquet of some of the fortifying and stimulating wines of Burgundy,
+from which time and warmth have not yet drawn out a certain native
+roughness that lingers on the palate. This hardness, if one must give
+the quality a name that only imperfectly describes it, sprang not from
+any original want of impressionableness or sensibility of nature, but
+partly from the relentless buffetings which he had to endure at the
+hands of fortune, and partly from the preponderance which had been given
+to the rational side of his mind by long habits of sedulous and accurate
+study. Few men knew so perfectly as he knew how to be touching without
+ceasing to be masculine, nor how to go down into the dark pits of human
+life without forgetting the broad sunlight, nor how to keep habitually
+close to visible and palpable fact while eagerly addicted to
+speculation. His contemplations were perhaps somewhat too near the
+ground; they led him into none of those sublimer regions of subtle
+feeling where the rarest human spirits have loved to travel; we do not
+think of his mind among those who have gone
+
+    Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
+
+If this kind of temper, strong, keen, frank, and a little hard and
+mordent, brought him too near a mischievous disbelief in the dignity of
+men and their lives, at least it kept him well away from morbid weakness
+in ethics, and from beating the winds in metaphysics. But of this we
+shall see more in considering his public pieces than can be gathered
+from his letters.
+
+The discomforts of De Maistre's life at St. Petersburg were extreme. The
+dignity of his official style and title was an aggravation of the
+exceeding straitness of his means. The ruined master could do little to
+mitigate the ruin of his servant. He had to keep up the appearance of an
+ambassador on the salary of a clerk. 'This is the second winter,' he
+writes to his brother in 1810, 'that I have gone through without a
+pelisse, which is exactly like going without a shirt at Cagliari. When I
+come from court a very sorry lackey throws a common cloak over my
+shoulders.' The climate suited him better than he had expected; and in
+one letter he vows that he was the only living being in Russia who had
+passed two winters without fur boots and a fur hat. It was considered
+indispensable that he should keep a couple of servants; so, for his
+second, De Maistre was obliged to put up with a thief, whom he rescued
+under the shelter of ambassadorial privilege from the hands of justice,
+on condition that he would turn honest. The Austrian ambassador, with
+whom he was on good terms, would often call to take him out to some
+entertainment. 'His fine servants mount my staircase groping their way
+in the dark, and we descend preceded by a servant carrying _luminare
+minus quam ut praeesset nocti_.' 'I am certain,' he adds pleasantly,
+'that they make songs about me in their Austrian patois. Poor souls! it
+is well they can amuse themselves.'
+
+Sometimes he was reduced so far as to share the soup of his valet, for
+lack of richer and more independent fare. Then he was constantly fretted
+by enemies at home, who disliked his trenchant diplomacy, and distrusted
+the strength and independence of a mind which was too vigorous to please
+the old-fashioned ministers of the Sardinian court. These chagrins he
+took as a wise man should. They disturbed him less than his separation
+from his family. 'Six hundred leagues away from you all,' he writes to
+his brother, 'the thoughts of my family, the reminiscences of childhood,
+transport me with sadness.' Visions of his mother's saintly face
+haunted his chamber; almost gloomier still was the recollection of old
+intimates with whom he had played, lived, argued, and worked for years,
+and yet who now no longer bore him in mind. There are not many glimpses
+of this melancholy in the letters meant for the eye of his beloved
+_trinite feminine_, as he playfully called his wife and two daughters.
+'_A quoi bon vous attrister_,' he asked bravely, '_sans raison et sans
+profit?_' Occasionally he cannot help letting out to them how far his
+mind is removed from composure. 'Every day as I return home I found my
+house as desolate as if it was yesterday you left me. In society the
+same fancy pursues me, and scarcely ever quits me.' Music, as might be
+surmised in so sensitive a nature, drove him almost beside himself with
+its mysterious power of intensifying the dominant emotion. 'Whenever by
+any chance I hear the harpsichord,' he says, 'melancholy seizes me. The
+sound of the violin gives me such a heavy heart, that I am fain to leave
+the company and hasten home.' He tossed in his bed at night, thinking he
+heard the sound of weeping at Turin, making a thousand efforts to
+picture to himself the looks of that 'orphan child of a living father'
+whom he had never known, wondering if ever he should know her, and
+battling with a myriad of black phantoms that seemed to rustle in his
+curtains. 'But you, M. de Chevalier,' he said apologetically to the
+correspondent to whom he told these dismal things, 'you are a father,
+you know the cruel dreams of a waking man; if you were not of the
+profession I would not allow my pen to write you this jeremiad.' As De
+Maistre was accustomed to think himself happy if he got three hours'
+sound sleep in the night, these sombre and terrible vigils were ample
+enough to excuse him if he had allowed them to overshadow all other
+things. But the vigour of his intellect was too strenuous, and his
+curiosity and interest in every object of knowledge too
+inextinguishable. 'After all,' he said, 'the only thing to do is to put
+on a good face, and to march to the place of torture with a few friends
+to console you on the way. This is the charming image under which I
+picture my present situation. Mark you,' he added, 'I always count books
+among one's consoling friends.'
+
+In one of the most gay and charming of his letters, apologising to a
+lady for the remissness of his correspondence, he explains that
+diplomacy and books occupy every moment. 'You will admit, madam, there
+is no possibility of one's shutting up books entirely. Nay, more than
+ever, I feel myself burning with the feverish thirst for knowledge. I
+have had an access of it which I cannot describe to you. The most
+curious books literally run after me, and hurry voluntarily to place
+themselves in my hands. As soon as diplomacy gives me a moment of
+breathing-time I rush headlong to that favourite pasture, to that
+ambrosia of which the mind can never have enough--
+
+    _Et voila ce qui fait que votre ami est muet._'
+
+He thinks himself happy if, by refusing invitations to dinner, he can
+pass a whole day without stirring from his house. 'I read, I write, I
+study; for after all one must know something.' In his hours of
+depression he fancied that he only read and worked, not for the sake of
+the knowledge, but to stupefy and tire himself out, if that were
+possible.
+
+As a student De Maistre was indefatigable. He never belonged to that
+languid band who hoped to learn difficult things by easy methods. The
+only way, he warned his son, is to shut your door, to say that you are
+not within, and to work. 'Since they have set themselves to teach us how
+we ought to learn the dead languages, you can find nobody who knows
+them; and it is amusing enough that people who don't know them, should
+be so obstinately bent on demonstrating the vices of the methods
+employed by us who do know them.' He was one of those wise and laborious
+students who do not read without a pen in their hands. He never shrank
+from the useful toil of transcribing abundantly from all the books he
+read everything that could by any possibility eventually be of service
+to him in his inquiries. His notebooks were enormous. As soon as one of
+them was filled, he carefully made up an index of its contents, numbered
+it, and placed it on a shelf with its unforgotten predecessors. In one
+place he accidentally mentions that he had some thirty of these folios
+over the head of his writing-table.
+
+'If I am a pedant at home,' he said, 'at least I am as little as
+possible a pedant out of doors.' In the evening he would occasionally
+seek the society of ladies, by way of recovering some of that native
+gaiety of heart which had hitherto kept him alive. 'I blow on this
+spark,' to use his own words, 'just as an old woman blows among the
+ashes to get a light for her lamp.' A student and a thinker, De Maistre
+was also a man of the world, and he may be added to the long list of
+writers who have shown that to take an active part in public affairs and
+mix in society give a peculiar life, reality, and force to both
+scholarship and speculation. It was computed at that time that the
+author of a philosophic piece could not safely count upon more than a
+hundred and fifty readers in Russia; and hence, we might be sure, even
+if we had not De Maistre's word for it, that away from his own house he
+left his philosophy behind. The vehemence of his own convictions did not
+prevent him from being socially tolerant to others who hated them. 'If I
+had the good fortune to be among his acquaintances,' he wrote of a
+heretical assailant, 'he would see that among the people with
+convictions it would be hard to find one so free from prejudice as I am.
+I have many friends among the Protestants, and now that their system is
+tottering, they are all the dearer to me.' In spite of his scanty means,
+his shabby valet, his threadbare cloak, and the humbleness of his
+diplomatic position, the fire and honesty of his character combined with
+his known ability to place him high in the esteem of the society of St.
+Petersburg. His fidelity, devotion, and fortitude, mellowed by many
+years and by meditative habits, and tinged perhaps by the patrician
+consciousness of birth, formed in him a modest dignity of manner which
+men respected. They perceived it to be no artificial assumption, but the
+outward image of a lofty and self-respecting spirit. His brother
+diplomatists, even the representatives of France, appear to have treated
+him with marked consideration. His letters prove him to have been a
+favourite among ladies. The Emperor Alexander showed him considerable
+kindness of the cheap royal sort. He conferred on his brother, Xavier de
+Maistre, a post in one of the public museums, while to the Sardinian
+envoy's son he gave a commission in the Russian service.
+
+The first departure of this son for the campaign of 1807 occasioned some
+of the most charming passages in De Maistre's letters, both to the young
+soldier himself and to others. For though without a touch of morbid
+expansiveness, he never denied himself the solace of opening his heart
+to a trusted friend, and a just reserve with strangers did not hinder a
+humane and manly confidence with intimates. 'This morning,' he wrote to
+his stripling, soon after he had joined the army, 'I felt a tightening
+at my heart when a pet dog came running in and jumped upon your bed,
+where he finds you no more. He soon perceived his mistake, and said
+clearly enough, after his own fashion: _I am mistaken; where can he be
+then?_ As for me I have felt all that you will feel, if ever you pursue
+this mighty trade of being a father.' And then he begs of his son if he
+should find himself with a tape line in his hand, that he will take his
+exact measure and forward it. Soon came the news of the battle of
+Friedland, and the unhappy father thought he read the fate of his son in
+the face of every acquaintance he met. And so it was in later campaigns,
+as De Maistre records in correspondence that glows with tender and
+healthy solicitude. All this is worth dwelling upon, for two reasons.
