Free Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran Page A

not hesitate to deny in the name of religion. “Mohammedanism and paganism itself would have done less harm politically if they had been substituted for Christianity, with their species of dogmas and faith; for they are religions, and Protestantism is no such thing.” So long as he maintained some loyalty to the principles of Freemasonry, he remained quite open to a certain liberalism; once his hatred of the Revolution drove him into the arms of the Church, he slid toward intolerance.
    Whether they take their inspiration from utopia or from reaction, absolutisms resemble and unite with each other. Independent of their doctrinal content, which differentiates them only on the surface, they participate in one and the same schema, one and the same logical process, a phenomenon proper to all the systems that, not content to posit an unconditional principle, also make of it a dogma and a law. An identical mode of thought presides over the elaboration of theories that are materially dissimilar but formally analogous. As for the doctrines of Unity, they are so closely related that to study one, whatever it may be, is thereby to scrutinize all the regimes that, rejecting diversity in concept and in practice, deny man the right to heresy, to singularity, or to doubt.
    Obsessed with Unity, de Maistre raves against any attempt likely to dissolve it, against the least impulse of innovation or even of autonomy, without realizing that heresy represents the sole possibility of reinvigorating men’s consciences, that by shaking them up it preserves them from the sluggishness into which conformism plunges them, and that if heresy weakens the Churchy on the other hand it reinforces religion. Any official god is a god alone, abandoned, soured. We pray with fervor only in sects, among persecuted minorities, in darkness and in fear, conditions indispensable to the proper exercise of piety. But for a de Maistre, submission — I should say, rather, the rage of submission — surpasses the effusions of faith. Lutherans, Calvinists, Jansenists were, if we are to believe him, merely rebels, conspirators, traitors; he abhors them and advises, for their annihilation, the use of all means that are not “crimes.” Yet if we read his apology for the Inquisition, our impression is that even this last resort is one he does not entirely reject. De Maistre is the Machiavelli of theocracy.
    Unity, as he conceives of it, presents itself in a double aspect: metaphysical and historical. On the one hand, it signifies triumph over division, evil, and sin; on the other, definitive instauration, final apotheosis of Catholicism through the victory over temptations and modern errors. Unity on the level of eternity; unity on the level of time. If the first transcends us, if it escapes our possibilities for control, the second we can envisage and deal with. Let us say it straight off: it seems to us illusory; it leaves us skeptical. For we do not see what religious idea would today be capable of achieving the spiritual and political unification of the world. Christianity is too weak to seduce or to subdue men’s minds; an ideology or a conqueror must be resorted to. Will the task fall to Marxism, or to a Caesarism of a new type? Or to both at once? Such a synthesis seems dismaying only to reason, but not to history, that reign of anomaly.
    That Catholicism, better still that the Christian religion in its entirety, should be in utter deliquescence, our experience teaches us every day: as it now appears — prudent, accommodating, measured — Christianity would not tolerate an apologist so fierce, so magnificently unbridled, as de Maistre, who would not have denounced with such fury “the sectarian spirit” in others had he not been uniquely imbued with it himself. The man who cursed the Terror does not find one word with which to castigate the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; he even applauds it: “With regard to the manufactures taken by the refugees into