erecting his first prejudices into doctrines” — but ultimately it sheds a certain light on the direction de Maistre’s thought was taking, as on the discipline he had imposed upon himself in order to avoid risk and subjectivism in matters of faith. Yet from time to time the visionary in him triumphs over the theologian’s scruples and, wresting him from the Pope and the rest, raises him to the perception of eternity: “Occasionally I should like to hurl myself beyond the narrow limits of this world; I would like to anticipate the day of revelations and plunge into the infinite. When the double law of man will be erased and these two centers united, he will be ONE: no longer having a war within, how would he have any idea of duality? But if we consider men, comparing them with each other, what will become of them when, Evil being annihilated, there will be no more passion or personal commitment? What will the Self become when all thoughts will be common, like all desires, when all minds will see each other as they are seen? Who can understand, who can represent to himself, that heavenly Jerusalem, where all the inhabitants, penetrated by the same spirit, will penetrate one another, and each reflect the other’s happiness?”
“What will the Self become?” This concern is not that of a mystic, for whom the self, precisely, is a nightmare he intends to be rid of by vanishing into God, where he knows the ecstasy of unity, object and end of his quest. De Maistre seems never to have attained unity by sensation, by the leap of ecstasy, by that intoxication in which the contours of being dissolve; for him unity remained the obsession of a theoretician. Attached to that “self” of his, he had difficulty imagining the “heavenly Jerusalem,” the return to a blessed pre-division identify as well as that nostalgia for paradise he must nonetheless have experienced, if only as a limit-state. In order to conceive how such nostalgia can constitute an everyday experience, we must consider a figure by whom de Maistre was strongly influenced, that Claude de Saint-Martin who admitted to possessing only two things or, to use his own words, two “posts”: paradise and the dust. “In 1817 I saw an old man in England named Best, who had the faculty of quotings to anyone he met, very appropriate passages of Scripture without his ever having known you before. Upon seeing me, he began by saying, ‘He has cast the world behind him.’” In a period of triumphant ideology, when the rehabilitation of man was noisily undertaken, no one was so deeply anchored in the Beyond as Saint-Martin, nor more qualified to preach the Fall: he represented the other face of the eighteenth century. The hymn was his element, indeed he was the hymn: examining his writings, we have the sensation of finding ourselves in the presence of an initiate to whom great secrets were transmitted and who, exceptionally, did not waste his ingenuity upon them. A true mystic, he disliked irony — antireligious by definition, irony never pays; how could this man who had cast the world behind him have resorted to it, who perhaps knew but one pride, that of the Sigh? “All nature is but a concentrated suffering”; “If I had not found God, my mind could never have attached itself to anything on earth”; “I had the happiness to feel and to say that I would believe myself wretched indeed if something prospered for me in the world.” And let us add this vast metaphysical disappointment: “Solomon reports having seen everything under the sun. I could cite someone who would not be lying if he said he had seen something more: that is, everything above the sun; and that someone is very far from glorying in what he has seen.”
As discreet as they are profound, such notations (taken chiefly from the posthumously published works) cannot win us over to the intolerable lyricism of L’Homme de Désir, where everything is vexing except the title, and where, unfortunately for
“What will the Self become?” This concern is not that of a mystic, for whom the self, precisely, is a nightmare he intends to be rid of by vanishing into God, where he knows the ecstasy of unity, object and end of his quest. De Maistre seems never to have attained unity by sensation, by the leap of ecstasy, by that intoxication in which the contours of being dissolve; for him unity remained the obsession of a theoretician. Attached to that “self” of his, he had difficulty imagining the “heavenly Jerusalem,” the return to a blessed pre-division identify as well as that nostalgia for paradise he must nonetheless have experienced, if only as a limit-state. In order to conceive how such nostalgia can constitute an everyday experience, we must consider a figure by whom de Maistre was strongly influenced, that Claude de Saint-Martin who admitted to possessing only two things or, to use his own words, two “posts”: paradise and the dust. “In 1817 I saw an old man in England named Best, who had the faculty of quotings to anyone he met, very appropriate passages of Scripture without his ever having known you before. Upon seeing me, he began by saying, ‘He has cast the world behind him.’” In a period of triumphant ideology, when the rehabilitation of man was noisily undertaken, no one was so deeply anchored in the Beyond as Saint-Martin, nor more qualified to preach the Fall: he represented the other face of the eighteenth century. The hymn was his element, indeed he was the hymn: examining his writings, we have the sensation of finding ourselves in the presence of an initiate to whom great secrets were transmitted and who, exceptionally, did not waste his ingenuity upon them. A true mystic, he disliked irony — antireligious by definition, irony never pays; how could this man who had cast the world behind him have resorted to it, who perhaps knew but one pride, that of the Sigh? “All nature is but a concentrated suffering”; “If I had not found God, my mind could never have attached itself to anything on earth”; “I had the happiness to feel and to say that I would believe myself wretched indeed if something prospered for me in the world.” And let us add this vast metaphysical disappointment: “Solomon reports having seen everything under the sun. I could cite someone who would not be lying if he said he had seen something more: that is, everything above the sun; and that someone is very far from glorying in what he has seen.”
As discreet as they are profound, such notations (taken chiefly from the posthumously published works) cannot win us over to the intolerable lyricism of L’Homme de Désir, where everything is vexing except the title, and where, unfortunately for
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