+First, because De Maistre has been too much regarded and spoken of as a
+man of cold sensibility, and little moved by the hardships which fill
+the destiny of our unfortunate race. And, secondly, because his own keen
+acquaintance with mental anguish helps us to understand the zeal with
+which he attempts to reconcile the blind cruelty and pain and torture
+endured by mortals with the benignity and wisdom of the immortal. 'After
+all,' he used to say, 'there are only two real evils--remorse and
+disease.' This is true enough for an apophthegm, but as a matter of fact
+it never for an instant dulled his sensibility to far less supreme forms
+of agony than the recollection of irreparable pain struck into the lives
+of others. It is interesting and suggestive to recall how a later
+publicist viewed the ills that dwarf our little lives. 'If I were asked
+to class human miseries,' said Tocqueville, 'I would do so in this
+order: first, Disease; second, Death; third, Doubt.' At a later date, he
+altered the order, and deliberately declared doubt to be the most
+insupportable of all evils, worse than death itself. But Tocqueville was
+an aristocrat, as Guizot once told him, who accepted his defeat. He
+stood on the brink of the great torrent of democracy, and shivered. De
+Maistre was an aristocrat too, but he was incapable of knowing what
+doubt or hesitation meant. He never dreamt that his cause was lost, and
+he mocked and defied the Revolution to the end. We easily see how
+natures of this sort, ardent, impetuous, unflinching, find themselves in
+the triumphant paths that lead to remorse at their close, and how they
+thus come to feel remorse rather than doubt as the consummate agony of
+the human mind.
+
+Having had this glimpse of De Maistre's character away from his books,
+we need not linger long over the remaining events of his life. In 1814
+his wife and two daughters joined him in the Russian capital. Two years
+later an outburst of religious fanaticism caused the sudden expulsion of
+the Jesuits from Russia, to De Maistre's deep mortification. Several
+conversions had taken place from the Orthodox to the Western faith, and
+these inflamed the Orthodox party, headed by the Prince de Galitzin, the
+minister of public worship, with violent theological fury. De Maistre,
+whose intense attachment to his own creed was well known, fell under
+suspicion of having connived at these conversions, and the Emperor
+himself went so far as to question him. 'I told him,' De Maistre says,
+'that I had never changed the faith of any of his subjects, but that if
+any of them had by chance made me a sharer of their confidence, neither
+honour nor conscience would have allowed me to tell them that they were
+wrong.' This kind of dialogue between a sovereign and an ambassador
+implied a situation plainly unfavourable to effective diplomacy. The
+envoy obtained his recall, and after twenty-five years' absence returned
+to his native country (1817). On his way home, it may be noticed, De
+Maistre passed a few days in Paris, and thus, for the first and last
+time, one of the most eminent of modern French writers found himself on
+French soil.
+
+The king accorded De Maistre an honourable reception, conferred upon him
+a high office and a small sum of money, and lent his ear to other
+counsellors. The philosopher, though insisting on declaring his
+political opinions, then, as ever, unwaveringly anti-revolutionary,
+threw himself mainly upon that literary composition which had been his
+solace in yet more evil days than these. It was at this time that he
+gave to the world the supreme fruit of nearly half a century of study,
+meditation, and contact with the world, in _Du Pape_, _Les Soirees de
+Saint Petersbourg_, and _L'Eglise Gallicane_. Their author did not live
+long to enjoy the vast discussion which they occasioned, nor the
+reputation that they have since conferred upon his name. He died in
+February 1821 after such a life as we have seen.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[2] The facts of De Maistre's life I have drawn from a very meagre
+biography by his son, Count Rodolphe de Maistre, supplemented by two
+volumes of _Lettres et Opuscules_ (Fourth edition. Paris: Vaton. 1865),
+and a volume of his _Diplomatic Correspondence_, edited by M. Albert
+Blanc.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+It is not at all surprising that they upon whom the revolutionary deluge
+came should have looked with indiscriminating horror and affright on all
+the influences which in their view had united first to gather up, and
+then to release the destructive flood. The eighteenth century to men
+like De Maistre seemed an infamous parenthesis, mysteriously interposed
+between the glorious age of Bossuet and Fenelon, and that yet brighter
+era for faith and the Church which was still to come in the good time of
+Divine Providence. The philosophy of the last century, he says on more
+than one occasion, will form one of the most shameful epochs of the
+human mind: it never praised even good men except for what was bad in
+them. He looked upon the gods whom that century had worshipped as the
+direct authors of the bloodshed and ruin in which their epoch had
+closed. The memory of mild and humane philosophers was covered with the
+kind of black execration that prophets of old had hurled at Baal or
+Moloch; Locke and Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, were habitually spoken of
+as very scourges of God. From this temper two consequences naturally
+flowed. In the first place, while it lasted there was no hope of an
+honest philosophic discussion of the great questions which divide
+speculative minds. Moderation and impartiality were virtues of almost
+superhuman difficulty for controversialists who had made up their minds
+that it was their opponents who had erected the guillotine, confiscated
+the sacred property of the church, slaughtered and banished her
+children, and filled the land with terror and confusion. It is hard amid
+the smoking ruins of the homestead to do full justice to the theoretical
+arguments of the supposed authors of the conflagration. Hence De
+Maistre, though, as has been already said, intimately acquainted with
+the works of his foes in the letter, was prevented by the vehemence of
+his antipathy to the effects which he attributed to them, from having
+any just critical estimate of their value and true spirit. 'I do not
+know one of these men,' he says of the philosophers of the eighteenth
+century, 'to whom the sacred title of honest man is quite suitable.'
+They are all wanting in probity. Their very names '_me dechirent la
+bouche_.' To admire Voltaire is the sign of a corrupt soul; and if
+anybody is drawn to the works of Voltaire, then be sure that God does
+not love such an one. The divine anathema is written on the very face of
+this arch-blasphemer; on his shameless brow, in the two extinct craters
+still sparkling with sensuality and hate, in that frightful _rictus_
+running from ear to ear, in those lips tightened by cruel malice, like a
+spring ready to fly back and launch forth blasphemy and sarcasm; he
+plunges into the mud, rolls in it, drinks of it; he surrenders his
+imagination to the enthusiasm of hell, which lends him all its forces;
+Paris crowned him, Sodom would have banished him.[3] Locke, again, did
+not understand himself. His distinguishing characteristics are
+feebleness and precipitancy of judgment. Vagueness and irresolution
+reign in his expressions as they do in his thoughts. He constantly
+exhibits that most decisive sign of mediocrity--he passes close by the
+greatest questions without perceiving them. In the study of philosophy,
+contempt for Locke is the beginning of knowledge.[4] Condillac was even
+more vigilantly than anybody else on his guard against his own
+conscience. But Hume was perhaps the most dangerous and the most guilty
+of all those mournful writers who will for ever accuse the last century
+before posterity--the one who employed the most talent with the most
+coolness to do most harm.[5] To Bacon De Maistre paid the compliment of
+composing a long refutation of his main ideas, in which Bacon's
+blindness, presumption, profanity, and scientific charlatanry are
+denounced in vehement and almost coarse terms, and treated as the
+natural outcome of a low morality.
+
+It has long been the inglorious speciality of the theological school to
+insist in this way upon moral depravity as an antecedent condition of
+intellectual error. De Maistre in this respect was not unworthy of his
+fellows. He believed that his opponents were even worse citizens than
+they were bad philosophers, and it was his horror of them in the former
+capacity that made him so bitter and resentful against them in the
+latter. He could think of no more fitting image for opinions that he did
+not happen to believe than counterfeit money, 'which is struck in the
+first instance by great criminals, and is afterwards passed on by honest
+folk who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they do.' A
+philosopher of the highest class, we may be sure, does not permit
+himself to be drawn down from the true object of his meditations by
+these sinister emotions. But De Maistre belonged emphatically to minds
+of the second order, whose eagerness to find truth is never intense and
+pure enough to raise them above perturbing antipathies to persons. His
+whole attitude was fatal to his claim to be heard as a truth-seeker in
+any right sense of the term. He was not only persuaded of the general
+justice and inexpugnableness of the orthodox system, but he refused to
+believe that it was capable of being improved or supplemented by
+anything which a temperate and fair examination of other doctrines might
+peradventure be found to yield. With De Maistre there was no
+peradventure. Again, no speculative mind of the highest order ever
+mistakes, or ever moves systematically apart from, the main current of
+the social movement of its time. It is implied in the very definition of
+a thinker of supreme quality that he should detect, and be in a certain
+accord with, the most forward and central of the ruling tendencies of
+his epoch. Three-quarters of a century have elapsed since De Maistre was
+driven to attempt to explain the world to himself, and this interval
+has sufficed to show that the central conditions at that time for the
+permanent reorganisation of the society which had just been so violently
+rent in pieces, were assuredly not theological, military, nor
+ultramontane, but the very opposite of all these.
+
+There was a second consequence of the conditions of the time. The
+catastrophe of Europe affected the matter as well as the manner of
+contemporary speculation. The French Revolution has become to us no more
+than a term, though the strangest term in a historic series. To some of
+the best of those who were confronted on every side by its tumult and
+agitation, it was the prevailing of the gates of hell, the moral
+disruption of the universe, the absolute and total surrender of the
+world to them that plough iniquity and sow wickedness. Even under
+ordinary circumstances few men have gone through life without
+encountering some triumphant iniquity, some gross and prolonged cruelty,
+which makes them wonder how God should allow such things to be. If we
+remember the aspect which the Revolution wore in the eyes of those who
+seeing it yet did not understand, we can imagine what dimensions this
+eternal enigma must have assumed in their sight. It was inevitable that
+the first problem to press on men with resistless urgency should be the
+ancient question of the method of the Creator's temporal government.
+What is the law of the distribution of good and evil fortune? How can we
+vindicate with regard to the conditions of this life, the different
+destinies that fall to men? How can we defend the moral ordering of a
+world in which the wicked and godless constantly triumph, while the
+virtuous and upright who retain their integrity are as frequently
+buffeted and put to shame?
