Part 10

"I myself have no doubt on the subject. Outwardly, he is formed like ourselves; but he is an abnormal being, and it is only a special act of creative power which can add such a member to the human family. He is like a world in himself. All shun him; his house stands in a desert place, every one withdrawing as far as possible from the spot where he lives with his mate and his young ones, whose voices are the only cheerful human sounds that fall upon his ear; but for them he would hear nothing but shrieks of agony.... A sinister signal is given. One of the lowest menials of justice knocks at his door and informs him that his services are required; he sets off; he arrives at a public place where human beings are crowding together in excited expectancy. A prisoner--a parricide, a committer of sacrilege--is flung at his feet; he seizes this man, binds him to a cross which is lying on the ground, then raises his arm--the terrible silence that follows is only broken by the sound of the crashing of bones under the blows of the iron mace and the screams of the victim. He unbinds the man; he carries him to the wheel; the broken limbs are twined round its spokes, the head hangs down, the hair stands on end, and from the mouth, open like the opening of a glowing furnace, there come at intervals a few broken syllables of entreaty for death.--He has finished his task; his heart is beating, but it is with pleasure; he is satisfied with his work; he says in his heart: No man breaks on the wheel better than I. He comes down from the scaffold and holds out his bloody hand, into which, from as great a distance as possible, the official whose duty it is to pay him flings a few gold pieces, with which he marches off between two rows of human beings who shrink from him with horror. He sits down to table and eats; he goes to bed and sleeps; and when he awakes next morning his thoughts run on everything but his occupation of the day before. Is he a man? Yes. God allows him to enter His temples and accepts his prayer. He is no criminal, and yet in no human language is he called honourable or estimable."

"Nevertheless all greatness, all power, all order depend upon the executioner. He is the terror of human society and the tie that holds it together. Take away this incomprehensible force, and that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, and states disappear. God, who is the source of the power of the ruler, is also the source of punishment; He has suspended our world upon these two poles, for the Lord is the Lord of the poles, and round them He sets the world revolving."

And in order that this reverence for the office of the executioner which it is in keeping with his plan to inculcate, and which it entertains him to astound with, may make a proper impression on the reader, De Maistre takes up the subject again in one of the later conversations. He asks what a reasoning being coming from another world to investigate into the conditions prevailing in ours would think of the executioner, and himself gives the answer: "He is an august being, the corner-stone of society. Since crime has undoubtedly taken up its abode upon earth, and since it can only be kept in check by punishment, it is plain that, if the executioner disappeared, all order would disappear with him. And what greatness of soul, what noble disinterestedness must we presume that man to be possessed of who takes upon himself the execution of a task which, though certainly a very honourable one, is most painful and repugnant to human nature, &c."

In these utterances we have at one and the same time the delight in consistency which is to be observed in the earliest nineteenth-century devotees of the principle of authority, the delight in a disconcerting idea which is one of De Maistre's own chief mental characteristics, and the delight in describing suffering which he has in common with Görres and so many of the other champions of the gloomy doctrine of the necessary subjection of humanity to kings and priests.

De Maistre resents hearing men so often talk as if crime went unpunished. What do they mean by this? "For whom are the gallows, the knout, the wheel, and the stake and fagot provided? Surely for the criminal." Justice may sometimes miscarry, but such exceptions do not alter the rule. It is folly to believe in all the judicial murders one hears talked about. Take the frequently quoted case of Calas. Nothing is more doubtful than his innocence.

The very fact that Voltaire defended him speaks against it.

But given the worst--that an innocent man is deprived of his life--why, it is simply a misfortune like any other. When a guilty man escapes we have another exception and misfortune of the same kind. The events which lead to the discovery of a crime are, however, often so unexpected and improbable that we cannot but believe that human justice is supported by higher aid. And all the time that we are foolishly blaming human justice for having punished an innocent man, nothing is more probable than that he really is guilty, though of some other, unknown crime. Many such cases are on record, the truth coming to light through the confession of the criminals. De Maistre, we observe, understands how to extricate himself from a difficulty.

Something of the same nature holds good in the matter of sickness. Its injustice, too, is only apparent. If every kind of intemperance could be prevented, most, nay, in reality all diseases would be done away with. This inference may be arrived at by arguing as follows: If there were no moral evil in the world there would be no physical evil, and since an infinite number of diseases are direct consequences of certain offences, it is permissible to generalise and say that this holds good of them all.

