Anathemas and Admirations Read Online Free Page B

to compromise what he loves as what he loathes. A hoard of panegyrics, an avalanche of dithyrambic arguments, his book Du Pape somewhat disconcerted the Sovereign Pontiff, who realized the danger of such an apology. There is only one way to praise: to inspire fear in the figure being extolled, to compel him in fear and trembling to hide himself far away from the statue being erected, to constrain him by generous hyperbole to measure his mediocrity and suffer from it. What is an argument for the defense that neither torments nor troubles — what is a eulogy that fails to kill? Every apology should be a murder by enthusiasm.

    “There exists no great character that does not tend to some exaggeration,” de Maistre writes, doubtless thinking of himself. We may note that the decisive and often frenzied tone of his works is not to be discerned in his letters; these caused amazement when they were published: who could have suspected such amenity in the raging doctrinaire? The reaction of surprise, which was unanimous, strikes us as a trifle naive. After all, a thinker generally puts his madness into his works and keeps his common sense for his ordinary relations; he will always be more pitiless and unbridled when he attacks a theory than when he must address a friend or an acquaintance. Intimacy with an idea incites to delirium, obliterates judgment, and produces the illusion of omnipotence. In truth, the tête-à-tête with ideas generates madness, deprives the mind of its equilibrium and pride of its composure. Our excesses and our aberrations derive from our combat with unrealities, with abstractions, from our will to triumph over what does not exist — whence the impure, tyrannical, wandering aspect of philosophical works, moreover of any work at all The thinker blackening a page without recipient believes— feels! — himself to be the arbiter of the world. Yet in his letters he expresses, on the contrary, his hopes, his weaknesses, his defeats; he attenuates the audacities of his books and rests from his excesses. De Maistre’s correspondence was that of a moderate man. Some, delighted to find a different writer, quickly classified him among the liberals, forgetting that he was tolerant in his life only because he was anything but in his works, where the best pages are precisely those in which he magnifies the abuses of the Church and the rigors of the State.
    Had it not been for the Revolution, which, wresting him from his habitual preoccupations — indeed, crushing him — awakened him to the great problems, he would have lived, in Chambéry, the life of a good paterfamilias and a good Freemason, continuing to dose his Catholicism, his royalism, and his Martinism with that tincture of Rousseauist phraseology which mars his early writings. The French army, invading Savoy, drove him out; he took the road of exile; thereby his mind profited, and his style as well, as we discover when we compare his Considérations sur la France with the declamatory and diffuse productions antedating the revolutionary period. Disaster, clarifying his prejudices and his tastes, saved him from vagueness while rendering him forever incapable of serenity and objectivity, virtues rare in the émigré. De Maistre was one of these, and precisely during those years (1803— 1817) when he served as the King of Sardinia’s ambassador to St. Petersburg. All his thoughts were to bear the mark of exile: “There is only violence in the universe; but we are deceived by modern philosophy, which asserts that all is for the best, whereas the worst has corrupted everything, and in a very real sense, all is for the worst, since nothing is where it belongs.”
    “Nothing is where it belongs”: the refrain of all emigrations, and also the point of departure for all philosophical reflection. The mind wakens upon contact with disorder and injustice: whatever is “where it belongs,” whatever is normal, leaves the mind indifferent, benumbed, while