+
+This tremendous question has never been presented with such sublimity of
+expression, such noble simplicity and force of thought, as in the
+majestic and touching legend of Job. But its completeness, as a
+presentation of the human tragedy, is impaired by the excessive
+prosperity which is finally supposed to reward the patient hero for his
+fortitude. Job received twice as much as he had before, and his latter
+end was blessed more than his beginning. In the chronicles of actual
+history men fare not so. There is a terribly logical finish about some
+of the dealings of fate, and in life the working of a curse is seldom
+stayed by any dramatic necessity for a smooth consummation. Destiny is
+no artist. The facts that confront us are relentless. No statement of
+the case is adequate which maintains, by ever so delicate an
+implication, that in the long run and somehow it is well in temporal
+things with the just, and ill with the unjust. Until we have firmly
+looked in the face the grim truth that temporal rewards and punishments
+do not follow the possession or the want of spiritual or moral virtue,
+so long we are still ignorant what that enigma is, which speculative
+men, from the author of the book of Job downwards, have striven to
+resolve. We can readily imagine the fulness with which the question
+would grow up in the mind of a royalist and Catholic exile at the end of
+the eighteenth century.
+
+Nothing can be more clearly put than De Maistre's answers to the
+question which the circumstances of the time placed before him to solve.
+What is the law of the distribution of good and evil fortune in this
+life? Is it a moral law? Do prosperity and adversity fall respectively
+to the just and the unjust, either individually or collectively? Has the
+ancient covenant been faithfully kept, that whoso hearkens diligently to
+the divine voice, and observes all the commandments to do them, shall be
+blessed in his basket and his store and in all the work of his hand? Or
+is God a God that hideth himself?
+
+De Maistre perceived that the optimistic conception of the deity as
+benign, merciful, infinitely forgiving, was very far indeed from
+covering the facts. So he insisted on seeing in human destiny the
+ever-present hand of a stern and terrible judge, administering a
+Draconian code with blind and pitiless severity. God created men under
+conditions which left them free to choose between good and evil. All the
+physical evil that exists in the world is a penalty for the moral evil
+that has resulted from the abuse by men of this freedom of choice. For
+these physical calamities God is only responsible in the way in which a
+criminal judge is responsible for a hanging. Men cannot blame the judge
+for the gallows; the fault is their own in committing those offences for
+which hanging is prescribed beforehand as the penalty. These curses
+which dominate human life are not the result of the cruelty of the
+divine ruler, but of the folly and wickedness of mankind, who, seeing
+the better course, yet deliberately choose the worse. The order of the
+world is overthrown by the iniquities of men; it is we who have provoked
+the exercise of the divine justice, and called down the tokens of his
+vengeance. The misery and disaster that surround us like a cloak are the
+penalty of our crimes and the price of our expiation. As the divine St.
+Thomas has said: _Deus est auctor mali quod est poena, non autem mali
+quod est culpa._ There is a certain quantity of wrong done over the face
+of the world; therefore the great Judge exacts a proportionate quantity
+of punishment. The total amount of evil suffered makes nice equation
+with the total amount of evil done; the extent of human suffering
+tallies precisely with the extent of human guilt. Of course you must
+take original sin into account, 'which explains all, and without which
+you can explain nothing.' 'In virtue of this primitive degradation we
+are subject to all sorts of physical sufferings _in general_; just as in
+virtue of this same degradation we are subject to all sorts of vices _in
+general_. This original malady therefore [which is the correlative of
+original sin] has no other name. It is only the capacity of suffering
+all evils, as original sin is only the capacity of committing all
+crimes.'[6] Hence all calamity is either the punishment of sins actually
+committed by the sufferers, or else it is the general penalty exacted
+for general sinfulness. Sometimes an innocent being is stricken, and a
+guilty being appears to escape. But is it not the same in the
+transactions of earthly tribunals? And yet we do not say that they are
+conducted without regard to justice and righteousness. 'When God
+punishes any society for the crimes that it has committed, he does
+justice as we do justice ourselves in these sorts of circumstance. A
+city revolts; it massacres the representatives of the sovereign; it
+shuts its gates against him; it defends itself against his arms; it is
+taken. The prince has it dismantled and deprived of all its privileges;
+nobody will find fault with this decision on the ground that there are
+innocent persons shut up in the city.'[7]
+
+De Maistre's deity is thus a colossal Septembriseur, enthroned high in
+the peaceful heavens, demanding ever-renewed holocausts in the name of
+the public safety.
+
+It is true, as a general rule of the human mind, that the objects which
+men have worshipped have improved in morality and wisdom as men
+themselves have improved. The quiet gods, without effort of their own,
+have grown holier and purer by the agitations and toil which civilise
+their worshippers. In other words, the same influences which elevate and
+widen our sense of human duty give corresponding height and nobleness to
+our ideas of the divine character. The history of the civilisation of
+the earth is the history of the civilisation of Olympus also. It will be
+seen that the deity whom De Maistre sets up is below the moral level of
+the time in respect of Punishment. In intellectual matters he vehemently
+proclaimed the superiority of the tenth or the twelfth over the
+eighteenth century, but it is surely carrying admiration for those loyal
+times indecently far, to seek in the vindictive sackings of revolted
+towns, and the miscellaneous butcheries of men, women, and babes, which
+then marked the vengeance of outraged sovereignty, the most apt parallel
+and analogy for the systematic administration of human society by its
+Creator. Such punishment can no longer be regarded as moral in any deep
+or permanent sense; it implies a gross, harsh, and revengeful character
+in the executioner, that is eminently perplexing and incredible to those
+who expect to find an idea of justice in the government of the world, at
+least not materially below what is attained in the clumsy efforts of
+uninspired publicists.
+
+In mere point of administration, the criminal code which De Maistre put
+into the hands of the Supreme Being works in a more arbitrary and
+capricious manner than any device of an Italian Bourbon. As Voltaire
+asks--
+
+    _Lisbonne, qui n'est plus, eut-elle plus de vices
+    Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices?
+    Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse a Paris._
+
+
+Stay, De Maistre replies, look at Paris thirty years later, not dancing,
+but red with blood. This kind of thing is often said, even now; but it
+is really time to abandon the prostitution of the name of Justice to a
+process which brings Lewis XVI. to the block, and consigns De Maistre to
+poverty and exile, because Lewis XIV., the Regent, and Lewis XV. had
+been profligate men or injudicious rulers. The reader may remember how
+the unhappy Emperor Maurice as his five innocent sons were in turn
+murdered before his eyes, at each stroke piously ejaculated: 'Thou art
+just, O Lord! and thy judgments are righteous.'[8] Any name would befit
+this kind of transaction better than that which, in the dealings of men
+with one another at least, we reserve for the honourable anxiety that he
+should reap who has sown, that the reward should be to him who has
+toiled for it, and the pain to him who has deliberately incurred it.
+What is gained by attributing to the divine government a method tainted
+with every quality that could vitiate the enactment of penalties by a
+temporal sovereign?
+
+We need not labour this part of the discussion further. Though conducted
+with much brilliance and vigour by De Maistre, it is not his most
+important nor remarkable contribution to thought. Before passing on to
+that, it is worth while to make one remark. It will be inferred from De
+Maistre's general position that he was no friend to physical science.
+Just as moderns see in the advance of the methods and boundaries of
+physical knowledge the most direct and sure means of displacing the
+unfruitful subjective methods of old, and so of renovating the entire
+field of human thought and activity, so did De Maistre see, as his
+school has seen since, that here was the stronghold of his foes. 'Ah,
+how dearly,' he exclaimed, 'has man paid for the natural sciences!' Not
+but that Providence designed that man should know something about them;
+only it must be in due order. The ancients were not permitted to attain
+to much or even any sound knowledge of physics, indisputably above us as
+they were in force of mind, a fact shown by the superiority of their
+languages which ought to silence for ever the voice of our modern pride.
+Why did the ancients remain so ignorant of natural science? Because they
+were not Christian. 'When all Europe was Christian, when the priests
+were the universal teachers, when all the establishments of Europe were
+Christianised, when theology had taken its place at the head of all
+instruction, and the other faculties were ranged around her like maids
+of honour round their queen, the human race being thus prepared, then
+the natural sciences were given to it.' Science must be kept in its
+place, for it resembles fire which, when confined in the grates prepared
+for it, is the most useful and powerful of man's servants; scattered
+about anyhow, it is the most terrible of scourges. Whence the marked
+supremacy of the seventeenth century, especially in France? From the
+happy accord of religion, science, and chivalry, and from the supremacy
+conceded to the first. The more perfect theology is in a country the
+more fruitful it is in true science; and that is why Christian nations
+have surpassed all others in the sciences, and that is why the Indians
+and Chinese will never reach us, so long as we remain respectively as we
+are. The more theology is cultivated, honoured, and supreme, then, other
+things being equal, the more perfect will human science be: that is to
+say, it will have the greater force and expansion, and will be the more
+free from every mischievous and perilous connection.[9]
+
+Little would be gained here by serious criticism of a view of this kind
+from a positive point. How little, the reader will understand from De
+Maistre's own explanations of his principles of Proof and Evidence.
+'They have called to witness against Moses,' he says, 'history,
+chronology, astronomy, geology, etc. The objections have disappeared
+before true science; but those were profoundly wise who despised them
+before any inquiry, or who only examined them in order to discover a
+refutation, but without ever doubting that there was one. Even a
+mathematical objection ought to be despised, for though it may be a
+demonstrated truth, still you will never be able to demonstrate that it
+contradicts a truth that has been demonstrated before.' His final
+formula he boldly announced in these words: '_Que toutes les fois qu'une
+proposition sera prouvee par le genre de preuve qui lui appartient,
+l'objection quelconque,_ MEME INSOLUBLE, _ne doit plus etre ecoutee._'
+Suppose, for example, that by a consensus of testimony it were perfectly
+proved that Archimedes set fire to the fleet of Marcellus by a
+burning-glass; then all the objections of geometry disappear. Prove if
+you can, and if you choose, that by certain laws a glass, in order to be
+capable of setting fire to the Roman fleet, must have been as big as the
+whole city of Syracuse, and ask me what answer I have to make to that.
+'_J'ai a vous repondre qu'Archimede brula la flotte romaine avec un
+miroir ardent._'
+
+The interesting thing about such opinions as these is not the exact
+height and depth of their falseness, but the considerations which could
+recommend them to a man of so much knowledge, both of books and of the
+outer facts of life, and of so much natural acuteness as De Maistre.
