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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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3: Joseph de Maistre and the Inquisition We must begin our journey in the eighteenth century with the Catholic political philosopher Joseph de Maistre, in whose dark thought at the beginning of the modem era we glimpse the origins of modem totalitarianism. Joseph de Maistre's life is easily recounted. He was born on 1 April 1753, in Savoy, to Francois-Xavier de Maistre, a judge who had been brought into nobility by the King of Sardinia. Maistre himself took a Law degree in Turin, and was appointed as a public prosecutor in Savoy in 1774. He was born to a deeply Catholic family, but he also joined a Masonic lodge that, in turn, offered him many personal and political connections. Maistre knew that Freemasonry was condemned by the Church, yet he joined a lodge; he wrote that heretics were among the worst of criminals, and yet he was very much influenced by Protestant mystics. We see this duality reflected throughout Maistre's work and thought. This division within Maistre had its origins (in part) in the turmoil and terror of the French Revolution. For before the French Revolution in 1789, Maistre was sympathetic to freedom of thought and to revolutionary impulses -- but, by 1792, he was forced to flee his native land by the invasion of Savoy by France, after which he was separated from his wife and children for more than twenty years. Maistre lived in exile in Lausanne, where he represented the Sardinian king, until 1798, when he moved to Italy. Then, in 1802, he was sent to represent the King of Sardinia in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where he remained until 1817. In exile, he refined his antirevolutionary, ultraconservative Catholic views. He only returned to his home and family in 1817, and he died in 1821. His most important works were written during the last third of his life, many -- for example, Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg (a series of literary-philosophical dialogues) -- during his stay in Russia. From our perspective, the most important dynamic in Maistre's life is one of the least examined. He certainly was influenced by the Christian theosophy of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, whom he mentioned a number of times in his Soirees; and he was a Freemason who furthermore drew on pansophic ideas in his writings. Maistre accepted, for example, the concept of a golden age of humanity and the corollary to it -- that our own time represents a precipitous decline. Jean-Louis Darcel and some other scholars even compare Maistre to the German theosophers Karl von Eckhartshausen and Franz von Baader. [1] But there is a striking difference between Maistre and any of these clearly esoteric theosophers, which could be summed up by the following fact: unlike any of them, Maistre was capable of writing a treatise defending the institution of the Inquisition. What are we to make of such a figure? It is altogether too facile to liken Maistre to esoteric authors such as Baader, Eckhartshausen, or Saint-Martin, when, unlike any of them, his work has at its center not an embrace of the inner -- mysticism or gnosis -- but, rather, an uncompromising affirmation of the outer, of the necessity for total church and state authority. [2] Maistre's work, impelled by his horror of the French Revolution, insists on a reactionary assertion of Church infallibility and of the power of the state. Paradoxically, for Saint-Martin, who saw its horrors firsthand, the French Revolution became the occasion (as what was externally reliable was being swept away) for him to take even more the "inward road" toward spiritual life, whereas for Maistre, the social chaos of the Revolution (seen from afar) became the occasion for his call for the imposition of external religious and state authority. In truth, these are antithetical responses. Yet it is important to recognize, too, that the great theosophers -- Saint- Martin, Eckhartshausen, and Baader in particular -- did not consider themselves heretical, nor, by and large, were they perceived by others as heretical. Admittedly, Baader did propose the dissolution of the papacy and its replacement with a synodical union of Orthodoxy and Catholicism -- but this remained a reform proposal within Roman Catholicism that, of course, went nowhere at the time. Baader never left the Church, and remained a devout Catholic, like Maistre himself Saint-Martin -- referred to directly and present indirectly elsewhere in Maistre's Soirees -- although deeply mystical, is not by any means therefore explicitly or consciously heretical. Thus, for Maistre to cite Saint- Martin is not -- from this perspective-for him to engage in a dalliance with heresy. Saint-Martin, or indeed Baader, arguably exist within the ambit of orthodox Christianity. Hence, when relatively late in life Maistre wrote his Defense of the Spanish Inquisition, it cannot be said that he had a figure such as Saint- Martin in mind. Still, there is a peculiar tension here, because Maistre clearly (in Defense of the Spanish Inquisition) endorses a demonstrably antimystical institution. It is worth examining Maistre's Defense carefully, because it does shed light on Maistre's viewpoint. Early on, Maistre raises what is by now the old saw that the Inquisition itself did not torture or murder people -- that only the secular government did this. [3] But of course, this claim ignores the simple fact that the secular governments only instituted such procedures at the explicit behest of the Roman Catholic Church as instituted by the Fourth Lateran Council's insistence, and the insistence of Pope Innocent III, that secular governments under Catholicism institute procedures to rid themselves of heretics (or, perhaps rather, "heretics"). One cannot reasonably absolve the Church of blame for the results of the Inquisition merely because the secular arm committed the atrocities, when, after all, they did so under Church authorization and direction. Maistre misleadingly claims that the "every man who remains quiet is left undisturbed" by the Inquisition, and that those who were prosecuted, tortured, and murdered, had only themselves to