Everything, then, is ordered upon moral principles. It is undeniable that life is a terrible thing, but this does not prove that God is unjust; he is offended, he is insulted, and to appease his anger blood is required. Man early comprehended his own fall, early understood that it is the innocent who must and alone can, by the transference of merit, atone for the sins of the guilty, that there is no salvation without the shedding of sacrificial blood.

Hence the idea of sacrifice is one of perpetual and keen interest to De Maistre. Sacrifice is ideal slaughter, slaughter the one and only aim of which is the accomplishment of what is right and meet. From the earliest ages men have offered both animal and human sacrifices; and in Christianity the practice is sanctified and acquires a deeper meaning. Here it is not any chance and possibly guilty individual who is the victim, but a being who is elected to die because of his innocence. This, therefore, is ideal sacrifice.

All this is undoubtedly an offence to reason. But contrariety to reason is the sign and seal of truth. The theory which is the most obviously reasonable is the theory which never stands the test of practice. Nothing could be more obviously reasonable than the whole philosophy of the eighteenth century, with its faith in man and its liberalism. But its very reasonableness bespeaks its superficiality. It satisfies reason; but experience opens men's eyes to its futility. Nothing seems more self-evident than that man is born free. Yet when Rousseau writes: "Man is born free, nevertheless he is everywhere in fetters," he does not notice that he is not only writing nonsense, but distinctly affirming that he is doing so. It would be quite as sensible to say; Sheep are born carnivorous, nevertheless they everywhere live on vegetable food. In the same way, nothing is theoretically more unreasonable than hereditary monarchy. If, without any previous experience, men were called on to choose a government, that man would be thought mad who hesitated to give an elective monarchy the preference over a hereditary one. And yet we know from experience that the latter is the best, the former the worst form of government. In other words, the world, far from being a reasonable world, is full of things that are profoundly at variance with reason.

Christianity, the Christian conception of life, is therefore no new, hitherto unknown conception. It is connected by many links with the whole succession of heathen religions, and is prepared for by them. All the truths of Christianity are foreshadowed in the creeds of heathendom. In heathen sacrificial practices, for instance, we already have the essential idea of sacrifice. And De Maistre waxes wroth over Voltaire's violent, irreligious tirades against the sacrificial festivals of the old pagans. He is yet more exasperated when, at the end of a description of a sacrifice of both adults and children, he comes upon the words; "However, the sacrifices of the Inquisition, of which we have so often spoken, are a hundred times more execrable."

It is apropos of this utterance that (in his essay _Éclaircissement sur les sacrifices_) De Maistre first takes up the cudgels for the Inquisition, to the defence of which institution he was ere long to devote a special work. He writes: "The passage relating to the Inquisition appears to have been written during an attack of delirium. What! The lawful execution of a small number of human beings, condemned to death by a fully qualified court of justice according to the strict letter of a penal law which had previously been solemnly proclaimed, and which each one of the victims was perfectly free to avoid transgressing--to call such an execution a hundred times more abominable than the horrible act of the parents who cast their children into the flaming arms of Moloch! What wild insanity! What forgetfulness of all reason, all justice, all shame!" De Maistre storms thus because he is here attacking the man who was his opposite, and who fought, like himself, with the weapons of wit and paradox, but wielded them with far greater power.

Founding his theory of the state upon the basis of religion, De Maistre derived the power of the ruler from God. It is from God that kings receive their rights, and to God that they owe duty. It is not the king's power but his duty that is absolute, for it is duty to the Absolute. The rights of the people may be called the duty of the king to God. In the proverb: "The voice of the people is the voice of God," there is this truth, that the rights of the people are the rights of God in His relation to the king. And "the voice of God" is not a mere figure of speech; the living voice of God speaks through the church. The king is responsible to God, and the church is the depositary of divine truth. But the church, as well as the state, is under the rule of an autocrat. As the state means the king, advised and guided by the great men of his country, so the church means the Pope, advised and guided by cardinals and bishops. The very idea of sovereignty implies that the king is absolute, the Pope infallible. People are not surprised that the captain of a ship should be, as such, an infallible sovereign, should permit no criticism of his orders, should issue unqualified commands and require them to be obeyed blindly; yet they are surprised that in all church matters the Pope should be infallible. They are accustomed to the idea that all the other courts of justice, low and high, are submitted to the jurisdiction of a highest court, the judgments of which are irreversible and may not be criticised; yet they are astonished that the Pope, as head of the church, is infallible. If they had any conception of what sovereignty means, they would not be astonished. A skilful attempt, this of De Maistre's, to prove to laymen the reasonableness of ecclesiastical dogma.

In his book _Du Pape_, which Catholics consider a work of the first importance, he carries his reasoning on ecclesiastical matters to its logical conclusion.