+Persons who have accustomed themselves to ascertained methods of proof,
+are apt to look on a man who vows that if a thing has been declared
+true by some authority whom he respects, then that constitutes proof to
+him, as either the victim of a preposterous and barely credible
+infatuation, or else as a flat impostor. Yet De Maistre was no ignorant
+monk. He had no selfish or official interest in taking away the
+keys of knowledge, entering not in himself, and them that would
+enter in hindering. The true reasons for his detestation of the
+eighteenth-century philosophers, science, and literature, are simple
+enough. Like every wise man, he felt that the end of all philosophy and
+science is emphatically social, the construction and maintenance and
+improvement of a fabric under which the communities of men may find
+shelter, and may secure all the conditions for living their lives with
+dignity and service. Then he held that no truth can be harmful to
+society. If he found any system of opinions, any given attitude of the
+mind, injurious to tranquillity and the public order, he instantly
+concluded that, however plausible they might seem when tested by logic
+and demonstration, they were fundamentally untrue and deceptive. What is
+logic compared with eternal salvation in the next world, and the
+practice of virtue in this? The recommendation of such a mind as De
+Maistre's is the intensity of its appreciation of order and social
+happiness. The obvious weakness of such a mind, and the curse inherent
+in its influence, is that it overlooks the prime condition of all; that
+social order can never be established on a durable basis so long as the
+discoveries of scientific truth in all its departments are suppressed,
+or incorrectly appreciated, or socially misapplied. De Maistre did not
+perceive that the cause which he supported was no longer the cause of
+peace and tranquillity and right living, but was in a state of absolute
+and final decomposition, and therefore was the cause of disorder and
+blind wrong living. Of this we shall now see more.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[3] _Soirees de Saint Petersbourg_ (8th ed. 1862), vol. i. pp. 238-243.
+
+[4] _Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, 6ieme entretien_, i. 397-442.
+
+[5] _Ib._ (8th ed. 1862) vol. i. p. 403.
+
+[6] _Soirees_, i. 76
+
+[7] De Maistre found a curiously characteristic kind of support for this
+view in the fact that evils are called _fleaux_: flails are things to
+beat with: so evils must be things with which men are beaten; and as we
+should not be beaten if we did not deserve it, _argal_, suffering is a
+merited punishment. Apart from that common infirmity which leads people
+after they have discovered an analogy between two things, to argue from
+the properties of the one to those of the other, as if, instead of being
+analogous, they were identical, De Maistre was particularly fond of
+inferring moral truths from etymologies. He has an argument for the
+deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in
+the same word, _supplicium_, the two ideas of prayer and punishment
+(_Soirees, 2ieme entretien_, i. p. 108). His profundity as an
+etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of _cadaver_: _ca_-ro,
+_da_-ta, _ver_-mibus. There are many others of the same quality.
+
+[8] _Gibbon_, c. xlvi. vol. v. 385.
+
+[9] See the _Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon_, vol. ii. 58 _et seq._
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+When the waters of the deluge of '89 began to assuage, the best minds
+soon satisfied themselves that the event which Bonaparte's restoration
+of order enabled them to look back upon with a certain tranquillity and
+a certain completeness, had been neither more nor less than a new
+irruption of barbarians into the European world. The monarchy, the
+nobles, and the Church, with all the ideas that gave each of them life
+and power, had fallen before atheists and Jacobins, as the ancient
+empire of Rome had fallen before Huns and Goths, Vandals and Lombards.
+The leaders of the revolution had succeeded one another, as Attila had
+come after Alaric, and as Genseric had been followed by Odoacer. The
+problem which presented itself was not new in the history of western
+civilisation; the same dissolution of old bonds which perplexed the
+foremost men at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had distracted
+their predecessors from the fifth to the eighth, though their conditions
+and circumstances were widely different. The practical question in both
+cases was just the same--how to establish a stable social order which,
+resting on principles that should command the assent of all, might
+secure the co-operation of all for its harmonious and efficient
+maintenance, and might offer a firm basis for the highest and best life
+that the moral and intellectual state of the time allowed. There were
+two courses open, or which seemed to be open, in this gigantic
+enterprise of reconstructing a society. One of them was to treat the
+case of the eighteenth century as if it were not merely similar to, but
+exactly identical with, the case of the fifth, and as if exactly the
+same forces which had knit Western Europe together into a compact
+civilisation a thousand years before, would again suffice for a second
+consolidation. Christianity, rising with the zeal and strength of youth
+out of the ruins of the Empire, and feudalism by the need of
+self-preservation imposing a form upon the unshapen associations of the
+barbarians, had between them compacted the foundations and reared the
+fabric of mediaeval life. Why, many men asked themselves, should not
+Christian and feudal ideas repeat their great achievement, and be the
+means of reorganising the system which a blind rebellion against them
+had thrown into deplorable and fatal confusion? Let the century which
+had come to such an end be regarded as a mysteriously intercalated
+episode, and no more, in the long drama of faith and sovereign order.
+Let it pass as a sombre and pestilent stream, whose fountains no man
+should discover, whose waters had for a season mingled with the mightier
+current of the divinely allotted destiny of the race, and had then
+gathered themselves apart and flowed off, to end as they had begun, in
+the stagnation and barrenness of the desert. Philosophers and men of
+letters, astronomers and chemists, atheists and republicans, had shown
+that they were only powerful to destroy, as the Goths and the Vandals
+had been. They had shown that they were impotent, as the Goths and the
+Vandals had been, in building up again. Let men turn their faces, then,
+once more to that system by which in the ancient times Europe had been
+delivered from a relapse into eternal night.
+
+The second course was very different from this. The minds to whom it
+commended itself were cast in a different mould and drew their
+inspiration from other traditions. In their view the system which the
+Church had been the main agency in organising, had fallen quite as much
+from its own irremediable weakness as from the direct onslaughts of
+assailants within and without. The barbarians had rushed in, it was
+true, in 1793; but this time it was the Church and feudalism which were
+in the position of the old empire on whose ruins they had built. What
+had once restored order and belief to the West, was now in its own turn
+overtaken by decay and dissolution. To look to them to unite these new
+barbarians in a stable and vigorous civilisation, because they had
+organised Europe of old, was as infatuated as it would have been to
+expect the later emperors to equal the exploits of the Republic and
+their greatest predecessors in the purple. To despise philosophers and
+men of science was only to play over again in a new dress the very part
+which Julian had enacted in the face of nascent Christianity. The
+eighteenth century, instead of being that home of malaria which the
+Catholic and Royalist party represented, was in truth the seed-ground of
+a new and better future. Its ideas were to furnish the material and the
+implements by which should be repaired the terrible breaches and chasms
+in European order that had been made alike by despots and Jacobins, by
+priests and atheists, by aristocrats and sans-culottes. Amidst all the
+demolition upon which its leading minds had been so zealously bent, they
+had been animated by the warmest love of social justice, of human
+freedom, of equal rights, and by the most fervent and sincere longing to
+make a nobler happiness more universally attainable by all the children
+of men. It was to these great principles that we ought eagerly to turn,
+to liberty, to equality, to brotherhood, if we wished to achieve before
+the new invaders a work of civilisation and social reconstruction, such
+as Catholicism and feudalism had achieved for the multitudinous invaders
+of old.
+
+Such was the difference which divided opinion when men took heart to
+survey the appalling scene of moral desolation that the cataclysm of '93
+had left behind. We may admire the courage of either school. For if the
+conscience of the Liberals was oppressed by the sanguinary tragedy in
+which freedom and brotherhood and justice had been consummated, the
+Catholic and the Royalist were just as sorely burdened with the weight
+of kingly basenesses and priestly hypocrisies. If the one had some
+difficulty in interpreting Jacobinism and the Terror, the other was
+still more severely pressed to interpret the fact and origin and meaning
+of the Revolution; if the Liberal had Marat and Hebert, the Royalist had
+Lewis XV., and the Catholic had Dubois and De Rohan. Each school could
+intrepidly hurl back the taunts of its enemy, and neither of them did
+full justice to the strong side of the other. Yet we who are, in England
+at all events, removed a little aside from the centre of this great
+battle, may perceive that at that time both of the contending hosts
+fought under honourable banners, and could inscribe upon their shields a
+rational and intelligible device. Indeed, unless the modern Liberal
+admits the strength inherent in the cause of his enemies, it is
+impossible for him to explain to himself the duration and obstinacy of
+the conflict, the slow advance and occasional repulse of the host in
+which he has enlisted, and the tardy progress that Liberalism has made
+in that stupendous reconstruction which the Revolution has forced the
+modern political thinker to meditate upon, and the modern statesman to
+further and control.
+
+De Maistre, from those general ideas as to the method of the government
+of the world, of which we have already seen something, had formed what
+he conceived to be a perfectly satisfactory way of accounting for the
+eighteenth century and its terrific climax. The will of man is left
+free; he acts contrary to the will of God; and then God exacts the
+shedding of blood as the penalty. So much for the past. The only hope of
+the future lay in an immediate return to the system which God himself
+had established, and in the restoration of that spiritual power which
+had presided over the reconstruction of Europe in darker and more
+chaotic times than even these. Though, perhaps, he nowhere expresses
+himself on this point in a distinct formula, De Maistre was firmly
+impressed with the idea of historic unity and continuity. He looked upon
+the history of the West in its integrity, and was entirely free from
+anything like that disastrous kind of misconception which makes the
+English Protestant treat the long period between St. Paul and Martin
+Luther as a howling waste, or which makes some Americans omit from all
+account the still longer period of human effort from the crucifixion of
+Christ to the Declaration of Independence. The rise of the vast
+structure of Western civilisation during and after the dissolution of
+the Empire, presented itself to his mind as a single and uniform
+process, though marked in portions by temporary, casual, parenthetical
+interruptions, due to depraved will and disordered pride. All the
+dangers to which this civilisation had been exposed in its infancy and
+growth were before his eyes. First, there were the heresies with which
+the subtle and debased ingenuity of the Greeks had stained and distorted
+the great but simple mysteries of the faith. Then came the hordes of
+invaders from the North, sweeping with irresistible force over regions
+that the weakness or cowardice of the wearers of the purple left
+defenceless before them. Before the northern tribes had settled in their
+possessions, and had full time to assimilate the faith and the
+institutions which they had found there, the growing organisation was
+menaced by a more deadly peril in the incessant and steady advance of
+the bloody and fanatical tribes from the East. And in this way De
+Maistre's mind continued the picture down to the latest days of all,
+when there had arisen men who, denying God and mocking at Christ, were
+bent on the destruction of the very foundations of society, and had
+nothing better to offer the human race than a miserable return to a
+state of nature.
