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 mediæval 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 Hébert, 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 Cæsar--_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 Fénelon 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,--'_espèce de moutons
enragés, toujours menés par la nature, et toujours par nature dévorant
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.