Anathemas and Admirations (18 page)

Saint-Simon, according to Sainte-Beuve, suggests a mélange of Shakespeare and Tacitus; for us, de Maistre would evoke — a less felicitous mixture — Cardinal Bellarmine and Voltaire, a theologian and a litterateur. If we cite the name of the great controversialist, that professional of quibbling who raged against Protestantism in the sixteenth century, it is because de Maistre, with more verve and more spirit, was to wage the same campaign: was he not, in some sense, the last representative of the Counter-Reformation?

Contemplating his transports against the new “sects,” we sometimes wonder if there is not a degree of humor in all this deployment of rage: is it conceivable that in writing certain diatribes, de Maistre was not conscious of the enormities he was uttering? And yet (we can never say it often enough) it is these enormities that rescue his works and lure us to read them still When, on the subject of an assertion of Bacon’s, he exclaims, “No, never since
Fiat Lux
was spoken has the human ear heard anything equal,” such extravagance delights us, as does this: “The priests have preserved everything, have revived everything, and have taught us everything,” An insane assertion whose savor is undeniable: in making it, did the author become the accomplice of our smiles? And when he assures us that the Pope is the “demiurge of civilization,” does he intend to divert us, or is this what he truly thinks? It would be simplest to admit that he was sincere; moreover, we discern not the slightest trace of charlatanism in his life: lucidity, in his case, never went to the lengths of imposture or farce. . . . That is the sole failing in his sense of excess.

There was in this conservative who destroyed in the name of tradition, in this fanatic by discipline and by method, a desire to possess unshakable convictions, a need to be all of a piece, “I fall into an idea as from a precipice,” complained a sick man; de Maistre could have said as much, though with this difference, that he
longed
to fall there, that he burned to be engulfed, and that like certain aggressive thinkers, enraged thinkers, he was impatient to take us down with him — abyssal proselytism that is the mark of fanaticism, innate or acquired. His, though acquired, the result of effort and deliberation he assimilated perfectly, and made it his organic reality. Nailed to the absolute out of hatred of a century that had called everything into question, he would go too far in the other direction and, out of fear or doubt, would erect deliberate blindness into a system. Never to be short of illusions, to obnubilate himself: such was his dream. He had the good fortune to realize it.

Despite his moments of clairvoyance, he was nonetheless mistaken in many of his expectations. The mission of France, he imagined, was the religious regeneration of humanity. France turned to secularity. ... He predicted the end of schisms, the return of the separated churches to Catholicism, the reconquest by the Sovereign Pontiff of his ancient privileges. Rome, abandoned to herself, is more modest, more timid, than ever. If he foresaw some of the convulsions that were to shake Europe, he did not divine those to which we are prey. But the nullity of his prophecies should not make us lose sight of the merits or the actuality of this theoretician of order and authority who, had he had the luck to be better known, would have been the inspiration of every form of political orthodoxy, the genius and the providence of all our century’s despotisms. His thought is incontestably alive today, but only to the degree that it repels or disconcerts: the more we frequent him, the more we are reminded, a contrario, of the delights of skepticism or of the crying need for a vindication of heresy.

3

Fractures

W
HEN ONE HAS EMERGED from the circle of errors and illusions within which actions are performed, taking a position is virtually an impossibility. A minimum of silliness is essential for everything, for affirming and even for denying.

To glimpse the essential, no need to ply a trade. Stay fiat on your back all day long, and moan. . . .

Whatever puts me at odds with the world is consubstantial with myself. How little I have learned from experience. My disappointments have always preceded me.

There exists an undeniable pleasure in knowing that everything you do has no real basis, that whether or not you commit an action is a matter of indifference. The fact nonetheless remains that in our daily gestures we compromise with Vacuity — that is, we turn and turn about, and occasionally, at the same time, we take the world as real and unreal. We mingle pure truths and sordid truths and this amalgam, the thinker’s disgrace, is the living man’s revenge.

It is not the violent evils that mark us but the secret, insistent tolerable ones belonging to our daily round and undermining us as conscientiously as Time itself.

After a quarter of an hour, no one can observe another’s despair without impatience.

Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, it is apparent that what he dreads most is being survived by his friends.

One can imagine everything, predict everything, save how low one can sink.

What still attaches me to things is a thirst inherited from ancestors who carried the curiosity to exist to the point of ignominy.