+
+As he thus reproduced this long drama, one benign and central figure was
+ever present, changeless in the midst of ceaseless change; laboriously
+building up with preterhuman patience and preterhuman sagacity, when
+other powers, one after another in evil succession, were madly raging to
+destroy and to pull down; thinking only of the great interests of order
+and civilisation, of which it had been constituted the eternal
+protector, and showing its divine origin and inspiration alike by its
+unfailing wisdom and its unfailing benevolence. It is the Sovereign
+Pontiff who thus stands forth throughout the history of Europe, as the
+great Demiurgus of universal civilisation. If the Pope had filled only
+such a position as the Patriarch held at Constantinople, or if there had
+been no Pope, and Christianity had depended exclusively on the East for
+its propagation, with no great spiritual organ in the West, what would
+have become of Western development? It was the energy and resolution of
+the Pontiffs which resisted the heresies of the East, and preserved to
+the Christian religion that plainness and intelligibility, without which
+it would never have made a way to the rude understanding and simple
+hearts of the barbarians from the North. It was their wise patriotism
+which protected Italy against Greek oppression, and by acting the part
+of mayors of the palace to the decrepit Eastern emperors, it was they
+who contrived to preserve the independence and maintain the fabric of
+society until the appearance of the Carlovingians, in whom, with the
+rapid instinct of true statesmen, they at once recognised the founders
+of a new empire of the West. If the Popes, again, had possessed over the
+Eastern empire the same authority that they had over the Western, they
+would have repulsed not only the Saracens, but the Turks too, and none
+of the evils which these nations have inflicted on us would ever have
+taken place.[10] Even as it was, when the Saracens threatened the West,
+the Popes were the chief agents in organising resistance, and giving
+spirit and animation to the defenders of Europe. Their alert vision saw
+that to crush for ever that formidable enemy, it was not enough to
+defend ourselves against his assaults; we must attack him at home. The
+Crusades, vulgarly treated as the wars of a blind and superstitious
+piety, were in truth wars of high policy. From the Council of Clermont
+down to the famous day of Lepanto, the hand and spirit of the Pontiff
+were to be traced in every part of that tremendous struggle which
+prevented Europe from being handed over to the tyranny, ignorance, and
+barbarism that have always been the inevitable fruits of Mahometan
+conquest, and had already stamped out civilisation in Asia Minor and
+Palestine and Greece, once the very garden of the universe.
+
+This admirable and politic heroism of the Popes in the face of foes
+pressing from without, De Maistre found more than equalled by their
+wisdom, courage, and activity in organising and developing the elements
+of a civilised system within. The maxim of old societies had been that
+which Lucan puts into the mouth of Caesar--_humanum paucis vivit genus_.
+A vast population of slaves had been one of the inevitable social
+conditions of the period: the Popes never rested from their endeavours
+to banish servitude from among Christian nations. Women in old
+societies had filled a mean and degraded place: it was reserved for the
+new spiritual power to rescue the race from that vicious circle in which
+men had debased the nature of women, and women had given back all the
+weakness and perversity they had received from men, and to perceive that
+'the most effectual way of perfecting the man is to ennoble and exalt
+the woman.' The organisation of the priesthood, again, was a masterpiece
+of practical wisdom. Such an order, removed from the fierce or selfish
+interests of ordinary life by the holy regulation of celibacy, and by
+the austere discipline of the Church, was indispensable in the midst of
+such a society as that which it was the function of the Church to guide.
+Who but the members of an order thus set apart, acting in strict
+subordination to the central power, and so presenting a front of
+unbroken spiritual unity, could have held their way among tumultuous
+tribes, half-barbarous nobles, and proud and unruly kings, protesting
+against wrong, passionately inculcating new and higher ideas of right,
+denouncing the darkness of the false gods, calling on all men to worship
+the cross and adore the mysteries of the true God? Compare now the
+impotency of the Protestant missionary, squatting in gross comfort with
+wife and babes among the savages he has come to convert, preaching a
+disputatious doctrine, wrangling openly with the rival sent by some
+other sect--compare this impotency with the success that follows the
+devoted sons of the Church, impressing their proselytes with the
+mysterious virtue of their continence, the self-denial of their lives,
+the unity of their dogma and their rites; and then recognise the wisdom
+of these great churchmen who created a priesthood after this manner in
+the days when every priest was as the missionary is now. Finally, it was
+the occupants of the holy chair who prepared, softened, one might almost
+say sweetened, the occupants of thrones; it was to them that Providence
+had confided the education of the sovereigns of Europe. The Popes
+brought up the youth of the European monarchy; they made it precisely in
+the same way in which Fenelon made the Duke of Burgundy. In each case
+the task consisted in eradicating from a fine character an element of
+ferocity that would have ruined all. 'Everything that constrains a man
+strengthens him. He cannot obey without perfecting himself; and by the
+mere fact of overcoming himself he is better. Any man will vanquish the
+most violent passion at thirty, because at five or six you have taught
+him of his own will to give up a plaything or a sweetmeat. That came to
+pass to the monarchy, which happens to an individual who has been well
+brought up. The continued efforts of the Church, directed by the
+Sovereign Pontiff, did what had never been seen before, and what will
+never be seen again where that authority is not recognised. Insensibly,
+without threats or laws or battles, without violence and without
+resistance, the great European charter was proclaimed, not on paper nor
+by the voice of public criers; but in all European hearts, then all
+Catholic Kings surrender the power of judging by themselves, and nations
+in return declare kings infallible and inviolable. Such is the
+fundamental law of the European monarchy, and it is the work of the
+Popes.'[11]
+
+All this, however, is only the external development of De Maistre's
+central idea, the historical corroboration of a truth to which he
+conducts us in the first instance by general considerations. Assuming,
+what it is less and less characteristic of the present century at any
+rate to deny, that Christianity was the only actual force by which the
+regeneration of Europe could be effected after the decline of the Roman
+civilisation, he insists that, as he again and again expresses it,
+'without the Pope there is no veritable Christianity.' What he meant by
+this condensed form needs a little explanation, as is always the case
+with such simple statements of the products of long and complex
+reasoning. In saying that without the Pope there is no true
+Christianity, what he considered himself as having established was, that
+unless there be some supreme and independent possessor of authority to
+settle doctrine, to regulate discipline, to give authentic counsel, to
+apply accepted principles to disputed cases, then there can be no such
+thing as a religious system which shall have power to bind the members
+of a vast and not homogeneous body in the salutary bonds of a common
+civilisation, nor to guide and inform an universal conscience. In each
+individual state everybody admits the absolute necessity of having some
+sovereign power which shall make, declare, and administer the laws, and
+from whose action in any one of these aspects there shall be no appeal;
+a power that shall be strong enough to protect the rights and enforce
+the duties which it has authoritatively proclaimed and enjoined. In free
+England, as in despotic Turkey, the privileges and obligations which the
+law tolerates or imposes, and all the benefits which their existence
+confers on the community, are the creatures and conditions of a supreme
+authority from which there is no appeal, whether the instrument by which
+this authority makes its will known be an act of parliament or a ukase.
+This conception of temporal sovereignty, especially familiarised to our
+generation by the teaching of Austin, was carried by De Maistre into
+discussions upon the limits of the Papal power with great ingenuity and
+force, and, if we accept the premisses, with great success.
+
+It should be said here, that throughout his book on the Pope, De Maistre
+talks of Christianity exclusively as a statesman or a publicist would
+talk about it; not theologically nor spiritually, but politically and
+socially. The question with which he concerns himself is the utilisation
+of Christianity as a force to shape and organise a system of civilised
+societies; a study of the conditions under which this utilisation had
+taken place in the earlier centuries of the era; and a deduction from
+them of the conditions under which we might ensure a repetition of the
+process in changed modern circumstance. In the eighteenth century men
+were accustomed to ask of Christianity, as Protestants always ask of so
+much of Catholicism as they have dropped, whether or no it is true. But
+after the Revolution the question changed, and became an inquiry whether
+and how Christianity could contribute to the reconstruction of society.
+People asked less how true it was, than how strong it was; less how many
+unquestioned dogmas, than how much social weight it had or could
+develop; less as to the precise amount and form of belief that would
+save a soul, than as to the way in which it might be expected to assist
+the European community.