This book was the outcome of the remorse he felt for having, at a trying moment, forgotten the reverence due to the head of the church. When, three years after the conclusion of the Concordat, the Pope went to Paris, at Napoleon's request, to anoint and crown him Emperor, Joseph de Maistre, the ardent royalist, was so incensed that in various letters to his court he used such language in writing of the Holy Father that his _Mémoires et correspondance diplomatique_ of these years were published by Cavour in 1858 with the view of depriving the papal power of a spiritual ally. In the course of a few years Napoleon and the Pope quarrelled, and when De Maistre saw the Pope insulted and ill-used by the Emperor, he repented his hasty words, and resolved to make ample reparation.

The fundamental idea of _Du Pape_ is that there is no human society without government, no government without sovereignty, and no sovereignty without infallibility. This attribute of infallibility is so indispensable that men are obliged to assume its existence even in secular societies (where it does not exist) on pain of seeing these societies dissolved. The church lays claim to no more than do the other authorities, although it has this immeasurable advantage over them, that its infallibility is not only taken for granted by man, but also guaranteed by God.

De Maistre writes: "A great and powerful nation has lately, before our own eyes, made the most strenuous efforts in the direction of liberty which the world has ever beheld. What has it gained by these? It has covered itself with ridicule and shame, and has ended by setting a Corsican gendarme on the throne of the kings of France." He shows how the Catholic religion necessarily forbids every kind of revolt, whereas Protestantism, which is a result of the sovereignty of the people, leaves the decision of everything to private feeling--a supposed species of moral instinct. "There is such accordance, such a strong family likeness, such interdependence between the papal and the kingly power that the former has never been shaken without the latter suffering too." As a proof of this he quotes the following utterance of Luther: "Princes are as a rule the greatest fools and the most arrant rogues on the face of the earth; nothing good can be expected from them; they are God's executioners, whom He employs to chastise us." He avers that Protestantism, which has no reverence for royalty, has no respect for marriage: "Had not Luther the audacity to write in his exposition of the book of Genesis (1525) that the example of the patriarchs leaves it an open question whether or not a man may have more than one wife, that the thing is neither sanctioned nor forbidden, and that he, for his part, will not take it upon him to decide one way or other?--edifying doctrine, of which practical application was soon made in the family of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel." (Luther gave his consent to this prince having two wives at the same time.)

In opposition to Rousseau's doctrine De Maistre maintains that man is by nature a slave, but that Christianity has, in a supernatural manner, emancipated him. For this reason he calls the Christian woman a truly supernatural being. Voltaire he without more ado calls the man "into whose hands hell has given all its power." And he puts the crowning touch to his work by propounding the following theory: "Monarchy is a _miracle_, and instead of reverencing it as such, we rail against it as tyranny. The soldier who does not kill a man when commanded to do so by his lawful sovereign is not less guilty than he who kills without having received orders to do so." Those states which have introduced Protestantism have been punished by the loss of their monarchs. De Maistre has discovered that the average length of reigns is shorter in Protestant than in Catholic countries. The one inexplicable exception to this rule is provided by Denmark, which is the only Protestant country whose sovereigns live as long after the Reformation as before it. "Denmark appears, from some unknown reason, but doubtless one honourable to the nation, to have been exempted from this law of the shortening of reigns."[1]

The fifth book of the earliest edition of _Du Pape_ was afterwards published as a separate work. It is the well-known _De l'Église Gallicane_, a treatise in which De Maistre draws from the doctrine of papal authority conclusions utterly subversive of the claim of the French church to relative independence. On this occasion he assumes an antagonistic and supercilious attitude towards Bossuet, a man for whom he generally has nothing but praise. The special object of his attack and invective is the Church Council held in France in 1682 for the purpose of strictly defining the limits of the Pope's power. He is almost as much incensed against that of 1700, which pronounced Jesuits and Jansenists to be equally blameworthy. It is to a life-long enthusiasm that De Maistre here gives expression. From his youth he had been the devoted friend, admirer, and supporter of the Jesuits. His diplomatic letters from Russia tell of his constant endeavours to be of assistance to them in their difficult position as Roman Catholics in a Greek Catholic country, of his anxiety to shield them when the court is exasperated by their efforts to convert members of the aristocracy, &c, &c. He now, as their champion, attacks Pascal. His attack is not made from the standpoint of philosophy, as it easily might have been, in so far as their sensible apprehension of the fact that there can be no other morality except morality of intention gives the Jesuits in certain ways the advantage over the man of genius who impeached them. Nor is his defence of the Jesuits conducted altogether from the standpoint of the man of the world, as it might well have been, in so far as the Jesuits, with their modification of principles and their practical indulgence, have followed the prudent rule that it is unwise to alarm and better to have some of the moral law fulfilled by demanding little than none by demanding all. He contents himself with maintaining that the Jesuit treatises on morality attacked by Pascal are obsolete, unread books, which Pascal dragged from their mouldy obscurity with the sole aim of insulting and injuring an order, the strict morality and stern self-discipline of which even its enemies had been forced to admit. Then, by way of variety taking up for a moment the standpoint of the worldling, he remarks humorously: "It is, when we come to think of it, very comical that we worldlings should take upon us to inveigh against the _lax morality_ of the Jesuits. This much is certain, that the whole aspect of society would be changed if every member of it acted up even to Escobar's moral standard, and were guilty of no shortcomings other than those excused by him."

