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science had had need of a new method and that Bacon had invented one.176
Indeed, Maistre went so far as to argue that Bacon’s novum organum was ‘directly
contrary to the advancement of the sciences’.177 ‘Nothing can excuse him’, Maistre
wrote, ‘for having written, with the pretension of being a legislator, whole volumes
upon things about which he did not have the least idea.’178
The more substantive criticism was that Bacon’s ‘false, vile, and corrupting
theories’ rested upon the assumption that the natural sciences (and ‘experimental
physics’ in particular) were the only valid or ‘real’ forms of knowledge. Not only
was this to seek to dislodge theology and metaphysics from the pre-eminent
position they had traditionally occupied but, more gravely still, it postulated the
separation of science from religion. It was in this sense, Maistre argued, that ‘every
line of Bacon leads to materialism’.179 Nowhere was this more evident, in Maistre’s
opinion, than when Bacon spoke of the soul, but the same applied to his account of
the origin of spontaneous motion. God was simply removed from the explanation
provided. ‘Bacon’s central principle’, Maistre wrote, ‘is that God can be compared
to nothing, if one speaks without resort to metaphor, and nothing being able to be
known except by comparison, God is absolutely inaccessible to reason, and by
consequence cannot be perceived in the universe.’180 ‘It would have been rather
difficult’, Maistre continued, ‘to drive God out from everywhere but it is already
something to enclose him firmly within the Bible: it only remains to burn the
book.’181
By way of rejoinder, Maistre argued that science was good only when it was
‘restrained within a certain circle’. Separated from theology, it was dangerous;
subordinated to theology, it would be ‘perfected’ and given more ‘strength and
breadth’. This was so, Maistre argued, ‘because religion, by purifying and exalting
the human mind, renders it more able to make discoveries, because it ceaselessly
combats those vices which are the principal enemy of truth’.182 The same rule
applied to all other manifestations of the human spirit, be it architecture, music,
painting, drama, or sculpture. It was not true, Maistre countered, that the Roman
Catholic Church had hindered scientific advance. It was, however, only right that it
should challenge untruth. It was Maistre’s opinion that, had Pope Leo X stifled
Protestantism at its birth, Europe would have been spared many of its worst
174 See Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon ou l’on traite différentes questions de la philosophie
rationnelle, 2 vols. (Lyons, 1845). In English see An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon wherein
Different Questions of Rational Philosophy are Treated (Montreal and Kingston, 1998).
175 Maistre, Examen, ii. 372–3.
176 Ibid. i. 72.
177 Ibid. 83.
178 Ibid. 260.
179 Ibid. ii. 33.
180 Ibid. 14.
181 Ibid.
182 Ibid. 290.
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disasters, including ‘the French Revolution, the incontestable daughter of the
revolution of the sixteenth century’.183
In summary, Maistre’s argument was that the philosophy of the eighteenth
century had been uniquely negative and worthless precisely because of its ‘anti-
religious spirit’. It had worked tirelessly to unburden men of everything they knew
and to leave them with ‘only physics’. It had sought ‘to isolate man, to render him
proud, egotistical, and pernicious to himself and to others’.184 Bacon, Maistre
concluded, was ‘the father of these deadly maxims’. He had given ‘the worst counsel
to men’. Those ‘conspirators’ who had chosen him as their ‘oracle’, Maistre
speculated, ‘no doubt knew what they were doing’.185 Maistre could at least
reassure himself with the thought that they had received the punishment they
deserved.
If natural science had limited merit as a source of knowledge, where else might
man look? Maistre rarely made reference to either of the two obvious candidates:
natural law and biblical revelation. Yet he clearly believed that the dictates of God’s
will could be known.186 Accordingly, Maistre identified four alternative sources of
knowledge. The first, and most important, was the knowledge generated by the
traditional beliefs and customs of a society. These, in a very real sense, embodied
not only the wisdom of past generations but also the voice of God. Moreover, they
needed to be adopted ‘without examination’. At a man’s birth, Maistre wrote, ‘his
cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason awakes all his
opinions should be given to him . . . Nothing is more vital to him than preju-
dices.’187 Related to this was language. Each language, Maistre argued, mirrored
‘the spiritual realities’ of its birth and to that extent it was language that evidenced
the ‘general soul’ and ‘true moral unity’ that made up each nation.188 Maistre had
only contempt for modern notions of a ‘philosophical language’. Next was the
knowledge that arose from the ‘inner sentiments’ of the heart. ‘The upright man’,
Maistre observed, ‘is very commonly alerted, by an inner sentiment, to the falsity or
truth of certain propositions before any examination, often without even having
made the studies necessary to be in a position to examine them with full knowledge
of the case.’189 This ‘secret instinct’, Maistre believed, was ‘almost infallible in
questions of theoretical philosophy, morality, metaphysics, and natural theology’.