+
+It was the strength of this temper in him which led to his extraordinary
+detestation and contempt for the Greeks. Their turn for pure speculation
+excited all his anger. In a curious chapter, he exhausts invective in
+denouncing them.[12] The sarcasm of Sallust delights him, that the
+actions of Greece were very fine, _verum aliquanto minores quam fama
+feruntur_. Their military glory was only a flash of about a hundred and
+fourteen years from Marathon; compare this with the prolonged splendour
+of Rome, France, and England. In philosophy they displayed decent
+talent, but even here their true merit is to have brought the wisdom of
+Asia into Europe, for they invented nothing. Greece was the home of
+syllogism and of unreason. 'Read Plato: at every page you will draw a
+striking distinction. As often as he is Greek, he wearies you. He is
+only great, sublime, penetrating, when he is a theologian; in other
+words, when he is announcing positive and everlasting dogmas, free from
+all quibble, and which are so clearly marked with the eastern cast, that
+not to perceive it one must never have had a glimpse of Asia.... There
+was in him a sophist and a theologian, or, if you choose, a Greek and a
+Chaldean.' The Athenians could never pardon one of their great leaders,
+all of whom fell victims in one shape or another to a temper frivolous
+as that of a child, ferocious as that of men,--'_espece de moutons
+enrages, toujours menes par la nature, et toujours par nature devorant
+leurs bergers_.' As for their oratory, 'the tribune of Athens would have
+been the disgrace of mankind if Phocion and men like him, by
+occasionally ascending it before drinking the hemlock or setting out for
+their place of exile, had not in some sort balanced such a mass of
+loquacity, extravagance, and cruelty.'[13]
+
+It is very important to remember this constant solicitude for ideas that
+should work well, in connection with that book of De Maistre's which
+has had most influence in Europe, by supplying a base for the theories
+of ultramontanism. Unless we perceive very clearly that throughout his
+ardent speculations on the Papal power his mind was bent upon enforcing
+the practical solution of a pressing social problem, we easily
+misunderstand him and underrate what he had to say. A charge has been
+forcibly urged against him by an eminent English critic, for example,
+that he has confounded supremacy with infallibility, than which, as the
+writer truly says, no two ideas can be more perfectly distinct, one
+being superiority of force, and the other incapacity of error.[14] De
+Maistre made logical blunders in abundance quite as bad as this, but he
+was too acute, I think, deliberately to erect so elaborate a structure
+upon a confusion so very obvious, and that must have stared him in the
+face from the first page of his work to the last. If we look upon his
+book as a mere general defence of the Papacy, designed to investigate
+and fortify all its pretensions one by one, we should have great right
+to complain against having two claims so essentially divergent, treated
+as though they were the same thing, or could be held in their places by
+the same supports. But let us regard the treatise on the Pope not as
+meant to convince free-thinkers or Protestants that divine grace
+inspires every decree of the Holy Father, though that would have been
+the right view of it if it had been written fifty years earlier. It was
+composed within the first twenty years of the present century, when the
+universe, to men of De Maistre's stamp, seemed once more without form
+and void. His object, as he tells us more than once, was to find a way
+of restoring a religion and a morality in Europe; of giving to truth the
+forces demanded for the conquests that she was meditating; of
+strengthening the thrones of sovereigns, and of gently calming that
+general fermentation of spirit which threatened mightier evils than any
+that had yet overwhelmed society. From this point of view we shall see
+that the distinction between supremacy and infallibility was not worth
+recognising.
+
+Practically, he says, 'infallibility is only a consequence of supremacy,
+or rather it is absolutely the same thing under two different names....
+In effect it is the same thing, _in practice_, not to be subject to
+error, and not to be liable to be accused of it. Thus, even if we should
+agree that no divine promise was made to the Pope, he would not be less
+infallible or deemed so, as the final tribunal; for every judgment from
+which you cannot appeal is and must be (_est et doit etre_) held for
+just in every human association, under any imaginable form of
+government; and every true statesman will understand me perfectly, when
+I say that the point is to ascertain not only if the Sovereign Pontiff
+is, but if he must be, infallible.'[15] In another place he says
+distinctly enough that the infallibility of the Church has two aspects;
+in one of them it is the object of divine promise, in the other it is a
+human implication, and that in the latter aspect infallibility is
+supposed in the Church, just 'as we are absolutely bound to suppose it,
+even in temporal sovereignties (where it does not really exist), under
+pain of seeing society dissolved.' The Church only demands what other
+sovereignties demand, though she has the immense superiority over them
+of having her claim backed by direct promise from heaven.[16] Take away
+the dogma, if you will, he says, and only consider the thing
+politically, which is exactly what he really does all through the book.
+The pope, from this point of view, asks for no other infallibility than
+that which is attributed to all sovereigns.[17] Without either
+vindicating or surrendering the supernatural side of the Papal claims,
+he only insists upon the political, social, or human side of it, as an
+inseparable quality of an admitted supremacy.[18] In short, from
+beginning to end of this speculation, from which the best kind of
+ultramontanism has drawn its defence, he evinces a deprecatory
+anxiety--a very rare temper with De Maistre--not to fight on the issue
+of the dogma of infallibility over which Protestants and unbelievers
+have won an infinite number of cheap victories; that he leaves as a
+theme more fitted for the disputations of theologians. My position, he
+seems to keep saying, is that if the Pope is spiritually supreme, then
+he is virtually and practically _as if he were_ infallible, just in the
+same sense in which the English Parliament and monarch, and the Russian
+Czar, are as if they were infallible. But let us not argue so much about
+this, which is only secondary. The main question is whether without the
+Pope there can be a true Christianity, 'that is to say, a Christianity,
+active, powerful, converting, regenerating, conquering, perfecting.'
+
+De Maistre was probably conducted to his theory by an analogy, which he
+tacitly leaned upon more strongly than it could well bear, between
+temporal organisation and spiritual organisation. In inchoate
+communities, the momentary self-interest and the promptly stirred
+passions of men would rend the growing society in pieces, unless they
+were restrained by the strong hand of law in some shape or other,
+written or unwritten, and administered by an authority, either
+physically too strong to be resisted, or else set up by the common
+consent seeking to further the general convenience. To divide this
+authority, so that none should know where to look for a sovereign
+decree, nor be able to ascertain the commands of sovereign law; to
+embody it in the persons of many discordant expounders, each assuming
+oracular weight and equal sanction; to leave individuals to administer
+and interpret it for themselves, and to decide among themselves its
+application to their own cases; what would this be but a deliberate
+preparation for anarchy and dissolution? For it is one of the clear
+conditions of the efficacy of the social union, that every member of it
+should be able to know for certain the terms on which he belongs to it,
+the compliances which it will insist upon in him, and the compliances
+which it will in turn permit him to insist upon in others, and therefore
+it is indispensable that there should be some definite and admitted
+centre where this very essential knowledge should be accessible.
+
+Some such reflections as these must have been at the bottom of De
+Maistre's great apology for the Papal supremacy, or at any rate they may
+serve to bring before our minds with greater clearness the kind of
+foundations on which his scheme rested. For law substitute Christianity,
+for social union spiritual union, for legal obligations the obligations
+of the faith. Instead of individuals bound together by allegiance to
+common political institutions, conceive communities united in the bonds
+of religious brotherhood into a sort of universal republic, under the
+moderate supremacy of a supreme spiritual power. As a matter of fact, it
+was the intervention of this spiritual power which restrained the
+anarchy, internal and external, of the ferocious and imperfectly
+organised sovereignties that figure in the early history of modern
+Europe. And as a matter of theory, what could be more rational and
+defensible than such an intervention made systematic, with its
+rightfulness and disinterestedness universally recognised? Grant
+Christianity as the spiritual basis of the life and action of modern
+communities; supporting both the organised structure of each of them,
+and the interdependent system composed of them all; accepted by the
+individual members of each, and by the integral bodies forming the
+whole. But who shall declare what the Christian doctrine is, and how its
+maxims bear upon special cases, and what oracles they announce in
+particular sets of circumstances? Amid the turbulence of popular
+passion, in face of the crushing despotism of an insensate tyrant,
+between the furious hatred of jealous nations or the violent ambition of
+rival sovereigns, what likelihood would there be of either party to the
+contention yielding tranquilly and promptly to any presentation of
+Christian teaching made by the other, or by some suspected neutral as a
+decisive authority between them? Obviously there must be some supreme
+and indisputable interpreter, before whose final decree the tyrant
+should quail, the flood of popular lawlessness flow back within its
+accustomed banks, and contending sovereigns or jealous nations
+fraternally embrace. Again, in those questions of faith and discipline,
+which the ill-exercised ingenuity of men is for ever raising and
+pressing upon the attention of Christendom, it is just as obvious that
+there must be some tribunal to pronounce an authoritative judgment.
+Otherwise, each nation is torn into sects; and amid the throng of sects
+where is unity? 'To maintain that a crowd of independent churches form a
+church, one and universal, is to maintain in other terms that all the
+political governments of Europe only form a single government, one and
+universal.' There could no more be a kingdom of France without a king,
+nor an empire of Russia without an emperor, than there could be one
+universal church without an acknowledged head. That this head must be
+the successor of St. Peter, is declared alike by the voice of tradition,
+the explicit testimony of the early writers, the repeated utterances of
+later theologians of all schools, and that general sentiment which
+presses itself upon every conscientious reader of religious history.
+
+The argument that the voice of the Church is to be sought in general
+councils is absurd. To maintain that a council has any other function
+than to assure and certify the Pope, when he chooses to strengthen his
+judgment or to satisfy his doubts, is to destroy visible unity. Suppose
+there to be an equal division of votes, as happened in the famous case
+of Fenelon, and might as well happen in a general council, the doubt
+would after all be solved by the final vote of the Pope. And 'what is
+doubtful for twenty selected men is doubtful for the whole human race.
+Those who suppose that by multiplying the deliberating voices doubt is
+lessened, must have very little knowledge of men, and can never have sat
+in a deliberative body.' Again, supposing there to present itself one of
+those questions of divine metaphysics that it is absolutely necessary to
+refer to the decision of the supreme tribunal. Then our interest is not
+that it should be decided in such or such a manner, but that it should
+be decided without delay and without appeal. Besides, the world is now
+grown too vast for general councils, which seem to be made only for the
+youth of Christianity. In fine, why pursue futile or mischievous
+discussions as to whether the Pope is above the Council or the Council
+above the Pope? In ordinary questions in which a king is conscious of
+sufficient light, he decides them himself, while the others in which he
+is not conscious of this light, he transfers to the States-General
+presided over by himself, but he is equally sovereign in either case. So
+with the Pope and the Council. Let us be content to know, in the words
+of Thomassin,[19] that 'the Pope in the midst of his Council is above
+himself, and that the Council decapitated of its chief is below him.'