It was very natural that the energetic champion of the ideas of the past should, towards the close of his career, make a special effort to clear the reputation of the great, misunderstood, misjudged Inquisition. This he did in his _Letters to a Russian Nobleman on the Subject of the Spanish Inquisition_. In these letters De Maistre says everything that can be said in vindication and in honour of the Inquisition; yet in reading them we are irresistibly reminded of the remark of the old tiger in the _Hitopadesa_: "Nevertheless," says the tiger, "nevertheless, it is difficult to prove the falsehood of the report that tigers eat men." De Maistre shows that many of the assertions made of the Inquisition are incorrect; he proves, for instance, that it was a secular, not an ecclesiastical court of justice. But the only part of the book that has any attraction for us is that in which he defends its proceedings. He says: "In Spain and Portugal, as elsewhere, every man who lives quietly is unmolested; as to the rash person who attempts to teach others what to believe, or who disturbs public order, he has only himself to blame.... The modern propagator of heretical doctrine, haranguing at his ease in his own room, is quite untroubled by the knowledge that Luther's line of argument produced the Thirty Years' War; but the old legislators, who knew the price men might have to pay for these fatal doctrines, most justly punished with death a crime which was capable of shaking society to its foundations and bathing it in blood.... It is thanks to the Inquisition that for the last three hundred years there has been more happiness and peace in Spain than anywhere else in Europe."

To the _Letters_ De Maistre has prefixed a quotation, which is to the effect that all great men have been intolerant, and that it is right to be so. "Let him who comes across a well-intentioned sovereign," says Grimm, the Encyclopedist, "preach tolerance in matters of faith to him, so that he may fall into the snare, and, by his toleration, give the persecuted party time to recover and prepare itself, when its turn of power comes, to crush its opponent. Voltaire's discourse, with its babble of tolerance, is a discourse only for simpletons and those who allow themselves to be fooled, or for people who have no interest in the matter."

A gross fallacy conceals itself in this argument. Every genuine, overpowering enthusiasm naturally makes tolerance impossible. Yet Voltaire's doctrine is none the less valid because of this. The difficulty is easy of solution. The principle of intolerance is the theoretical, that of tolerance the practical, principle. In theory no consideration, no toleration, no mercy! For error must be crushed and torn asunder, follies must be blown from the cannon's mouth, and lies flayed alive. But what about the liar, and the fool, and the erring one? Are they also to be hewn asunder, or flayed alive, or blown from the cannon's mouth? They are to go their way. The domain of real life is the domain of tolerance.

De Maistre's _Examen de la philosophie de Bacon_ was not published until after its author's death. It is the most disputatious and tedious of his works, and one in which the combative champion of Christianity is plainly grappling with a subject that is beyond his powers. He desired to confute Bacon because he believed that the ungodliness of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century was entirely to be ascribed to his influence; and he falls upon him with positive theological fury, attacking all his theories--his theory of consciousness, of nature, of light, of the weather, of the soul, of religion; attacking him where he is right, and where, for once in a way, he is wrong; finding him out in immaterial and merely superficial inconsistencies; pointing out defects in his Latin and in his taste; fighting in a noisy, violent, dogmatic manner, with weapons drawn from the arsenals of supernaturalism and tradition. In single chapters, such as that on _Causes Finales_, he displays a certain futile acuteness; in others, such as that entitled _Union de la Religion et de la Science_, cold-blooded fanaticism. In this latter chapter we read: "Science undoubtedly has its value, but it is necessary that it should be kept within bounds.... It has been very aptly said that science resembles fire: confined to the hearths which are destined to receive it, it is man's most useful and powerful servant; left to the hazard of chance, it is a terrible scourge."