Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran Page B

the reader, Rousseau is present on every page. A curious fate, let us remark in passing, that of Rousseau, acting on others only by his dubious aspects, and whose windiness and jargon have spoiled the style of a Saint-Martin as much as that of a . . . Robespierre. The declamatory tone before, during, and after the Revolution, everything that heralds, reveals, and disqualifies Romanticism, the horrors of poetic prose in general, stem from this paradoxically inspired and unsound mind, responsible for the generalization of bad taste toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the next. A deadly influence that marked Chateaubriand and Senancour, and that only Joubert managed to escape. Saint-Martin yielded to it all the more readily because his literary instincts were never very certain. As for his ideas, pastured in the vague, they were capable of exasperating Voltaire, who after reading the book Des Erreurs et de la Vérité wrote to d’Alembert, “I do not believe that anything more absurd, more obscure, more insane, and more foolish has ever been printed,” It is irritating that de Maistre should have shown a pronounced taste for this work, though this appeared, it is true, at a time when he was sacrificing both to Rousseauism and to theosophy. But at the very moment he was renouncing one and the other, moving away from illuminism and, in a spasm of ingratitude and ill humor, taxing Freemasonry with “stupidity,” he kept all his sympathy for the philosophe inconnu whose theses on “primitive knowledge,” matter, sacrifice, and salvation by blood he had adopted and developed. Would the very notion of the Fall have assumed such importance for him had it not been vigorously affirmed by Saint-Martin? The notion was certainly banal, even stale, but in rejuvenating it, rethinking it as a free mind disengaged from all orthodoxy, our theosophist conferred upon it that extra authority which only the heterodox can impart to tired religious themes. He did the same for the notion of Providence, which, preached (thanks to him) in the Lodges of the period, acquired a seductiveness it could have received from no Church. It was also one of Saint-Martin’s merits to have given — in the midst of “endless progress” — a religious accent to the malaise of living in time, to the horror of being imprisoned within it. De Maistre would follow him on this path, though with less exaltation and ardor. Time, he tells us, is “something compelled that asks only to end”; “Man is subject to time, and nonetheless he is by nature alien to time, so much so that the notion of eternal happiness, joined to that of time, fatigues and frightens him.”
    In de Maistre’s thought, entrance into eternity is effected not by ecstasy, by the individual leap into the absolute, but by the mediation of an extraordinary event, one likely to seal off becoming — and not by the instantaneous suppression of time achieved in delight, but by the end of time, the denouement of the historical process in its entirety. It is — need we repeat? — as a prophet and not as a mystic that de Maistre envisages our relations with the temporal universe: “There is no longer any religion on earth: the human race cannot remain in this state. Dreadful oracles announce, moreover, that ‘the time has come.’”
    Each epoch tends to think that it is in some sense the last, that with it ends a cycle or all cycles. Today as yesterday, we conceive hell more readily than the golden age, apocalypse than utopia, and the idea of a cosmic catastrophe is as familiar to us as it was to the Buddhists, to the pre-Socratics, or to the Stoics. The vivacity of our terrors keeps us in an unstable equilibrium, favorable to the flowering of the prophetic gift. This is singularly true for the periods following great convulsions. The passion for prophesying then seizes everyone; skeptics and fanatics alike delight in the idea of disaster and give themselves up in concert