+
+The point so constantly dwelt upon by Bossuet, the obligation of the
+canons upon the Pope, was of very little worth in De Maistre's judgment,
+and he almost speaks with disrespect of the great Catholic defender for
+being so prolix and pertinacious in elaborating it. Here again he finds
+in Thomassin the most concise statement of what he held to be the true
+view, just as he does in the controversy as to the relative superiority
+of the Pope or the Council. 'There is only an apparent contradiction,'
+says Thomassin, 'between saying that the Pope is above the canons, and
+that he is bound by them; that he is master of the canons, or that he is
+not. Those who place him above the canons or make him their master, only
+pretend that he _has a dispensing power over them_; while those who deny
+that he is above the canons or is their master, mean no more than that
+_he can only exercise a dispensing power for the convenience and in the
+necessities of the Church_.' This is an excellent illustration of the
+thoroughly political temper in which De Maistre treats the whole
+subject. He looks at the power of the Pope over the canons much as a
+modern English statesman looks at the question of the coronation oath,
+and the extent to which it binds the monarch to the maintenance of the
+laws existing at the time of its imposition. In the same spirit he
+banishes from all account the crowd of nonsensical objections to Papal
+supremacy, drawn from imaginary possibilities. Suppose a Pope, for
+example, were to abolish all the canons at a single stroke; suppose him
+to become an unbeliever; suppose him to go mad; and so forth. 'Why,' De
+Maistre says, 'there is not in the whole world a single power in a
+condition to bear all possible and arbitrary hypotheses of this sort;
+and if you judge them by what they can do, without speaking of what they
+have done, they will have to be abolished every one.'[20] This, it may
+be worth noticing, is one of the many passages in De Maistre's writings
+which, both in the solidity of their argument and the direct force of
+their expression, recall his great predecessor in the anti-revolutionary
+cause, the ever-illustrious Burke.
+
+The vigour with which De Maistre sums up all these pleas for supremacy
+is very remarkable; and to the crowd of enemies and indifferents, and
+especially to the statesmen who are among them, he appeals with
+admirable energy. 'What do you want, then? Do you mean that the nations
+should live without any religion, and do you not begin to perceive that
+a religion there must be? And does not Christianity, not only by its
+intrinsic worth but because it is in possession, strike you as
+preferable to every other? Have you been better contented with other
+attempts in this way? Peradventure the twelve apostles might please you
+better than the Theophilanthropists and Martinists? Does the Sermon on
+the Mount seem to you a passable code of morals? And if the entire
+people were to regulate their conduct on this model, should you be
+content? I fancy that I hear you reply affirmatively. Well, since the
+only object now is to maintain this religion for which you thus declare
+your preference, how could you have, I do not say the stupidity, but the
+cruelty, to turn it into a democracy, and to place this precious deposit
+in the hands of the rabble?
+
+'You attach too much importance to the dogmatic part of this religion.
+By what strange contradiction would you desire to agitate the universe
+for some academic quibble, for miserable wranglings about mere words
+(these are your own terms)? Is it so then that men are led? Will you
+call the Bishop of Quebec and the Bishop of Lucon to interpret a line of
+the Catechism? That believers should quarrel about infallibility is what
+I know, for I see it; but that statesmen should quarrel in the same way
+about this great privilege, is what I shall never be able to
+conceive.... That all the bishops in the world should be convoked to
+determine a divine truth necessary to salvation--nothing more natural,
+if such a method is indispensable; for no effort, no trouble, ought to
+be spared for so exalted an aim. But if the only point is the
+establishment of one opinion in the place of another, then the
+travelling expenses of even one single Infallible are sheer waste. If
+you want to spare the two most valuable things on earth, time and money,
+make all haste to write to Rome, in order to procure thence a lawful
+decision which shall declare the unlawful doubt. Nothing more is needed;
+policy asks no more.'[21]
+
+Definitely, then, the influence of the Popes restored to their ancient
+supremacy would be exercised in the renewal and consolidation of social
+order resting on the Christian faith, somewhat after this manner. The
+anarchic dogma of the sovereignty of peoples, having failed to do
+anything beyond showing that the greatest evils resulting from obedience
+do not equal the thousandth part of those which result from rebellion,
+would be superseded by the practice of appeals to the authority of the
+Holy See. Do not suppose that the Revolution is at an end, or that the
+column is replaced because it is raised up from the ground. A man must
+be blind not to see that all the sovereignties in Europe are growing
+weak; on all sides confidence and affection are deserting them; sects
+and the spirit of individualism are multiplying themselves in an
+appalling manner. There are only two alternatives: you must either
+purify the will of men, or else you must enchain it; the monarch who
+will not do the first, must enslave his subjects or perish; servitude or
+spiritual unity is the only choice open to nations. On the one hand is
+the gross and unrestrained tyranny of what in modern phrase is styled
+Imperialism, and on the other a wise and benevolent modification of
+temporal sovereignty in the interests of all by an established and
+accepted spiritual power. No middle path lies before the people of
+Europe. Temporal absolutism we must have. The only question is whether
+or no it shall be modified by the wise, disinterested, and moderating
+counsels of the Church, as given by her consecrated chief.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There can be very little doubt that the effective way in which De
+Maistre propounded and vindicated this theory made a deep impression on
+the mind of Comte. Very early in his career this eminent man had
+declared: 'De Maistre has for me the peculiar property of helping me to
+estimate the philosophic capacity of people, by the repute in which they
+hold him.' Among his other reasons at that time for thinking well of M.
+Guizot was that, notwithstanding his transcendent Protestantism, he
+complied with the test of appreciating De Maistre.[22] Comte's rapidly
+assimilative intelligence perceived that here at last there was a
+definite, consistent, and intelligible scheme for the reorganisation of
+European society, with him the great end of philosophic endeavour. Its
+principle of the division of the spiritual and temporal powers, and of
+the relation that ought to subsist between the two, was the base of
+Comte's own scheme.
+
+In general form the plans of social reconstruction are identical; in
+substance, it need scarcely be said, the differences are fundamental.
+The temporal power, according to Comte's design, is to reside with
+industrial chiefs, and the spiritual power to rest upon a doctrine
+scientifically established. De Maistre, on the other hand, believed that
+the old authority of kings and Christian pontiffs was divine, and any
+attempt to supersede it in either case would have seemed to him as
+desperate as it seemed impious. In his strange speculation on _Le
+Principe Generateur des Constitutions Politiques_, he contends that all
+laws in the true sense of the word (which by the way happens to be
+decidedly an arbitrary and exclusive sense) are of supernatural origin,
+and that the only persons whom we have any right to call legislators,
+are those half-divine men who appear mysteriously in the early history
+of nations, and counterparts to whom we never meet in later days.
+Elsewhere he maintains to the same effect, that royal families in the
+true sense of the word 'are growths of nature, and differ from others,
+as a tree differs from a shrub.'
+
+People suppose a family to be royal because it reigns; on the contrary,
+it reigns because it is royal, because it has more life, _plus d'esprit
+royal_--surely as mysterious and occult a force as the _virtus
+dormitiva_ of opium. The common life of man is about thirty years; the
+average duration of the reigns of European sovereigns, being Christian,
+is at the very lowest calculation twenty. How is it possible that 'lives
+should be only thirty years, and reigns from twenty-two to twenty-five,
+if princes had not more common life than other men?' Mark again, the
+influence of religion in the duration of sovereignties. All the
+Christian reigns are longer than all the non-Christian reigns, ancient
+and modern, and Catholic reigns have been longer than Protestant reigns.
+The reigns in England, which averaged more than twenty-three years
+before the Reformation, have only been seventeen years since that, and
+those of Sweden, which were twenty-two, have fallen to the same figure
+of seventeen. Denmark, however, for some unknown cause does not appear
+to have undergone this law of abbreviation; so, says De Maistre with
+rather unwonted restraint, let us abstain from generalising. As a matter
+of fact, however, the generalisation was complete in his own mind, and
+there was nothing inconsistent with his view of the government of the
+universe in the fact that a Catholic prince should live longer than a
+Protestant; indeed such a fact was the natural condition of his view
+being true. Many differences among the people who hold to the
+theological interpretation of the circumstances of life arise from the
+different degrees of activity which they variously attribute to the
+intervention of God, from those who explain the fall of a sparrow to the
+ground by a special and direct energy of the divine will, up to those
+at the opposite end of the scale, who think that direct participation
+ended when the universe was once fairly launched. De Maistre was of
+those who see the divine hand on every side and at all times. If, then,
+Protestantism was a pernicious rebellion against the faith which God had
+provided for the comfort and salvation of men, why should not God be
+likely to visit princes, as offenders with the least excuse for their
+backslidings, with the curse of shortness of days?
+
+In a trenchant passage De Maistre has expounded the Protestant
+confession of faith, and shown what astounding gaps it leaves as an
+interpretation of the dealings of God with man. 'By virtue of a terrible
+anathema,' he supposes the Protestant to say, 'inexplicable no doubt,
+but much less inexplicable than incontestable, the human race lost all
+its rights. Plunged in mortal darkness, it was ignorant of all, since it
+was ignorant of God; and, being ignorant of him, it could not pray to
+him, so that it was spiritually dead without being able to ask for life.
+Arrived by rapid degradation at the last stage of debasement, it
+outraged nature by its manners, its laws, even by its religions. It
+consecrated all vices, it wallowed in filth, and its depravation was
+such that the history of those times forms a dangerous picture, which it
+is not good for all men so much as to look upon. God, however, _having
+dissembled for forty centuries_, bethought him of his creation. At the
+appointed moment announced from all time, he did not despise a virgin's
+womb; he clothed himself in our unhappy nature, and appeared on the
+earth; we saw him, we touched him, he spoke to us; he lived, he taught,
+he suffered, he died for us. He arose from his tomb according to his
+promise; he appeared again among us, solemnly to assure to his Church a
+succour that would last as long as the world.