Finally, Maistre had recourse to the concept of ‘the true elect’. Vaguely reminiscent
of Rousseau’s lawgiver, these were men invested by God with ‘extraordinary power,
often unrecognized by their contemporaries, and perhaps to themselves’. They
acted from inspiration and, if ever they took up their pen, it was to command.
Through their ‘infallible instinct’ they were able to ‘divine’ the ‘hidden forces
and qualities’ that formed the character of a nation.190 It was in these four ways,
183 Maistre, Examen, ii. 372–3.
184 Ibid. 269.
185 Ibid. 272.
186 Richard A. Lebrun, ‘Maistre and Natural Law’, in Lebrun (ed.), Maistre Studies, 193–206.
187 Maistre, De la Souveraineté du peuple, 147.
188 Maistre, ‘Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg’, 497–507; De la Souveraineté du peuple, 106.
189 Maistre, ‘Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg’, 461.
190 Maistre, De la Souveraineté du peuple, 122.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
331
therefore, that a people, if it should so wish, was able to apprehend the purposes
of God.
Maistre’s next target was the abstract reasoning he associated with the Enlight-
enment’s projects for social and political reform. Constitutions, Maistre argued,
were not made by man alone or ‘as a watchmaker makes a watch’.191 This was so for
the fundamental reason that, if man was capable of modifying things, he was
capable of creating nothing. If a man could plant a seed or cultivate a tree, Maistre
; argued, it could never be imagined that he could make a tree.192 Where men did
deliberate rationally upon a constitution they could at best produce a naïve
simplification of what was required, a ‘pure abstraction’ that was ill-suited to the
complexities of a nation’s character and situation. The inevitable outcome would be
civil disorder and anarchy and a form of government that could not last. Moreover,
such a product of abstract deliberation would not possess the power to bind men
and to guarantee their loyalty and obedience.
One example of these difficulties provided by Maistre related to what he called
‘the theory of names’.193 Starting from the assumption that God alone had the right
to bestow a name, Maistre concluded that, if an institution had a name imposed
upon it by a deliberative assembly, ‘both the name and the thing will disappear in a
short time’. A name needed to ‘germinate’: otherwise it would not ring true.
Speaking therefore of the decision to build a new American capital, Maistre
concluded that ‘it is a thousand to one that the town will not be built, or that it
will not be called Washington, or that the Congress will not sit there’.194 Indeed,
Maistre went so far as to suggest that the very act of having to write something
down was ‘always a sign of weakness, ignorance, or danger’ and that a law or
institution possessed no real force.195 Never, Maistre suggested, had statesmen in
England gathered together and resolved a priori to create three powers and to
balance them and yet, after several centuries, the English constitution displayed ‘the
most complex unity and the most delicate equilibrium of political forces the world
has ever seen’. It was ‘a work of circumstances’ and those circumstances were
‘infinite’196
A priori reasoning, therefore, could not produce institutions that would endure.
On the contrary, a successful constitution could only ever be the work of God and
one that was seen to enjoy divine sanction. ‘The author of all things’, Maistre wrote,
‘has only two ways of giving a government to a people.’ Either it grew ‘impercepti-
bly like a plant’ or the task was entrusted to one of the true elect. Whatever the case,
it could never be the result of rational deliberation.197 And so, Maistre argued, man
191 Ibid.
192 Maistre, ‘Considérations sur la France’, 232.
193 Maistre, ‘Essai sur le Principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions
humaines’, 393–8.
194 Maistre, ‘Considérations sur la France’, 242.
195 Maistre, ‘Essai sur le Principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions
humaines’, 378.
196 Ibid. 373.
197 Maistre, De la Souveraineté du peuple, 122.
332
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
must always be brought back to history as the ‘first and only teacher in politics’.
Indeed, history was ‘experimental politics’ and was of infinitely more worth than ‘a
hundred books of speculative theories’.198 Two immediate lessons could be learnt.
The first was that ‘in its laws and ancient customs each nation has everything
it needs to be as happy as it can be’.199 The second was that, as a republic of
24 million people had never been known before, its existence in the future was an
impossibility.200 Europe’s sin, Maistre contended, was that it had closed its eyes to
these, and other, ‘great truths’ and, as a consequence, it had suffered.