blame. [4] But alas, accounts and assessments of the Spanish Inquisition attest otherwise. Bartolome Bennassar writes at length about the terror generated in the population by the very words "official of the Holy Office." He notes that the sentences of the Inquisition were more or less similar to those of the civil courts but observes that the terror in the population was far greater than the sentences themselves would account for. Why? Bennassar points out two primary reasons: secrecy, and infamy. [5] Witnesses were kept hidden from defendants and thus one could not confront or cross-examine one's accusers. And the penalties of the Inquisition relied on not only torture and murder but also public humiliation for one's family. These two together -- fear that anyone could be an accuser against whom one could not respond, and fear of public humiliation -- served to make the Inquisition a terrifying institution whose reach extended deep into the general population. But the most important dimension of Maistre's work, for our purposes, is his insistence that heresy is arguably the greatest of crimes. He writes that "the heresiarch, the obstinate heretic, and the propagator of heresy, ought to be classed among the greatest criminals." [6] And Maistre asserts that by suppressing heretics, the Inquisition created a much more stable, ordered society. Had the Inquisition been in sufficient power against Lutheranism, the Thirty Years' War would have been prevented, and so, too, the French Revolution would never have taken place, he thinks. [7] Spain was the "happiest," "most ordered country in Europe," under the Inquisition, Maistre argues -- the Inquisition "saved" and even "immortalized" Spain. [8] Yet at what cost? There is a fundamental question here. It is true that the suppression of heresy and the enforcement of a "pedagogy of fear" on a population does ensure order, at least in some respects. Yet it can only ensure order exactly as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor said, by eliminating freedom of thought and, in effect, by shifting responsibility from the individual to the Inquisitors. Freedom of thought, in this view, is too great for the individual to bear, and so the Church must assume corporate responsibility for determining what is acceptable and what is unacceptable thought. Exactly the same argument can be applied to the imposition of any centralized secular state power on society: at the heart of Maistre's endorsement of the Inquisition is the Hobbesian belief that man is fundamentally evil by nature and must be restrained by an outside force, be it the Church in the form of the Inquisition, or, by extension, the fascist government, or the Communist Party. At the crux of Maistre's endorsement of the Inquisition is his belief that once Catholicism has become predominant in a society, "things change. Since religion and sovereignty have embraced one another in the state, their interests must necessarily be confounded." [9] Thus the ideal state, in Maistre's view, is one in which there is a tribunal to maintain orthodoxy in what has become a national religion, indeed, something akin to a unified theocratic state. Although in the stage of proselytizing, Catholicism is to be meek and mild, when in the stage of state control, Catholicism must incorporate state violence via a tribunal to enforce religious orthodoxy. [10] In his view, the interests of state and religion become one. And if one accepts this unity, then, indeed, heresy becomes not merely a matter of freedom of thought, but in effect a crime against the state. Maistre detests individualism. In his view, democracy is the "harshest, most despotic, and most intolerable" form of government because it is anarchic, and "whoever says that man is born for liberty is speaking nonsense." [11] A state exists, he argues, only by virtue of sovereignty, and individuals cannot have sovereignty over themselves: they must be restrained by an outside, a sovereign force. [12] One cannot have a "multiheaded" leadership -- the idea itself is ridiculous, Maistre contends. He goes so far as to claim that "There is no sovereign without a nation, just as there is no nation without a sovereign." [13] Maistre's broader logic is this: God is sovereign over man; and among men, there must therefore also be a sovereign. Thus, he believes, monarchy is the most natural of state institutions, just as the papacy is the most natural form of religious leadership. At heart, Maistre rejects individualism and notions of liberty as Protestant and as fundamentally heretical: what he insists on is an organically unified religious state. In this larger context, then, Maistre's vigorous defense of the Inquisition is not, as some have claimed, an anomalous work disconnected from his thought as a whole, but in fact belongs very much to the center of Maistre's worldview. Yet can we go further and, with Isaiah Berlin, see Maistre as an originating source for twentieth-century totalitarianism? At the very least, there is some cause for such a belief. Emile Faguet wrote in 1899 of Maistre that "his Christianity is terror, passive obedience, and the religion of the state," and Samuel Rocheblave wrote of Maistre's "christianisme de la Terreur." [14] Certainly there is something authentically new emerging in Maistre's work: a nonclerical defense of the Inquisition and of centralized and unified state power. The terror of the French Revolution generated in Maistre its antithesis. Given that the masses rose up in the French Revolution, then the counter must be the imposition of divine authority and authoritarian suppression of individualism and of dissent. The tyranny of the masses must be opposed by an authoritarian force. In Maistre's view, constitutions, republicanism, democracy, individualism, and all the institutions of liberalism are to be scorned and opposed because man is intrinsically suited to monarchic or authoritarian centralized power conjoined with religious authority. And there is more. Maistre feverishly opposes those whom he terms "la secte." By this, he means dissenters, those who subvert established order -- secular heretics. Among them, he lists Protestants, Jews, Jacobins, intellectuals, scientists -- anyone whose faith is in individualism or rationalism rather than in