Definitely, then, the influence of the Popes restored to their ancient supremacy would be exercised in the renewal and consolidation of social order resting on the Christian faith, somewhat after this manner. The anarchic dogma of the sovereignty of peoples, having failed to do anything beyond showing that the greatest evils resulting from obedience do not equal the thousandth part of those which result from rebellion, would be superseded by the practice of appeals to the authority of the Holy See. Do not suppose that the Revolution is at an end, or that the column is replaced because it is raised up from the ground. A man must be blind not to see that all the sovereignties in Europe are growing weak; on all sides confidence and affection are deserting them; sects and the spirit of individualism are multiplying themselves in an appalling manner. There are only two alternatives: you must either purify the will of men, or else you must enchain it; the monarch who will not do the first, must enslave his subjects or perish; servitude or spiritual unity is the only choice open to nations. On the one hand is the gross and unrestrained tyranny of what in modern phrase is styled Imperialism, and on the other a wise and benevolent modification of temporal sovereignty in the interests of all by an established and accepted spiritual power. No middle path lies before the people of Europe. Temporal absolutism we must have. The only question is whether or no it shall be modified by the wise, disinterested, and moderating counsels of the Church, as given by her consecrated chief.
There can be very little doubt that the effective way in which De Maistre propounded and vindicated this theory made a deep impression on the mind of Comte. Very early in his career this eminent man had declared: ‘De Maistre has for me the peculiar property of helping me to estimate the philosophic capacity of people, by the repute in which they hold him.’ Among his other reasons at that time for thinking well of M. Guizot was that, notwithstanding his transcendent Protestantism, he complied with the test of appreciating De Maistre.[22] Comte’s rapidly assimilative intelligence perceived that here at last there was a definite, consistent, and intelligible scheme for the reorganisation of European society, with him the great end of philosophic endeavour. Its principle of the division of the spiritual and temporal powers, and of the relation that ought to subsist between the two, was the base of Comte’s own scheme.
In general form the plans of social reconstruction are identical; in substance, it need scarcely be said, the differences are fundamental. The temporal power, according to Comte’s design, is to reside with industrial chiefs, and the spiritual power to rest upon a doctrine scientifically established. De Maistre, on the other hand, believed that the old authority of kings and Christian pontiffs was divine, and any attempt to supersede it in either case would have seemed to him as desperate as it seemed impious. In his strange speculation on Le Principe Générateur des Constitutions Politiques, he contends that all laws in the true sense of the word (which by the way happens to be decidedly an arbitrary and exclusive sense) are of supernatural origin, and that the only persons whom we have any right to call legislators, are those half-divine men who appear mysteriously in the early history of nations, and counterparts to whom we never meet in later days. Elsewhere he maintains to the same effect, that royal families in the true sense of the word ‘are growths of nature, and differ from others, as a tree differs from a shrub.’
People suppose a family to be royal because it reigns; on the contrary, it reigns because it is royal, because it has more life, plus d’esprit royal—surely as mysterious and occult a force as the virtus dormitiva of opium. The common life of man is about thirty years; the average duration of the reigns of European sovereigns, being Christian, is at the very lowest calculation twenty. How is it possible that ‘lives should be only thirty years, and reigns from twenty-two to twenty-five, if princes had not more common life than other men?’ Mark again, the influence of religion in the duration of sovereignties. All the Christian reigns are longer than all the non-Christian reigns, ancient and modern, and Catholic reigns have been longer than Protestant reigns. The reigns in England, which averaged more than twenty-three years before the Reformation, have only been seventeen years since that, and those of Sweden, which were twenty-two, have fallen to the same figure of seventeen. Denmark, however, for some unknown cause does not appear to have undergone this law of abbreviation; so, says De Maistre with rather unwonted restraint, let us abstain from generalising. As a matter of fact, however, the generalisation was complete in his own mind, and there was nothing inconsistent with his view of the government of the universe in the fact that a Catholic prince should live longer than a Protestant; indeed such a fact was the natural condition of his view being true. Many differences among the people who hold to the theological interpretation of the circumstances of life arise from the different degrees of activity which they variously attribute to the intervention of God, from those who explain the fall of a sparrow to the ground by a special and direct energy of the divine will, up to those at the opposite end of the scale, who think that direct participation ended when the universe was once fairly launched. De Maistre was of those who see the divine hand on every side and at all times. If, then, Protestantism was a pernicious rebellion against the faith which God had provided for the comfort and salvation of men, why should not God be likely to visit princes, as offenders with the least excuse for their backslidings, with the curse of shortness of days?
