Anathemas and Admirations (13 page)

Divine or not, war, as it is treated in the
Soirées
, does not fail to exert a certain fascination upon us. This ceases to be true when it obsesses a second-order mind such as de Maistre’s Spanish disciple, Donoso Cortès: “War, God’s work, is good, as all His works are good; but a war can be disastrous and unjust, because it is the work of man’s free will.” “I have never been able to understand those who anathematize war. Such anathema is contrary to philosophy and to religion; those who pronounce it are neither philosophers nor Christians.”

The master’s thought, already established in an extreme position, scarcely tolerates the additional exaggeration afforded by the pupil. Bad causes require talent or temperament. The disciple, by definition, possesses neither.

In de Maistre, aggression is inspiration; hyperbole, innate knowledge. Carried to extremes, he dreams of nothing better than taking us with him. And so he manages to reconcile us to war, as he reconciles us to the executioner’s solitude, if not to the executioner himself. Christian by persuasion rather than by sentiment, quite alien to the figures of the New Testament, he secretly loves the pomp of intolerance, and it suits him to be intractable: is is for nothing that he grasped so thoroughly the spirit of the Revolution? And would he have managed to describe its vices had he not recognized them in himself? As an enemy of the Terror — and one never opposes with impunity an events an epoch, or an idea — he would have to combat it by steeping himself in it, assimilating it. His religious experience would be marked thereby: the obsession with blood prevails. Hence he is more attracted by the old God (“the God of hosts”) than by Christ, whom he always mentions in conventional, “sublime” phrases, and usually to justify the theory — interesting, though no more than that — of the reversibility of the sufferings of the innocent to the advantage of the guilty. Moreover, the only Christ who might have suited him is the figure of Spanish sculpture, sanguinolent, disfigured, convulsive, and pleased to the point of delirium by His crucifixion.

By packing God off, outside of the world and human affairs, by dispossessing Him of the virtues and faculties that would have allowed Him to make His presence and His authority felt, the deists had reduced Him to the level of an idea and a symbol, an abstract figuration of goodness and wisdom. After a century of “philosophy,” the point was to restore His ancient privileges, the status of tyrant that had been stripped from Him so pitilessly. Good, correct, He had ceased to be fearsome, losing all empire over men’s minds — an enormous danger, of which de Maistre was more conscious than any of his contemporaries and which he could rout only by insisting on the reestablishment of the “true” God, the terrible one. We understand nothing about religions if we suppose that man flees a capricious, wicked, and even ferocious divinity, or if we forget that he loves fear to the point of frenzy.

The problem of Evil actually troubles only a few sensitive souls, a few skeptics, repelled by the way in which the believer comes to terms with it or spirits it away. Hence it is to these that theodicies are primarily addressed, attempts to humanize God, frantic acrobatics that collapse and compromise themselves on this ground, constantly belied as they are by experience. Try as they will to be persuasive, they fail; they are declared suspect, incriminated, and asked for accountings, in the name of one piece of evidence — Evil — evidence that a de Maistre will attempt to deny. “Everything is Evil,” he instructs us; yet Evil, he hastens to add, comes down to a “purely negative” force that has nothing “in common with existence,” comes down to a “schism in being,” to an accident. Others will assert on the contrary that quite as constitutive of being as Good, and quite as real. Evil is nature, an essential ingredient of existence and anything but an accessory phenomenon, and that the problems Evil raises become insoluble as soon as we refuse to introduce it into the composition of the divine substance. Just as sickness is not an absence of health but a reality as positive and as lasting as health, in the same way Evil is worth as much as Good, even exceeds it in indestructibility and plenitude. Good and Evil principles coexist and mingle in God, as they coexist and mingle in the world. The notion of God’s culpability is not a gratuitous one, but necessary and perfectly compatible with the notion of His omnipotence: only such an idea confers some intelligibility on the historical process, on all it contains that is monstrous, mad, and absurd. To attribute goodness and purity to the creator of becoming is to abandon all comprehension of the majority of events, especially the most important one: the Creation. God could not avoid the influence of Evil, mainspring of actions, an agent indispensable to Whoever, exasperated by self-containment, aspires to emerge, to spread Himself and corrupt Himself in time. If Evil, the secret of our dynamism, were to withdraw from our lives, we should vegetate in that monotonous perfection of the Good which, according to Genesis, vexed Being itself. The combat between the two principles. Good and Evil, is waged on every level of existence, including eternity. We are plunged into the adventure of the Creation, one of the most dreadful of exploits, without “moral purposes” and perhaps without meaning; and though the idea and the initiative for it are God’s, we cannot reproach him for it, so great in our eyes is His prestige as the first guilty party. By making us His accomplices, He associated us with that vast movement of solidarity in Evil which sustains and affirms the universal confusion.

