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 Fénelon, 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 déchirent 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, plongés dans les délices?
Lisbonne est abîmée, et l'on danse à 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 prouvée par le genre de preuve qui lui appartient,
l'objection quelconque,_ MÊME INSOLUBLE, _ne doit plus être écoutée._'
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 à vous répondre qu'Archimède brûla 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] _Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg_ (8th ed. 1862), vol. i. pp. 238-243.
[4] _Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, 6ième entretien_, i. 397-442.
[5] _Ib._ (8th ed. 1862) vol. i. p. 403.
[6] _Soirées_, i. 76
[7] De Maistre found a curiously characteristic kind of support for this
view in the fact that evils are called _fléaux_: 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
(_Soirées, 2ième 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.