Maistre had not yet finished with the Enlightenment. Philosophisme was inti-
mately linked to Protestantism and both, in his view, embodied ‘the spirit of
insurrection’ that was destroying Europe.201 In truth, it would be difficult to do
justice to the vituperative ferocity of Maistre’s polemic against Protestantism. He
asserted that Protestantism was born ‘rebellious’ and fully armed. It was ‘the son of
pride and the father of anarchy’. It protested against everything and submitted to
no authority. It was the enemy of all belief. Its very name was a crime. It was a
‘deadly sore’ that destroyed everything. It was dissolving the ‘cement’ that had
bound European civilization together. More than this, Protestantism was not only a
religious heresy but also a civil heresy, for the primary reason that it had freed
people from ‘the yoke of obedience’. It was, Maistre avowed, ‘the mortal enemy of
all sovereignty’. From all sides its apostles preached resistance to authority. There
was consequently a direct line from Protestantism to Jansenism, to the philosophes,
and on to the Revolution and Jacobinism. Protestantism, Maistre wrote, ‘is not
favourable to any government; it attacks them all; but as sovereignty only fully
exists under monarchies, it particularly detests this form of government’.202 It was,
he concluded, the ‘sans-culottisme of religions’.203
Louis XIV had been right therefore to revoke the Edict of Nantes and everything
now needed to be done, Maistre wrote in the late 1790s, to suffocate this ‘great
enemy’. In later years Maistre’s public stance on Protestantism mellowed somewhat
and, as he demonstrated in the concluding pages of Du Pape,204 he even came to
consider it likely that Protestants, and Anglicans in particular, might return to the
Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the overall tenor of his argument was that, in
marked contrast to Protestantism, Catholicism was a religion of obedience. Resting
upon the ‘infallibility’ of the teaching provided by its clergy, it urged ‘the abnega-
tion of all individual reasoning’ and ‘unquestioning respect for authority’.205 Never
had it preached the doctrines of resistance and insurrection, always preferring
martyrdom to rebellion. Rather, Catholicism was ‘the most ardent friend, guardian,
and defender of government’.206
198 Maistre, De la Souveraineté du peuple, 186–7.
199 Ibid. 260.
200 Maistre, ‘Considérations sur la France’, 219–20.
201 Maistre, ‘Sur le protestantisme’, in Glaudes (ed.), Joseph de Maistre, 311–30.
202 Ibid. 326.
203 Ibid. 330.
204 Maistre, Du Pape (Antwerp, 1820), 483–515.
205 Maistre, ‘Sur le protestantisme’, 312.
206 Ibid. 324.
Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction
333
It was in this context that Maistre lauded what he described unhesitatingly as
‘the monarchical supremacy of the Supreme Pontiff ’.207 The very idea of univer-
sality, he stated, presupposed that the Church was a monarchy and that the spiritual
authority of the pope was infallible. In embracing this position, it is important
to realize that Maistre was setting himself firmly and unequivocally against the
doctrine known as Gallicanism.208 At its simplest, Gallicanism denoted a tendency
within the French Church to emphasize its relative independence from the Holy
See. As it came to be defined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
articles of Gallicanism stipulated that monarchs, and sovereigns more generally,
were not subject to ecclesiastical authority in temporal matters and therefore that
the head of the Church could not free their subjects from any oath of alleg
iance or
obedience. It also laid down that the primacy of the papacy in spiritual matters was
limited either by the episcopate or, in its more radical version, by the entire body of
the faithful. Both the Constitutional Church foisted upon France during the
Revolution and the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801 drew heavily upon these
traditions and they were again to prevail under the Restoration.
In Maistre’s eyes, there was little to distinguish Gallicanism from Calvinism and
Jansenism.209 He regarded the Gallican Declaration of 1682, drawn up to settle the
dispute between Louis XIV and Pope Innocent XI, as one of the most ‘reprehensi-
ble’ and ‘pernicious’ documents in ecclesiastical history, and in the process dis-
missed talk of ‘the ancient tradition of the Gallican church’ as ‘a pure chimera’.210
The so-called Gallican liberties enjoyed by the Church in France, in Maistre’s
view, were non-existent and, by subordinating the Church to the State, amounted
to no more than the liberty not to be Catholic.211 Accordingly, Maistre argued
that the pope’s authority was as absolute as that of any other sovereign and that the
government of the Church could not be devolved to its ecumenical councils. This,
he avowed, did not amount, as Protestants claimed, to a justification of despotism,
but rather to a recognition that a ‘periodic or intermittent sovereignty [was] a
contradiction in terms’.212 It did mean, however, that, when faced with ‘the horrors
of tyranny’, the pope and the pope alone could act as a dispensing power. ‘The
Sovereign Pontiff’, Maistre wrote, ‘would do nothing contrary to divine law by
releasing subjects from their oath of allegiance. He would simply claim that
sovereignty is a divine and sacred authority which can be controlled only by another
similarly divine authority, but of a superior order and one specially vested with this
power in certain extraordinary situations.’213 By the same token, there could be no
general right of rebellion or resistance. Man, Maistre observed, ‘in his capacity as a
being at once moral and corrupt, of right understanding and perverse will, must
necessarily be governed’.214 It was no more possible to imagine a society without a
sovereign than a hive of bees without a queen.
207 Maistre, Du Pape, 34.
208 In addition to Du Pape, see Maistre, De l’Église Gallicane dans son rapport avec le souverain pontife