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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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4: Juan Donoso Cortes and the "Sickness" of the Liberal State Juan Donoso Cortes is the next major figure in the lineage of authoritarianism that began with Maistre. Donoso Cortes was born in 1809 in the arid province of Extremadura; his father was a successful lawyer and mayor of the town of Don Benito. [1] He grew up in relative prosperity -- his father held land that brought in an income -- and Donoso Cortes went on to study law at the University of Seville, from which he was graduated in 1828. He lived the good life thereafter in Madrid and then back in Don Benito, running up debts, writing poetry, and continuing intense reading of both romantic and conservative writers. In 1829, he accepted a professorship in the humanities, and married a wealthy young woman who gave birth to a child, Maria, that died at two, and who herself died in 1835. After these deaths, the most important women in Donoso's life were royalty: the Queen (or Queen Mother), in particular Maria Christina, in whose favor he rose to high political prominence. In 1837, he was elected to parliament, and in the 1840s, he played a major role in Spanish politics. His work took a decisively authoritarian turn after the revolutionary year of 1848 -- for the following year, 1849, saw his famous speech and letters defending dictatorship and Catholic authoritarianism against disorder and against what he derided as "philosophical civilization." Deeply religious, Donoso Cortes was known for his piety, charity, and personal asceticism; he was internationally famous for his defenses of order and authority in the tradition of Maistre; and it came as a shock when he died in 1853 at the young age of forty-four. The most important work of Donoso Cortes, at least for our line of inquiry, was his "Speech on Dictatorship," given 4 January 1849. In this oration, he asserted that, faced with the risk of revolutionary excess, law alone is not enough to preserve order. Thus, "when [the letter of the law] is not enough [to save society], then dictatorship is best." Donoso explicitly set aside any assertion of his own ascent to power, but insisted that "in [revolutionary] circumstances, I say that dictatorship is as legitimate, good, and beneficial a form of government as any other. It is a rational form of government that can be defended in theory as in practice." [2] He holds -- in a tradition that was to be followed by Carl Schmitt in the twentieth century -- that laws may be set aside in exceptional circumstances, because what matters is "society. Everything through society, everything for society, always society, society in all circumstances and on all occasions." Of course, Donoso is here insisting on social totalism. He then makes absolutely explicit why he insists on a "clear, luminous, and indestructible theory of dictatorship" by employing a metaphor of illness and health in society. Donoso declaims that "invading forces, called illnesses in the human body and something else in the social body (but essentially being one and the same thing), have two forms." One is when "illnesses are complete spread throughout a society by individuals," while in the other, "acutely diseased form," "these illnesses are concentrated in and represented by political associations." [3] In the first case, resistance to widespread illness in the social body is also widespread: it is "dispersed throughout the government, the authorities, the law courts," that is, "throughout the entire social body." But when, in the second case, the illness is concentrated in political associations, then, necessarily "the resisting forces concentrate themselves into the hands of one man." Dictatorship, he continues, is found in every society on earth, and is even, if he may say so, "a divine fact" in the person of God Himself Social illness or disorder has to be combated by the unified society in the person of the dictator who can impose his (society's) unified will on the disorder and eradicate it. Donoso's thought is typically dualistic. Hence, he posits that there are only two forms of repression in the world: religious and political. These he likens to two linked "thermometers." When "the religious thermometer rises, the thermometer of political repression falls." [4] Thus, Jesus and his disciples had no government whatever, because they had internal (religious) discipline. But when there is no religious discipline, then tyranny and slavery rule. The more corrupt the society becomes, the more government and with it political repression must grow. Hence, he continues, "if government was not necessary when religious repression was at its height, now that religious repression does not exist, there will be no form of government powerful enough to maintain order, for all despotisms will be weak." This, he continues, is "placing the finger in the wound:" that is, he is simply diagnosing the illness in society as it actually is. [5] Only a "healthy religious reaction" will save society. And such a miraculous healthy religious reaction, such a return of "religious repression," he sadly says, he cannot expect. Donoso concludes that his audience must choose between "a dictatorship of insurrection and a dictatorship of the government." [6] Had he the choice, he would of course choose freedom over dictatorship, but since "freedom does not exist in Europe," then "I choose the