No doubt de Maistre would not participate in a doctrine grounded in reason to this degree: does he not propose to lend some verisimilitude to so audacious a theory as that of a divinity essentially and uniquely good? A difficult, even an unrealizable enterprise, which he hopes to bring off by overwhelming human nature: “. . . no man is punished as just, but always as a man, so that it is untrue to say that virtue suffers in this world: it is human nature that suffers, and that always deserves to do so.”

How can we require of the just man that he separate his quality as a man from his quality as just? No innocent person will go so far as to assert, “I am suffering as a man, not as a good man.” To propose such a dissociation is to commit a psychological error, is to be deceived as to the meaning of Job’s rebellion and not to understand that the plague-stricken man yielded to God less out of conviction than out of weariness. Nothing permits us to regard goodness as the major attribute of the divinity. De Maistre himself sometimes seems tempted to think as much. “What is an injustice of God with regard to man? Do you suppose there is some common legislator above God who has prescribed how He must act toward man? And what will be the nature of such a judge between Him and ourselves?” “The more terrible God seems to us, the more we must redouble our religious fear of Him, the more ardent and indefatigable our prayers must become: for there is no vindication that His goodness will suffice.” And he adds, in one of the most significant passages of the
Soirées
, these indiscreet considerations: “Since the proof of God precedes that of His attributes, we know
that
He is before knowing
what
He is. Thus we find ourselves in an empire whose sovereign has published once and for all the laws that rule the world. These laws are, in general, marked with the striking signs of wisdom and even of goodness; yet some (I suppose) seem harsh, even unjust; whereupon I ask all the malcontents, what should be done? Depart from the empire, perhaps? Impossible: it is everywhere, and nothing is outside it. Complain, sulk, write against the sovereign? Only to be thrashed or put to death. There is no better side to take than that of resignation and respect, I may even say of love; for, since we start from the supposition that the Master exists, and that He must absolutely be served, is it not better (whatever He be) to serve Him with love than without love?”

An unhoped-for avowal that would have delighted a Voltaire. Providence is unmasked, denounced, rendered suspect, by the very man who had put himself forward to celebrate its goodness, its honorable character. Admirable sincerity, the dangers of which de Maistre must have understood. Subsequently he will forget himself less and less and, as usual, returning the focus to man, will abandon the inculpation of God by rebellion, jeers, or despair. The better to reproach human nature for the evils it endures, he will forget that eminently untenable theory of the moral origin of diseases. “If there were no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil”; “. . . all suffering is a torment imposed for some crime, present or original”; “if I have made no distinction among diseases, it is because they are all punishments.”

This doctrine he derives from that of Original Sin, without which, he tells us, “one explains nothing.” But he is mistaken when he reduces Sin to a primitive transgression, to a concerted and immemorial fault, instead of seeing in it a flaw, a vice of nature; he is also mistaken when, after speaking correctly of an “original disease,” he attributes it to our iniquities, whereas it is, like Sin, inscribed in our very essence: primordial disorder, calamity affecting good and wicked, virtuous and vicious alike.