the Church. "This," writes Berlin, "is 'la secte,' and it never sleeps, it is forever boring from within." [15] "La secte" therefore, Maistre thinks, must be suppressed and, if possible, extirpated. As Berlin later puts it, from this perspective "men must submit freely to authority; but they must submit. For they are too corrupt, too feeble to govern themselves; and without government, they collapse into anarchy and are lost." [16] Here we see a confusion of the secular state and religion; here we see the emergence of the persecutorial state that hunts down dissenters. And there is still more. For in Maistre we see the conceptual emergence of the inquisitorial secular state. Maistre writes that "Government is a true religion. It has its dogmas, its mysteries, its priests. To submit it to the discussion of each individual is to destroy it. It is given life only by the reason of the nation, that is, by a political faith of which it is a symbol." [17] What is more, "Man's first need is that his growing reason be put under the double yoke [of church and state]. It should be annihilated, it should lose itself in the reason of the nation, so that it is transformed from its individual existence into another -- communal -- being, as a river that falls into the ocean does indeed persist in the midst of the waters, but without name or personal identity." [18] Berlin observes that Maistre's opposition to individualism, "far beyond traditional authoritarianism," is "terrifyingly modern." He goes so far as to conclude that "Maistre's deeply pessimistic vision is the heart of the totalitarianisms, of both left and right, of our terrible [twentieth] century." [19] Of course, Berlin's influential essay is subtler than its title might suggest. Berlin recognizes that Maistre predicted the brutality of the Russian Revolution and its consequences, and he offers some illuminating remarks on Maistre and Voltaire as, paradoxically, two sides of the same coin. Maistre foresaw that if religious and civil authority were overthrown in czarist Russia, the results would be terrible -- and so he proposed that the authorities only gradually introduce Western liberal thought so as not to overthrow the social order and create an atheistic tyranny of the masses. Berlin also observes that Voltaire and Maistre proposed fundamentally cynical and even heartless perspectives that were together the intellectual origins of modern totalitarianism. Berlin does not lay the blame for totalitarianism entirely at the feet of Maistre by any means. His argument, rather, is that we see totalitarianism foreshadowed in Maistre's works. I believe that Berlin is quite right in this. Some forty years after Berlin's essay was published, an expert on Maistre, Richard Lebrun, responded. Lebrun wrote that Berlin's assessment of Maistre is "seriously misleading" for a variety of reasons, but primarily because Berlin asserts that "Maistre believed in authority because it was an irrational force." [20] According to Lebrun, Berlin "distorts Maistre's overall position by overemphasizing what he characterizes as the 'irrational' aspects of Maistre's theorizing." [21] Lebrun sees Berlin's depiction of Maistre as more "lurid" than "lifelike." In these assessments, Lebrun is right: Berlin does overemphasize the irrationalism of Maistre in order, I think, to better conform Maistre's thought to the prevalent depiction of fascism during the mid-twentieth century as a predominantly backward-looking, irrationalist movement rather than as a futurist movement deeply imbued with the spirit of industrialism. But, paradoxically, Lebrun's point actually confirms the deeper insight that Berlin had into the connections between Maistrean thought and twentieth-century totalitarianism. If Maistre's thought is not so easily characterized as simply "irrationalist," then it is similar to fascism in yet another way. For Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were very much intent upon the imposition of order upon society and upon a quasi-religious rejection of political dissent as a kind of heresy. In its totalization of society, Fascism represented not an atavistic primitivism, but an industrialist futurism, even a secular millennialism that cannot be accurately dismissed as mere "irrationalism." The reality is more complicated than that, both in the case of Maistre and in the cases of twentieth-century fascism. In any case, already a solid body of research has emerged that shows how Maistre formed a major source for the work of one of the most prominent legal theorists during Hitler's Third Reich: Carl Schmitt (1888-1985). As Stephen Holmes has put it in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, Maistre represents a "truly brilliant" originator of the antiliberal tradition, and Schmitt in turn represents Maistre's "most influential twentieth-century admirer." [22] And Graeme Garrard summarizes neatly the connections between these two figures. He writes that:
It is true, as Garrard argues, that Schmitt selectively chose parts of Maistre's work to cite, and even that Schmitt and Maistre diverge in views because they belong to very different eras and societies, but such observations do not change (and in some respects, underscore) the fundamental connections between these two authors. It is with good reason that Schmitt drew extensively on the works and thought of Maistre. Maistre was not as anti-Semitic as Schmitt, he was no decisionist, and he was more ambivalent toward Freemasonry and related European esoteric currents -- this is true. [24] But these are adventitious differences that derive from their respective eras. More important are the facts that Maistre and Schmitt both saw the Inquisition as a fine juridical model, that both despised liberalism and individualism, and that both insisted on a state corporatism whose origins are unquestionably in Roman Catholicism. We will analyze Schmitt and his work in more detail shortly, but for now it is sufficient to say that his work represents an extension and a development of themes that first appear in modernity in the work of Maistre, and that reappear in even more fiery and extreme form in the work of the other primary predecessor whom Schmitt cites: Juan Donoso Cortes.
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