More Gems from de Maistre

Here's a selection of some more excellent quotes from de Maistre, on three themes--law and constitutions, the necessity of religion for a good society, and the Enlightenment.  Enjoy, and if you do enjoy, let me know which ones you most enjoyed. If you don't enjoy, then pick a fight.

On Law and Constitutions

I: “reason and experience agree that a constitution is a divine work and that it is precisely the most fundamental and essentially constitutional elements in a nation’s laws that cannot be written.”

II: “the essence of a fundamental law is that no one has the right to abolish it: but how is it beyond human power if it has been made by someone.”

“Locke sought the characteristic of law in the expression of combined wills, an unlucky chance to choose the precise characteristic that excludes the idea of law.”

“Law is properly law and has a genuine sanction only if it is taken as emanating from a superior will; so that its essential feature is that it is not the will of all.”

“Primordial good sense, happily anterior to sophisms, has everywhere sought the sanction for laws in a power above men, either by recognizing that sovereignty derives from God, or by revering certain unwritten laws as God’s word.”

VII:

“Was it not everywhere believed that a constitution is as much a work of the imagination as an ode or a tragedy?  Had not Paine asserted, with a profundity which enraptured the universities, that a constitution does not exist if one cannot put it in one’s pocket?  The eighteenth century, which questioned nothing, had no doubts of itself: that is the rule, and I do not believe that it produced a youth of any talent whatever who had not made three things by the time he left school--a new system of education, a constitution, and a society.”

XVIII: “Monarchy becomes more necessary as the association becomes more numerous....France was geometrically monarchical.  It would be indeed difficult to express more happily a more unshakeable truth.”

XXI: “Every written law is only a necessary evil produced by human infirmity or malice, and...it is nothing at all if it has not received a previous and unwritten sanction.”

On the Necessity of Religion for a Good Society

XXXV: “Perhaps one day...in the heart of some affluent town set in an old savannah, a statue will be raised to the father of these missionaries [the Jesuits].  One will be able to read on its pedestal: ‘To the Christian Osiris, whose envoys have traversed the earth to snatch men from misery, from savagery and from brutality, by teaching them the arts of agriculture, giving them laws, and showing them how to know and serve God, not by the force of arms, of which they had no need, but by gentle persuasion, moral songs, and the power of hymns, so that they were believed to be angels.”

XXXVII: “Every educational system that does not rest on religion will fall in the twinkling of an eye or will disgorge nothing but poison into the state, religion being, as Bacon has well put it, the preservative that saves sciences from putrefaction.”

XXXVIII: “It is often asked why there is a school of theology in every university. The reply is easy: It is so that universities will continue to exist and that teaching will not corrupt itself.”

XXXIX: “In short...if one does not rely on ancient maxims, if education is not given back to the priests, and if science is not put everywhere in second place, the evils that await us are incalculable; we shall be brutalized by sciences, and that constitutes the lowest point of brutalization.”

XL: “Nothing, he [Origen] said, can be changed for the better in social matters without divine help.  All men feel the truth of this, without being able themselves to express it.  It is from this that follows the unconscious aversion of all right-thinking men to innovations.  The word reform, in itself and before any scrutiny, will always be suspect to the wise, and the experience of every age justifies this kind of instinct.”

XLV: “Not only does creation not belong to man, but even reformation belongs to him in only a secondary manner and with a host of severe restrictions.”

“Man in harmony with his Creator is sublime and his action creative; equally, once he separates himself from God and acts alone, he does not cease to be powerful, since that is a privilege of his nature, but his acts are negative and lead only to destruction.”

On the Enlightenment

LXI: “Although there has always been impiety, there had never been, before the eighteenth century and in the heart of the Christian world, an insurrection against God; above all there had never been seen before a sacrilegious conspiracy of all the talents against their author.  Now, this is what we have seen in our own day.  Comedy has vied with tragedy in blasphemy, and the novel with history and natural philosophy.  The men of this age have prostituted their talents to irreligion, and, to use the admirable phrase of the dying St. Louis, they have waged war against God with his gifts.  The impiety of the ancient world is never angry; sometimes it is reasonable, ordinarily it is lighthearted, but it is never bitter....The ancient religions were not sufficiently worthwhile to merit the anger of contemporary skeptics.”