As long as he confines himself to describing the ills that overwhelm us, de Maistre is veracious; he strays from truth when he tries to explain and justify their distribution on earth. His observations seem to us exact; his theories and his value judgments, inhuman and erroneous. If, as he likes to think, diseases are punishments, then the hospitals are crammed with monsters and the incurable are by far the greatest criminals in existence. Let us not take apologetics to its ultimate position; let us show some indulgence with regard to those who, eager to disinculpate God, to put Him above suspicion, reserve to man alone the honor of having conceived Evil. ‘. . . Like all great ideas, that of the Fall accounts for everything and for nothings and it is quite as difficult to utilize as it is to do without. But finally, whether the Fall can be imputed to a fault or a fatality, to an action of moral order or to a metaphysical principle, the fact remains that it explains, at least in part, our erring ways, our inconclusiveness, our fruitless quests, the terrible singularity of beings, the role of disturber, of broken-down and inventive animal, that was assigned to each of us. And if it involves a number of points subject to caution, there is one, however, whose importance is incontestable: the one that traces our failure to our separation from the All. It could not escape de Maistre: “The more one examines the universe, the more one is inclined to believe that Evil proceeds from a certain division that cannot be explained, and that the return to Good depends on a contrary force that ceaselessly impels us toward a unity just as inconceivable.”

How to explain such division? Attribute it to the insinuation of Becoming within Being? To the infiltration of movement into the primordial unity? To a fatal shock given to the happy indistinction before there was time? Who knows? What seems certain is that “history” proceeds from a broken identity, from an initial laceration, source of the multiple, source of Evil.

The notion of Sin, associated with that of division, satisfies the mind only if used with caution, instead of in de Maistre’s fashion, for he quite arbitrarily proceeds to imagine a
second-order
Original Sin, responsible, he says, for the existence of the savage, that “descendant of a man detached from the great tree of civilization by an ordinary prevarication,” a fallen being who cannot be regarded “without reading the anathema written, I am not saying merely in his soul, but even upon the external form of his body,” “stricken in the last depths of his moral essence,” not at all like primitive man, for “with our intelligence, our morality, our sciences, and our arts, we are precisely to primitive man what the savage is to us.”

And our author, quick to hurl himself to the extremities of an idea, maintains that “the state of civilization and of knowledge in a certain sense is the natural and primitive state of man,” that the first humans, “marvelous” beings, having begun with a knowledge higher than ours, perceived the effects in the causes and found themselves in possession of “precious communications” dispensed by “beings of a higher order,” and that moreover certain peoples refractory to our mode of thought seem still to preserve the memory of “primitive knowledge” and of “the era of intuition.”

Thus we find civilization placed before history! This idolatry of beginnings, of a paradise already realized, this obsession with origins, is the very sign of “reactionary” or, if one prefers, “traditional” thought. We can certainly conceive of an “era of intuition,” yet only on condition that we do not identify it with civilization itself, which — in a break with the mode of intuitive knowledge — supposes complex relations between being and knowing, as well as man’s inaptitude for emerging from his own categories, a “civilized” person being by definition alien to essence, to the simultaneous perception of the immediate and the ultimate. It is playing with words to speak of a perfect civilization before the appearance of the conditions capable of making any civilization possible; we abusively enlarge the concept of civilization if we include the golden age within it. History, according to de Maistre, will bring us back — by the detour of Evil and Sin — to the unity of the paradisal age, to the “perfect” civilization to the secrets of “primitive knowledge.” What those secrets consisted of, we shall not be so indiscreet as to ask him: he has declared them impenetrable, the prerogative of “marvelous” men, no less impenetrable than they. De Maistre never offers a hypothesis without immediately treating it with all the considerations due to certainty; how could he doubt the existence of an immemorial knowledge when without it he could not “explain” to us the very first of all our catastrophes? The punishments being proportional to the guilty party’s knowledge, the Flood, he assures us, presupposes “unheard-of crimes,” and these crimes presuppose in their turn “knowledge infinitely superior to that which we possess.” A lovely and improbable theory, comparable to the one about savages, of which these are the terms: “A leader of a people having diluted the moral principle among them by a number of those prevarications which, to all appearances, are no longer possible in the present state of affairs because we fortunately no longer know enough to become guilty to this degree — this leader, then, transmitted the anathema to his posterity; and any constant force being by its nature accelerative, since it continually adds to itself, such degradation weighing continually upon the descendants has ultimately made them into what we call savages.”