Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran Read Free Book Online Page B

difference; in fact, any order that seeks to last succeeds in doing so only by surrounding itself with a certain obscurity, by flinging a veil over its motives and its actions, by generating an aura of the “sacred” that renders it impenetrable to the masses. This is an obvious fact that the “democratic” governments cannot adopt but that, on the other hand, is proclaimed by the reactionaries, who, unconcerned by public opinion and the consent of the crowd, shamelessly offer unpopular truisms, inopportune banalities. By these the “democrats” are scandalized, though they know that “reaction” often translates their hidden thoughts, that it expresses certain of their innermost disappointments, many bitter certitudes of which they can give no public account. Committed to their “generous” program, they may not parade the slightest contempt for the “people.” nor even for human nature; not having the right or the luck to invoke Original Sin, they must cajole and flatter man, must seek to “liberate” him: optimists sick at hearty anguished amid their fervors and their dreams, at once swept away and paralyzed by a uselessly noble, uselessly pure idea. How many times, in their heart of hearts, must they not envy the doctrinal offhandedness of their enemies! The leftist’s despair is to do battle in the name of principles that forbid him cynicism.
    Such torment was spared a de Maistre, who, dreading above all things the liberation of the individual, was careful to found authority on bases solid enough to resist the “dissolving” principles promulgated by the Reformation and the Encyclopédie . The better to affirm the notion of order, he will attempt to minimize the share of premeditation and of will in the creation of laws and institutions; he will deny that languages themselves have been invented, while conceding that they may have begun; nonetheless speech precedes man, for, he adds, it is only possible by the Word. The political meaning of such a doctrine is revealed to us by Bonald in the Discours préliminare of his Législation primitive . If the human race has received speech, it has necessarily received with it “the knowledge of moral truth.” Hence there exists a sovereign, fundamental law, as well as an order of duties and truths. “But if man, on the contrary, has made his speech himself, he has made his thought, he has made his law, he has made society, he has made everything and can destroy everything, and it is right that in the same party that asserts that speech is of human institution society is regarded as an arbitrary convention. . . .”
    Theocracy, ideal of reactionary thought is based on both contempt for and fear of man, on the notion that he is too corrupt to deserve freedom, that he does not know how to use it, and that when it is granted him, he uses it against himself, so that in order to remedy his failure, laws and institutions must be made to rest on a transcendent principle, preferably on the authority of the old “terrible God,” always ready to intimidate and discourage revolutions.
    The new theocracy will be haunted by the old: the legislation of Moses is the only one, if we follow de Maistre, to have withstood time, it alone emerges “from the circle drawn around human power”; Bonald, for his part, will see in it “the strongest of all legislations,” since it has produced the most “stable” people, destined to preserve the “deposit of all truths.” If the Jews owe their civil rehabilitation to the Revolution, it devolved upon the Restoration to reconsider their religion and their past, to exalt their sacerdotal civilization, which Voltaire had flouted.
    The Christian seeking the antecedents of his God quite naturally comes up against Jehovah; thus the fate of Israel intrigues him. The interest our two thinkers took in Israel was not, however, exempt from political calculations. This “stable” people, supposedly hostile to the craving for innovation that