+
+'But, alas, this effort of almighty benevolence was a long way from
+securing all the success that had been foretold. For lack of knowledge,
+or of strength, or by distraction maybe, God missed his aim, and could
+not keep his word. Less sage than a chemist who should undertake to shut
+up ether in canvas or paper, he only confided to men the truth that he
+had brought upon the earth; it escaped, then, as one might have
+foreseen, by all human pores; soon, this holy religion revealed to man
+by the Man-God, became no more than an infamous idolatry, which would
+remain to this very moment if Christianity after sixteen centuries had
+not been suddenly brought back to its original purity by a couple of
+sorry creatures.'[23]
+
+Perhaps it would be easier than he supposed to present his own system in
+an equally irrational aspect. If you measure the proceedings of
+omnipotence by the uses to which a wise and benevolent man would put
+such superhuman power, if we can imagine a man of this kind endowed with
+it, De Maistre's theory of the extent to which a supreme being
+interferes in human things, is after all only a degree less ridiculous
+and illogical, less inadequate and abundantly assailable, than that
+Protestantism which he so heartily despised. Would it be difficult,
+after borrowing the account, which we have just read, of the tremendous
+efforts made by a benign creator to shed moral and spiritual light upon
+the world, to perplex the Catholic as bitterly as the Protestant, by
+confronting him both with the comparatively scanty results of those
+efforts, and with the too visible tendencies of all the foremost
+agencies in modern civilisation to leave them out of account as forces
+practically spent?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+De Maistre has been surpassed by no thinker that we know of as a
+defender of the old order. If anybody could rationalise the idea of
+supernatural intervention in human affairs, the idea of a Papal
+supremacy, the idea of a spiritual unity, De Maistre's acuteness and
+intellectual vigour, and, above all, his keen sense of the urgent social
+need of such a thing being done, would assuredly have enabled him to do
+it. In 1817, when he wrote the work in which this task is attempted, the
+hopelessness of such an achievement was less obvious than it is now. The
+Bourbons had been restored. The Revolution lay in a deep slumber that
+many persons excusably took for the quiescence of extinction. Legitimacy
+and the spiritual system that was its ally in the face of the
+Revolution, though mostly its rival or foe when they were left alone
+together, seemed to be restored to the fulness of their power. Fifty
+years have elapsed since then, and each year has seen a progressive
+decay in the principles which then were triumphant. It was not,
+therefore, without reason that De Maistre warned people against
+believing '_que la colonne est replacee, parcequ'elle est relevee_.' The
+solution which he so elaborately recommended to Europe has shown itself
+desperate and impossible. Catholicism may long remain a vital creed to
+millions of men, a deep source of spiritual consolation and refreshment,
+and a bright lamp in perplexities of conduct and morals; but resting on
+dogmas which cannot by any amount of compromise be incorporated with the
+daily increasing mass of knowledge, assuming as the condition of its
+existence forms of the theological hypothesis which all the
+preponderating influences of contemporary thought concur directly or
+indirectly in discrediting, upheld by an organisation which its history
+for the last five centuries has exposed to the distrust and hatred of
+men as the sworn enemy of mental freedom and growth, the pretensions of
+Catholicism to renovate society are among the most pitiable and impotent
+that ever devout, high-minded, and benevolent persons deluded themselves
+into maintaining or accepting. Over the modern invader it is as
+powerless as paganism was over the invaders of old. The barbarians of
+industrialism, grasping chiefs and mutinous men, give no ear to priest
+or pontiff, who speak only dead words, who confront modern issues with
+blind eyes, and who stretch out a palsied hand to help. Christianity,
+according to a well-known saying, has been tried and failed; the
+religion of Christ remains to be tried. One would prefer to qualify the
+first clause, by admitting how much Christianity has done for Europe
+even with its old organisation, and to restrict the charge of failure
+within the limits of the modern time. To-day its failure is too patent.
+Whether in changed forms and with new supplements the teaching of its
+founder is destined to be the chief inspirer of that social and human
+sentiment which seems to be the only spiritual bond capable of uniting
+men together again in a common and effective faith, is a question which
+it is unnecessary to discuss here. '_They talk about the first centuries
+of Christianity_,' said De Maistre, '_I would not be sure that they are
+over yet_.' Perhaps not; only if the first centuries are not yet over,
+it is certain that the Christianity of the future will have to be so
+different from the Christianity of the past, as to demand or deserve
+another name.
+
+Even if Christianity, itself renewed, could successfully encounter the
+achievement of renewing society, De Maistre's ideal of a spiritual power
+controlling the temporal power, and conciliating peoples with their
+rulers by persuasion and a coercion only moral, appears to have little
+chance of being realised. The separation of the two powers is sealed,
+with a completeness that is increasingly visible. The principles on
+which the process of the emancipation of politics is being so rapidly
+carried on, demonstrate that the most marked tendencies of modern
+civilisation are strongly hostile to a renewal in any imaginable shape,
+or at any future time, of a connection whether of virtual subordination
+or nominal equality, which has laid such enormous burdens on the
+consciences and understandings of men. If the Church has the uppermost
+hand, except in primitive times, it destroys freedom; if the State is
+supreme, it destroys spirituality. The free Church in the free State is
+an idea that every day more fully recommends itself to the public
+opinion of Europe, and the sovereignty of the Pope, like that of all
+other spiritual potentates, can only be exercised over those who choose
+of their own accord to submit to it; a sovereignty of a kind which De
+Maistre thought not much above anarchy.
+
+To conclude, De Maistre's mind was of the highest type of those who fill
+the air with the arbitrary assumptions of theology, and the abstractions
+of the metaphysical stage of thought. At every point you meet the
+peremptorily declared volition of a divine being, or the ontological
+property of a natural object. The French Revolution is explained by the
+will of God; and the kings reign because they have the _esprit royal_.
+Every truth is absolute, not relative; every explanation is universal,
+not historic. These differences in method and point of view amply
+explain his arrival at conclusions that seem so monstrous to men who
+look upon all knowledge as relative, and insist that the only possible
+road to true opinion lies away from volitions and abstractions in the
+positive generalisations of experience. There can be no more
+satisfactory proof of the rapidity with which we are leaving these
+ancient methods, and the social results which they produced, than the
+willingness with which every rightly instructed mind now admits how
+indispensable were the first, and how beneficial the second. Those can
+best appreciate De Maistre and his school, what excellence lay in their
+aspirations, what wisdom in their system, who know most clearly why
+their aspirations were hopeless, and what makes their system an
+anachronism.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[10] De Maistre forgot or underestimated the services of Leo the
+Isaurian whose repulse of the Caliph's forces at Constantinople (A.D.
+717) was perhaps as important for Europe as the more renowned victory of
+Charles Martel. But then Leo was an Iconoclast and heretic. Cf. Finlay's
+_Byzantine Empire_, pp. 22, 23.
+
+[11] _Du Pape_, bk. iii. c. iv. p. 298 (ed. 1866).
+
+[12] _Du Pape_, bk. iv. c. vii.
+
+[13] A remark of Mr. Finlay's is worth quoting here. 'The Greeks,' he
+says, 'had at times only a secondary share in the ecclesiastical
+controversies in the Eastern Church, though the circumstance of these
+controversies having been carried on in the Greek language has made the
+natives of Western Europe attribute them to a philosophic, speculative,
+and polemic spirit, inherent in the Hellenic mind. A very slight
+examination of history is sufficient to prove that several of the
+heresies which disturbed the Eastern Church had their origin in the more
+profound religious ideas of the oriental nations, and that many of the
+opinions called heretical were in a great measure expressions of the
+mental nationality of the Syrians, Armenians, Egyptians, and Persians,
+and had no conception whatever with the Greek mind.'--_Byzantine Empire,
+from 716 to 1057_, p. 262.
+
+The same writer (p. 263) remarks very truly, that 'the religious or
+theological portion of Popery, as a section of the Christian Church, is
+really Greek; and it is only the ecclesiastical, political, and
+theoretic peculiarities of the fabric which can be considered as the
+work of the Latin Church.'
+
+[14] Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen in the _Saturday Review_, Sept. 9, 1865,
+p. 334.
+
+[15] _Du Pape_, bk. i. c. i. p. 17.
+
+[16] _Ib._ bk. i. c. xix. pp. 124, 125.
+
+[17] _Ib._ bk. i. c. xvi. p. 111.
+
+[18] '_Il n'y a point de souverainete qui pour le bonheur des hommes, et
+pour le sien surtout, ne soit bornee de quelque maniere, mais dans
+l'interieur de ces bornes, placees comme il plait a Dieu, elle est
+toujours et partout absolue et tenue pour infaillible. Et quand je parle
+de l'exercice legitime de la souverainete, je n'entends point ou je ne
+dis point l'exercice_ juste, _ce qui produirait une amphibologie
+dangereuse, a moins que par ce dernier mot on ne veuille dire que tout
+ce qu'elle opine dans son cercle est_ juste ou tenu pour tel, _ce qui
+est la verite. C'est ainsi qu'un tribunal supreme, tant qu'il ne sort
+pas de ses attributions, est toujours juste_; car c'est la meme chose
+DANS LA PRATIQUE, d'etre infaillible, ou de se tromper sans appel.'--Bk.
+ii. c. xi. p. 212 (footnote).
+
+[19] Thomassin, the eminent French theologian, flourished from the
+middle to the end of the seventeenth century. The aim of his writings
+generally was to reconcile conflicting opinions on discipline or
+doctrine by exhibiting a true sense in all. In this spirit he wrote on
+the Pope and the Councils, and on the never-ending question of Grace.
+Among other things, he insisted that all languages could be traced to
+the Hebrew. He wrote a defence of the edict in which Lewis XIV. revoked
+the Edict of Nantes, contending that it was less harsh than some of the
+decrees of Theodosius and Justinian, which the holiest fathers of the
+Church had not scrupled to approve--an argument which would now be
+thought somewhat too dangerous for common use, as cutting both ways.
+Gibbon made use of his _Discipline de l'Eglise_ in the twentieth
+chapter, and elsewhere.
+
+[20] _Du Pape_, bk. i. c. xviii. p. 122.
+
+[21] Bk. i. c. xvii. p. 117.
+
+[22] Littre, _Auguste Comte et la Phil. Posit._ p. 152.
+
+[23] _Du Pape_, Conclusion, p. 380.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+END OF VOL. II.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.
+
+
+Transcribers' Notes:
+
+Minor printer errors (omitted quotation marks) have been amended without
+note. Other errors have been amended and are listed below.
+
+OE/oe ligatures have not been retained in this version.
+
+List of Amendments:
+
+Page 305: lights amended to rights; "... freedom, of equal rights, and
+by ..."
+
+Page 329: impressisn amended to impression; "... theory made a deep
+impression on the mind ..."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley
+
+*** 
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