LXIV: “Then for the first time the unique character of eighteenth century atheism revealed itself.  It no longer speaks in the cold tone of indifference, still less with the biting irony of skepticism; there is a deadly hatred, a tone of anger and often of fury.  The writers of this age, at least the most outstanding, no longer treat Christianity as an inconsequential human error, but hunt it like a mortal enemy: it becomes a fight to the end, a war to the death; and what would seem unbelievable, if we did not have sad proofs of it before our eyes, is that many of these self-styled philosophers raised their hatred of Christianity to a personal hatred of its divine Author.  They really detest him as a living enemy is detested.”

LXV: “Every government and institution in Europe displeased it [the philosophy of the age], precisely because they were Christian, and in proportion to the influence of Christianity, a malaise of opinion, a general discontent seized men’s minds.”

LXVI: “How has God punished this abominable delirium?  He has punished it as he created the world, by a single phrase.  He has said: LET IT BE--and the political world collapsed.”

Summary of de Maistre

I wrote this up for class today. No doubt, it could be much improved upon in light of O'Donovan's fantastic remarks in class, but this covers some of the main bases, and other important insights might make up a separate post.

Joseph de Maistre, born in 1753, lived and served as a public official in the Duchy of Savoy, part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, but occupying a portion of the European mainland right next to France. He lived until 1821 and wrote much political philosophy after the French Revolution and deeply critical of it. Fervently Catholic, he saw the collapse of respect for civil authority and, along with it, European order and civilization, as the inevitable fruit of a rejection of the Christian religion. Indeed, he went further than this in arguing that the same principles of disrespect for tradition and authority that the Protestant Reformers introduced were liable to yield the fruit of political revolution and chaos.

We see both of these arguments in the pithy and provocative Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions. In this essay, he mocks the arrogant anthropocentrism of the French Revolution, which proceeded on the assumption that a successful constitution could be fabricated all at once, written down, and then become authoritative. This supposition is false on a number of levels. First, written documents are only authoritative insofar as they represent what is already, on unwritten grounds, generally accepted. They can reflect and enshrine custom and authority, but they cannot create it out of thin air. Indeed, a written law only emerges in response to a challenge to accepted authority, and serves as a poor substitute for the acceptance of that authority which precedes it. This principle, he thinks, operates in the realm of religion as well, and he musters his Catholic understanding of the priority of unwritten tradition as evidence for his case. The same Protestant faith in the naked Word he sees in the French Revolutionaries. Second, human action cannot create sovereignty; only God can, and God usually takes his sweet time to do it. No great authority is legitimate at its outset, but only when it has grown to maturity under God’s guidance.

So, a written ordinance is only authoritative if it was already authoritative unwritten, and it is often better left unwritten. Authority cannot be created, but only inherited. Only God can create sovereignty. What else? These are de Maistre’s basic points, but he intensifies them with some corollaries--man must also beware of confidently undertaking reform or even renaming of political institutions. Here too God’s authority exceeds his own, and modesty and dependence on divine aid must be the order of the day. Moreover, no society can succeed or prosper unless it is constituted firmly on religion, preferably the Christian religion.

De Maistre concludes by blaming the chaos and violence that succeeded the French Revolution, and what he sees as the breakdown of European civilization, on the wholesale rebellion against God that took place in the eighteenth century.

De Maistre’s account, while powerful, raises a number of questions: first, is de Maistre blurring the crucial line between God’s sovereign will and his revealed will? De Maistre seems to almost be saying, “God acts in history to bring a particular government to power, and therefore, that government now rightfully has sovereignty and should not be overthrown.” But just because God caused or permitted it to happen in some ultimate sense does not mean that he has stamped his approval on it and we should not change it. One might make this argument with the Church, as de Maistre does, since the Church has the promise of the Spirit. One can thus argue that, guided by the Spirit, the Church has assumed a divinely authorized form. But can we claim the same special divine guidance for states?