In a trenchant passage De Maistre has expounded the Protestant confession of faith, and shown what astounding gaps it leaves as an interpretation of the dealings of God with man. ‘By virtue of a terrible anathema,’ he supposes the Protestant to say, ‘inexplicable no doubt, but much less inexplicable than incontestable, the human race lost all its rights. Plunged in mortal darkness, it was ignorant of all, since it was ignorant of God; and, being ignorant of him, it could not pray to him, so that it was spiritually dead without being able to ask for life. Arrived by rapid degradation at the last stage of debasement, it outraged nature by its manners, its laws, even by its religions. It consecrated all vices, it wallowed in filth, and its depravation was such that the history of those times forms a dangerous picture, which it is not good for all men so much as to look upon. God, however, having dissembled for forty centuries, bethought him of his creation. At the appointed moment announced from all time, he did not despise a virgin’s womb; he clothed himself in our unhappy nature, and appeared on the earth; we saw him, we touched him, he spoke to us; he lived, he taught, he suffered, he died for us. He arose from his tomb according to his promise; he appeared again among us, solemnly to assure to his Church a succour that would last as long as the world.
‘But, alas, this effort of almighty benevolence was a long way from securing all the success that had been foretold. For lack of knowledge, or of strength, or by distraction maybe, God missed his aim, and could not keep his word. Less sage than a chemist who should undertake to shut up ether in canvas or paper, he only confided to men the truth that he had brought upon the earth; it escaped, then, as one might have foreseen, by all human pores; soon, this holy religion revealed to man by the Man-God, became no more than an infamous idolatry, which would remain to this very moment if Christianity after sixteen centuries had not been suddenly brought back to its original purity by a couple of sorry creatures.’[23]
Perhaps it would be easier than he supposed to present his own system in an equally irrational aspect. If you measure the proceedings of omnipotence by the uses to which a wise and benevolent man would put such superhuman power, if we can imagine a man of this kind endowed with it, De Maistre’s theory of the extent to which a supreme being interferes in human things, is after all only a degree less ridiculous and illogical, less inadequate and abundantly assailable, than that Protestantism which he so heartily despised. Would it be difficult, after borrowing the account, which we have just read, of the tremendous efforts made by a benign creator to shed moral and spiritual light upon the world, to perplex the Catholic as bitterly as the Protestant, by confronting him both with the comparatively scanty results of those efforts, and with the too visible tendencies of all the foremost agencies in modern civilisation to leave them out of account as forces practically spent?
De Maistre has been surpassed by no thinker that we know of as a defender of the old order. If anybody could rationalise the idea of supernatural intervention in human affairs, the idea of a Papal supremacy, the idea of a spiritual unity, De Maistre’s acuteness and intellectual vigour, and, above all, his keen sense of the urgent social need of such a thing being done, would assuredly have enabled him to do it. In 1817, when he wrote the work in which this task is attempted, the hopelessness of such an achievement was less obvious than it is now. The Bourbons had been restored. The Revolution lay in a deep slumber that many persons excusably took for the quiescence of extinction. Legitimacy and the spiritual system that was its ally in the face of the Revolution, though mostly its rival or foe when they were left alone together, seemed to be restored to the fulness of their power. Fifty years have elapsed since then, and each year has seen a progressive decay in the principles which then were triumphant. It was not, therefore, without reason that De Maistre warned people against believing ‘que la colonne est replacée, parcequ’elle est relevée.’ The solution which he so elaborately recommended to Europe has shown itself desperate and impossible. Catholicism may long remain a vital creed to millions of men, a deep source of spiritual consolation and refreshment, and a bright lamp in perplexities of conduct and morals; but resting on dogmas which cannot by any amount of compromise be incorporated with the daily increasing mass of knowledge, assuming as the condition of its existence forms of the theological hypothesis which all the preponderating influences of contemporary thought concur directly or indirectly in discrediting, upheld by an organisation which its history for the last five centuries has exposed to the distrust and hatred of men as the sworn enemy of mental freedom and growth, the pretensions of Catholicism to renovate society are among the most pitiable and impotent that ever devout, high-minded, and benevolent persons deluded themselves into maintaining or accepting. Over the modern invader it is as powerless as paganism was over the invaders of old. The barbarians of industrialism, grasping chiefs and mutinous men, give no ear to priest or pontiff, who speak only dead words, who confront modern issues with blind eyes, and who stretch out a palsied hand to help. Christianity, according to a well-known saying, has been tried and failed; the religion of Christ remains to be tried. One would prefer to qualify the first clause, by admitting how much Christianity has done for Europe even with its old organisation, and to restrict the charge of failure within the limits of the modern time. To-day its failure is too patent. Whether in changed forms and with new supplements the teaching of its founder is destined to be the chief inspirer of that social and human sentiment which seems to be the only spiritual bond capable of uniting men together again in a common and effective faith, is a question which it is unnecessary to discuss here. ‘They talk about the first centuries of Christianity,’ said De Maistre, ‘I would not be sure that they are over yet.’ Perhaps not; only if the first centuries are not yet over, it is certain that the Christianity of the future will have to be so different from the Christianity of the past, as to demand or deserve another name.