Anathemas and Admirations Read Online Free PDF Page B

severity. War will be its “department,” in which it permits man to act “only in a virtually mechanical fashion, since successes in this realm depend almost entirely upon what depends least upon him,” War will therefore be “divine.” “a law of the world” — divine above all in the way it breaks out: “At the very moment occasioned by men and prescribed by justice, God advances to avenge the iniquity that the inhabitants of the world have committed against Him.”
    Divine : there is no adjective de Maistre uses more readily. Constitution sovereignty, hereditary monarchy, and papacy are all, according to him, “divine” institutions, as is any authority consolidated by tradition, any order whose origins data back to a remote period; the rest is all “wretched usurpation,” hence “human” work. In short, divine relates to the body of institutions and phenomena execrated by liberal thought. Applied to war, the adjective seems, at first glance, unfortunate; replace it with irrational and it is no longer so. This kind of substitution, if made in many of de Maistre’s observations, would attenuate their scandalous character; but by resorting to it, do we not ultimately dilute a thought whose virulence constitutes its charm? The fact remains that to name and invoke God at every moment, to associate Him with the horrible, has something about it that sends chills down the spine of any balanced, reticent, and reasonable believer, contrary to the fanatic — the real believer — who relishes the divinity’s bloodthirsty escapades.
    Divine or not, war, as it is treated in the Soirées , does not fail to exert a certain fascination upon us. This ceases to be true when it obsesses a second-order mind such as de Maistre’s Spanish disciple, Donoso Cortès: “War, God’s work, is good, as all His works are good; but a war can be disastrous and unjust, because it is the work of man’s free will.” “I have never been able to understand those who anathematize war. Such anathema is contrary to philosophy and to religion; those who pronounce it are neither philosophers nor Christians.”
    The master’s thought, already established in an extreme position, scarcely tolerates the additional exaggeration afforded by the pupil. Bad causes require talent or temperament. The disciple, by definition, possesses neither.
    In de Maistre, aggression is inspiration; hyperbole, innate knowledge. Carried to extremes, he dreams of nothing better than taking us with him. And so he manages to reconcile us to war, as he reconciles us to the executioner’s solitude, if not to the executioner himself. Christian by persuasion rather than by sentiment, quite alien to the figures of the New Testament, he secretly loves the pomp of intolerance, and it suits him to be intractable: is is for nothing that he grasped so thoroughly the spirit of the Revolution? And would he have managed to describe its vices had he not recognized them in himself? As an enemy of the Terror — and one never opposes with impunity an events an epoch, or an idea — he would have to combat it by steeping himself in it, assimilating it. His religious experience would be marked thereby: the obsession with blood prevails. Hence he is more attracted by the old God (“the God of hosts”) than by Christ, whom he always mentions in conventional, “sublime” phrases, and usually to justify the theory — interesting, though no more than that — of the reversibility of the sufferings of the innocent to the advantage of the guilty. Moreover, the only Christ who might have suited him is the figure of Spanish sculpture, sanguinolent, disfigured, convulsive, and pleased to the point of delirium by His crucifixion.
    By packing God off, outside of the world and human affairs, by dispossessing Him of the virtues and faculties that would have allowed Him to make His presence and His authority felt, the deists had reduced Him to the level of an idea and a symbol, an abstract