Joseph de Maistre

French Catholic counterrevolutionary writer (http://maistre.ath.cx:8000), born at Chambéry, in Savoy, in 1753, died at Turin, 26 Feb., 1821. His family, of French origin, had settled in Savoy a century earlier, and had attained a high position. He was a pupil of the Jesuits, who, like his parents, inspired him with an intense love of religion and detestation of the eighteenth-century philosophical rationalism.

After the outbreak of the French Revolution, he began to write on current events, e.g. "Discours à M. le Marquis Costa de Beauregard sur la vie et la mort de ton fils" and "Cinq paradoxes a la Marquise de Nav . . ." (1795). In the following year appeared his "Considerations sur la France." (http://maistre.ath.cx:8000//considerations_on_france) The author maintains the thesis that France has a mission from God: she is the principal instrument of good and of evil on earth. Maistre looks on the Revolution as a providential occurrence: the monarchy, the aristocracy, the whole of the old French society, instead of turning the powerful influence of French civilization to benefit mankind, had used it to foster the doctrines of the eighteenth-century philosophers. The crimes of the Reign of Terror were the punishment thus merited.

In connection with this work must be mentioned a little book composed in 1809, under the title "Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines" (http://maistre.ath.cx:8000/generative_principle). Its main idea is that constitutions are not the artificial products of the study but come in due time and under suitable circumstances from God, who slowly brings them to maturity. After the appearance in 1816 of the treatise "Sur les délais de la justice divine dans la punition des coupables", translated from Plutarch, Maistre published in 1819 his masterpiece "Du Pape". The work is divided into four parts. In the first he argues that in the Church the pope is sovereign, and that it is an essential characteristic of all sovereign power that that its decisions should be subject to no appeal. Consequently, the pope is infallible in his teaching, since it is by his teaching that he exercises his sovereignty. In the remaining divisions the author examines the relations of the pope and the temporal powers, civilization and the welfare of nations, and the schismatical Churches. He establishes that nations require to be guaranteed against abuses of power by a sovereignty superior to all others. Now, this sovereignty can be none but the papacy, which, even in the Middle Age had already saved European civilization from the barbarians. As to the schismatical Churches, the writer thinks that they will inevitably fall into philosophic indifference. For "no religion can resist science, except one."

Besides a voluminous correspondence, Joseph de Maistre left two posthumous works. One of these, "L'examen de la Philosophie de Bacon", (1836), is an attack on Locke and Condillac, and in general on the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, in the person whom the author considers as the father of their system. The "Soirées de St. Pétersbourg" (http://maistre.ath.cx:8000/st_petersburg) (1821) is a reply in the form of a dialogue to the objection against Providence drawn from the existence of evil in the world. For Joseph de Maistre, the existence of evil, far from obscuring the designs of God, throws a new light on them; for the moral world and the physical world are inter-related. Physical evil exists only because there has been, and there is, moral evil. So humanity which has always believed in the necessity of this expiation, has had recourse not only to prayer, but to sacrifice, that is, the shedding of blood, the merits of the innocent being applied to the guilty, a law as mysterious as it is indubitable, and which (in the opinion of the author) explains the existence and the perpetuity of war.

An enthusiastic believer in the principle of authority, which the Revolution tried to destroy, Maistre defends it everywhere: in the State by extolling the monarchy, in the Church by exalting the privileges of the papacy; in the world by glorifying the rights and the conduct of God. His style is strong, lively, picturesque; animation and good humour temper his dogmatic tone. He possesses a wonderful facility in exposition, precision of doctrine, breadth of learning, and dialectical power.