Anathemas and Admirations Read Online Free Page A

detractors, of obliging either party to wonder: did he really produce an apology for the executioner and for war, or merely confine himself to acknowledging their necessity? In his indictment of Port-Royal, did he express what he really thought, or simply yield to a momentary impulse? Where does the theoretician leave off and the partisan begin? Was he a cynic, an enthusiast, or merely an aesthete who strayed into Catholicism?
    To sustain the ambiguity, to confound us with convictions as clear-cut as his: this was certainly a tour de force. Inevitably readers began to question the authenticity of his fanaticism, to note the restrictions he himself set upon the brutality of his remarks, and insistently to cite his rare complicities with common sense. We ourselves shall not insult him by supposing him tepid. What attracts us is his pride, his marvelous insolence, his lack of equity, of pro-portion, and occasionally of decency. If he did not constantly irritate us, would we still have the patience to read him? The truths of which he made himself an apostle amount to something only by the impassioned distortion his temperament infected upon them. He transfigured the insipidities of the catechism and imparted to ecclesiastical commonplaces a flavor of extravagance. Religions die for lack of paradox: he knew this, or felt it, and in order to save Christianity, he contrived to inject it with a little more spice, a little more horror. Here he was aided much more by his talent as a writer than by his piety, which, in the opinion of Madame Swetchine, who knew him well, lacked any warmth whatever. Infatuated with corrosive expression, how could he stoop to the flabby phrases of the missal? (A pamphleteer at prayer? Conceivable, though hardly attractive.) Humility, a virtue alien to his nature, he pretends to only when he remembers that he must react as a Christian . Some of his exegetes have impugned— not without regret — his sincerity, whereas they ought to have relished the uneasiness he inspired: without his contradictions, without the misunderstandings that he — either by instinct or by design — created about himself, his case would have been dismissed long since, his career been closed, and his work suffered the misfortune of being understood, the worst fate that can befall an author.
    A fusion of the acrimonious and the elegant in his genius and in his style evokes the image of an Old Testament prophet and of a man of the eighteenth century. In him inspiration and irony are no longer irreconcilable; he allows us to share — by his rages and his repartee — in the encounter of space and intimacy, infinity and the salon. But while he venerated the Bible to the point of admiring indiscriminately its treasures and its trivialities, he thoroughly hated the Encyclopédie , though he was attached to it by the form of his intelligence and the quality of his prose.

    Imbued with a bracing rage, his books are never boring. In them we see him, paragraph by paragraph immoderately exalt or disparage an idea, an event, an institution adopting toward them the tone of a prosecutor or of a thurifer: “Any Frenchman who is a friend to the Jansenists is a fool or a Jansenist.” “Everything in the French Revolution is miraculously bad,” “The greatest enemy of Europe, a foe to be crushed by all means short of crime, the deadly cancer lodged in all sovereignties and unremittingly feeding on them, the son of pride, the father of anarchy, the universal dissolvent, is Protestantism,” “In the first place, there is nothing so just, so learned, so incorruptible as the great Spanish tribunals, and if, to this general character, we add that of the Catholic priesthood, we shall be convinced, before any experience, that in all the universe there can be nothing more peaceful, more circumspect, more humane by nature than the tribunal of the Inquisition.”
    Ignorant of the practice of excess, we could learn it from de Maistre, who is as likely