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 souveraineté qui pour le bonheur des hommes, et
pour le sien surtout, ne soit bornée de quelque manière, mais dans
l'intérieur de ces bornes, placées comme il plaît à Dieu, elle est
toujours et partout absolue et tenue pour infaillible. Et quand je parle
de l'exercice légitime de la souveraineté, je n'entends point ou je ne
dis point l'exercice_ juste, _ce qui produirait une amphibologie
dangereuse, à 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 vérité. C'est ainsi qu'un tribunal suprême, tant qu'il ne sort
pas de ses attributions, est toujours juste_; car c'est la même chose
DANS LA PRATIQUE, d'être 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] Littré, _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