dominated the age — what a reproach to the fickle nations oriented toward modern ideas! A transient enthusiasm: when de Maistre realized that the Jews in Russia, faithless toward their theocratic tradition, were echoing certain ideologies imported from France, he turned against them, calling them subversive spirits and — the depth of abomination in his eyes — comparing them to Protestants. One dares not imagine the invectives reserved for them had he foreseen the role they were later to play in the movements of social emancipation as much in Russia as in Europe. Too concerned by Moses’ tablets, de Maistre could not anticipate those of Marx. . . . His affinities with the spirit of the Old Testament were so deep that his Catholicism seems, so to speak, Judaic, imbued with that prophetic frenzy of which he found but a faint trace in the gentle mediocrity of the Gospels. Tormented by the demon of vaticination, he sought everywhere signs heralding the return to Unity, the final triumph of . . . origins, the end of the process of degradation inaugurated by Evil and Sin; signs that obsess him to the point where he forgets God for them, or ponders Him to penetrate His manifestations rather than His nature, not Being but its reflections; and these appearances by which God is manifested are called Providence — sightings, ways, artifices of the alarming, the unspeakable divine strategy.
Because the author of the Soirées constantly invokes “mystery,” because he reverts to it every time his reason comes up against some impassable frontier, readers have insisted, despite the evidence, on his mysticism, whereas the true mystic, far from questioning himself upon mystery, or diminishing it to a problem, or making use of it as a means of explanation, on the contrary settles himself within it from the start, is inseparable from it, and lives inside it as one lives inside a reality, his God not being, like that of the prophets, absorbed by time, traitor to eternity, entirely external and superficial, but indeed that God of our soliloquies and our lacerations, the deep God in Whom our outcries gather.
De Maistre, evidently, has opted for the God of the prophets — a “sovereign” God it is vain to rail against or be offended by, a churchwarden God uninterested in souls — just as he had opted for an abstract mystery, annex of theology or dialectics, a concept rather than an experience. Indifferent to the encounter of human solitude and divine solitude, much more accessible to the problems of religion than to the dramas of faith, inclined to establish between God and ourselves relations that are juridical rather than confidential, he increasingly emphasizes the laws (does he not speak as a magistrate of the mystery?) and reduces religion to a simple “cement of the political edifice,” to the social function it fulfills — a hybrid synthesis of utilitarian preoccupations and theocratic inflexibility, a baroque mélange of fictions and dogmas. If he preferred the Father to the Son, he will prefer the Pope to either — by which I mean that, practical-minded in spite of everything, he will reserve for their delegate the most brilliant of his flatteries. “He has suffered a Catholic stroke”: this witticism to which he was inspired by Werner’s conversion suits de Maistre as well, for it is not God who has stricken him but a certain form of religion, an institutional expression of the absolute. A similar stroke had also affected Bonald, a thinker chiefly concerned with constructing a system of political theology. In a letter of July 18, 1818, de Maistre wrote to him, “Is it possible, Monsieur, that nature has entertained herself by putting two strings as perfectly in tune as your mind and mine! It is the most rigorous unison, a unique phenomenon!” One regrets this conformity of views with a lusterless and deliberately limited writer — of whom Joubert once remarked, “He’s a squireen of great wit and great knowledge,
Because the author of the Soirées constantly invokes “mystery,” because he reverts to it every time his reason comes up against some impassable frontier, readers have insisted, despite the evidence, on his mysticism, whereas the true mystic, far from questioning himself upon mystery, or diminishing it to a problem, or making use of it as a means of explanation, on the contrary settles himself within it from the start, is inseparable from it, and lives inside it as one lives inside a reality, his God not being, like that of the prophets, absorbed by time, traitor to eternity, entirely external and superficial, but indeed that God of our soliloquies and our lacerations, the deep God in Whom our outcries gather.
De Maistre, evidently, has opted for the God of the prophets — a “sovereign” God it is vain to rail against or be offended by, a churchwarden God uninterested in souls — just as he had opted for an abstract mystery, annex of theology or dialectics, a concept rather than an experience. Indifferent to the encounter of human solitude and divine solitude, much more accessible to the problems of religion than to the dramas of faith, inclined to establish between God and ourselves relations that are juridical rather than confidential, he increasingly emphasizes the laws (does he not speak as a magistrate of the mystery?) and reduces religion to a simple “cement of the political edifice,” to the social function it fulfills — a hybrid synthesis of utilitarian preoccupations and theocratic inflexibility, a baroque mélange of fictions and dogmas. If he preferred the Father to the Son, he will prefer the Pope to either — by which I mean that, practical-minded in spite of everything, he will reserve for their delegate the most brilliant of his flatteries. “He has suffered a Catholic stroke”: this witticism to which he was inspired by Werner’s conversion suits de Maistre as well, for it is not God who has stricken him but a certain form of religion, an institutional expression of the absolute. A similar stroke had also affected Bonald, a thinker chiefly concerned with constructing a system of political theology. In a letter of July 18, 1818, de Maistre wrote to him, “Is it possible, Monsieur, that nature has entertained herself by putting two strings as perfectly in tune as your mind and mine! It is the most rigorous unison, a unique phenomenon!” One regrets this conformity of views with a lusterless and deliberately limited writer — of whom Joubert once remarked, “He’s a squireen of great wit and great knowledge,
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