Second, is writing really a poor substitute for unwritten tradition, used only by necessity? His account of the New Testament might seem to fit this account, but what about the Old? He admits that Israel’s constitution is the exception to his rule, but it’s more than just this. The Old Testament prophets, for example, seemed to think writing a very important way of communicating truth. And, one might argue that the US Constitution provides an easy counterexample to de Maistre’s skepticism about written constitutions...or does it provide solid proof of his case?

Third, Christianity on his account seems to be firmly on the side of the powers that be. Is this accurate? Is this desirable? Jesus Christ certainly wasn’t, and those who have wanted to remain faithful to him have always wanted to preserve something of the antagonism between Christian practice and the principalities and powers.

Finally, assuming we accept his general point, where does this leave us? Just because a sovereignty exists does not mean that it should always continue to exist, does it? Surely there are times when abuses must be corrected; indeed, even times when an edifice is collapsing and a fresh start must be made. Does de Maistre have any wisdom to offer to such endeavors? Put another way, is de Maistre really saying, “Constitutions can’t be written, so just relax and let God choose sovereigns?” or is he merely cautioning his contemporaries against pretentious overconfidence in their ability to fashion a utopia and make people embrace it?

De Maistre on Tradition and Writing

For some reason, I am always curiously tempted to become Catholic when I read Catholic political theologians. These quotes from de Maistre's "Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions" may begin to illustrate why:

XV: “The New Testament, coming after the death of the legislator and even after the establishment of his religion, offers a narrative, warnings, moral precepts, exhortations, orders, threats, and so on, but certainly not a collection of dogma set out in an imperative form....If the scriptural historian sets out a dogma, it is simply as something already known...Far from the first creeds containing a statement of all our dogmas, on the contrary, Christians of those days would have regarded it as a serious crime to state them all. The same is true of the Holy Scriptures; no idea has been more mistaken than the attempt to find in them the whole of Christian dogma.”

XVI: “Not only does this list of dogmas [the Thirty-Nine Articles] count for nothing, or very nearly, in the country of its birth, but besides it is evident even to a foreigner that the illustrious possessors of this piece of paper find it nothing but an embarrassment. They would like very much to see it go, since it irritates the national good sense enlightened by time, and since it recalls to them an unhappy beginning: but the constitution is written.”

XVII: “Faith, if sophistical opposition had never forced it to write, would be a thousand times more angelic....The state of war elevated venerable ramparts around the truth: they doubtless protect it, but they hide it; they make it unassailable, but at the same time even less accessible. This is not what truth, which would like to clasp humanity in its arms, asks for.”

XX: “Christ did not leave a single writing to his Apostles. In place of books, he promised them the Holy Spirit. It is it, he said to them, that will inspire what you will have to say. But, because in the course of time, guilty men revolted against dogmas and morality, it was necessary to resort to books.”

XXII: “Can this writing [Scripture] be other than the portrait of the Word? And, although infinitely worthy of regard in this respect, does it not need to maintain a divine silence? Finally, if it is attacked or insulted, can it defend itself in the absence of its father? Glory be to truth. If the eternally living spoken word does not give life to writing, it will never become the Word, that is to say life. Let others then invoke as much as they like the SILENT WORD, we shall peacefully laugh at this false god, ever waiting with a gentle impatience for the moment when its partisans will leave their illusions and throw themselves in our arms, extended now for three centuries.”

XXIII: “Since the sixteenth century, a host of scholars have made prodigious efforts of erudition to establish, by going to the earliest days of Christianity, that the Bishops of Rome were not in the first centuries what they have since become, thus assuming as an agreed point that everything that is not found in primitive ages is an abuse. However (and I say this in no spirit of contention and without meaning to shock anyone), they show in this as much philosophy and true learning as if they sought in a babe in arms the real dimensions of a full-grown man. The sovereignty of which I am now talking was born like others and has grown like others. It is pitiful to see powerful minds straining themselves to prove that maturity is an abuse by citing infancy, whereas the very idea of an institution being adult at birth is essentially an absurdity, a true logical contradiction.”