Even if Christianity, itself renewed, could successfully encounter the 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:
[1] See Damiron’s La Philosophie en France au XIXième Siècle. Introduction to Vol. I. (Fifth edition.)
[2] The facts of De Maistre’s life I have drawn from a very meagre biography by his son, Count Rodolphe de Maistre, supplemented by two volumes of Lettres et Opuscules (Fourth edition. Paris: Vaton. 1865), and a volume of his Diplomatic Correspondence, edited by M. Albert Blanc.
[3] Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg (8th ed. 1862), vol. i. pp. 238-243.
[4] Soirées de Saint Pétersbourg, 6ième entretien, i. 397-442.
[5] Ib. (8th ed. 1862) vol. i. p. 403.
[6] Soirées, i. 76
[7] De Maistre found a curiously characteristic kind of support for this view in the fact that evils are called fléaux: flails are things to beat with: so evils must be things with which men are beaten; and as we should not be beaten if we did not deserve it, argal, suffering is a merited punishment. Apart from that common infirmity which leads people after they have discovered an analogy between two things, to argue from the properties of the one to those of the other, as if, instead of being analogous, they were identical, De Maistre was particularly fond of inferring moral truths from etymologies. He has an argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirées, 2ième entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others of the same quality.