Anathemas and Admirations Read Online Free PDF

illusion? In the fifth century, in a Gaul ravaged by barbarian invasions, Salvianus, writing De Gubernatione Dei , had faced a similar task: desperate combat against the evidence, mission without an object intellectual effort based on hallucination. . . . Justification by Providence is the quixotism of theology.
    Dependent though it is on various historical moments, a sensibility to fate is nonetheless conditioned by the nature of the individual. Whoever engages in important enterprises knows himself to be at the mercy of a reality that is beyond him. Only frivolous minds, only the “irresponsible.” believe they act freely; the rest, at the heart of an essential experience, are rarely free from the obsession of necessity or of their “star,” Rulers are administrators of Providence, observes Saint-Martin; elsewhere, Friedrich Meinecke remarks that in Hegel’s system, heroes figure as no more than functionaries of Absolute Spirit. An analogous sentiment led de Maistre to call the leaders of the Revolution merely “automata,” “instruments,” “villains,” who, far from governing events, on the contrary submitted to their course.
    As for these automata, these instruments, how were they more culpable than the “higher” power that had provoked them and whose decrees they were so faithfully executing? Would that power not be equally “villanous”? Since it represented for de Maistre the only fixed point in the midst of the revolutionary “whirlwind,” he does not indict it, or at least he behaves as if he accepted its sovereignty without argument. In his mind, it would in fact intervene only at moments of disturbance and would vanish during periods of calm, so that he implicitly identifies it with a temporal phenomenon, with a circumstantial Providence, useful in explaining catastrophes, superfluous in the intervals between them and when passions die down. For us it is fully justified only if manifest everywhere and always, only if it keeps permanent vigil. What was such a power doing before 1789? Was it sleeping? Was it not at its post throughout the eighteenth century, and did it not want anything to do with that century which de Maistre, despite his theory of divine intervention, makes chiefly responsible for the advent of the guillotine?
    For him such a power assumes a content, becomes truly Providence, starting from a miracle, from the Revolution; “. . . that in the dead of winter a man should command a tree, in the presence of a thousand witnesses, suddenly to cover itself with leaves and fruit, and that the tree should obey, everyone will acclaim as a miracle and hail the thaumaturge. But the French Revolution and all that is happening at this moment is quite as wondrous, in its way, as the instantaneous fructification of a tree in the month of January.”
    Facing a force that performs such marvels, the believer will wonder how to safeguard his freedom, how to avoid the temptation of quietism and the more serious one of fatalism. Such difficulties, raised early in the Considérations , the author attempts to evade by subtleties or by equivocation: “We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that binds but does not enslave us. What is admirable in the universal order of things is the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely enslaved, they function at once by will and by necessity: they really do as they wish, but without being able to upset the general plan.”

    “A supple chain,” slaves who act “freely”: these are incompatibilities that betray the thinker’s embarrassment over the impossibility of reconciling divine omnipotence and human freedom. And it is doubtless in order to save that freedom, to leave it a wider field of action that he postulates the withdrawal of divine intervention in moments of equilibrium — brief intervals indeed, for Providence, reluctant to remain long in eclipse, emerges from its repose only to strike, to manifest its