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.