dictatorship of the government as the least wearisome as well as the least outrageous." Donoso chooses to reject the "dictatorship from below," and to accept instead "one that comes from above," one that is "noble," that represents a "dictatorship of the saber." It is not for nothing that Donoso has been accused of being a kind of Manichee in his extreme dualism (he was so accused in his own lifetime): and we see his dualism here again, as in so many other places. True to form, in his final line, he urges his audience to vote, always, "for what is more healthy." Let us pursue a bit more carefully, now, this theme of social health and disease in Donoso's work, since it is the leitmotif of his most famous speech. For here, in this theme of health, we have a key to unlock a door whose opening will reveal some hidden dimensions of Donoso's thought and life. We may begin by noting that, near the end of his "Speech on Dictatorship," Donoso remarks that he will conclude because both Congress and he himself are tired. "Frankly, gentlemen," he continues, "I must declare here that I cannot continue because I am ill. It is a miracle that I could speak at all." [7] And he adds, a bit later, that his illness would not permit him to add too much more. Indeed, he concludes his speech only a handful of paragraphs later, with the observation that he and his fellow legislators "will vote for what is more healthy." These references to Donoso's own illness are jarring, given all that he has said about the repression of illness in society. With what was he ill? And could his own illness be reflected into his most famous speech? Our answers to such questions come by consulting biographical investigations into Donoso's last years of life. It is true that during his last years of life, he was very devout, charitable, and ascetic. But, as John Graham detailed in his biography of Donoso Cortes, in fact in the latter years of his life, Donoso was suffering from the acute stages of a venereal disease -- which he kept a secret, and which he sought to treat on his own. [8] The symptoms of this disease, probably syphilis, were appalling. Among his family papers are the names of a series of drugs recorded in his own hand, and as recently as 1971, his preserved library included worn copies of medical treatises on the urinary tract and genitals. [9] He meticulously recorded his symptoms, which included "blood in the urine, swelling of the testicles, utter loss of control over sexual appetites and functions at all times of the day, and much pain." His symptoms also included "diarrhea, bloating of the stomach, general weakness, sleeplessness, sharp pains in the [legs], and some paralysis." [10] The loss of control must have been terrifying, especially because some of the symptoms must have been occurring at the very time that he had garnered the most international fame and notoriety, near the end of his life. Indeed, "his illness in 1849 is the most severe one he recorded." [11] How difficult it must have been to seek to master the disorder in his own body, even as he declaimed against the disorder and illnesses of society as a whole. What his opponents and enemies would have done with such knowledge! No wonder he kept the nature of his illness a secret. But there is more to consider here. Is it not possible, indeed, likely, that Donoso's own struggle to master and to extirpate the raging illness in his own body might well have been projected outward into society as a whole? He struggled to impose his will-to-health upon the various horrific symptoms of his own disease, but if he could not be the dictator of his own body, he could at least insist on the stability and health of society around him. Donoso's dualism now appears in a different light. When he argues against socialism and communism and revolutionary disorder, he is in some sense arguing also against the illness that has infected him, and insisting on a cure by sheer imposition of will, by penance and mortification, by hair shirt -- by dictatorial fiat. Although psychological explanations may not always be entirely useful as explanatory tools, in this particular case it would seem that psychology can play an even greater than usual role in revealing what is actually at work in Donoso's writing. It is not as though this theme is found only in the "Speech on Dictatorship." The same metaphor of illness runs through, for instance, Donoso's "Letter to the Editors of El Pais and El Heraldo." There, he refers to all the various forms of rationalism and in particular of philosophy as "doctrines of perdition" that are "poisoning" society. Thus, "European society is dying. Its extremities are cold. Its heart will soon stop beating. Do you know why Europe is dying? It is dying because it is poisoned." [12] The poison? "Every anti-Catholic word uttered from the mouths of philosophers. [Society] is dying because error kills. And this society is grounded in errors. Everything that it holds to be incontestable is false." And so "the disaster that must come will be the disaster par excellence of History. Individuals can still save themselves because they can always save themselves. But society is lost." [13] These words read somewhat more poignantly if we consider that Donoso himself was dying, that he was dying because of a venereal error years before, one that had irrevocably poisoned him, and that his own heart soon after ceased to beat. By 1852, he is writing even more harshly against "rationalism," against "freedom," against "liberalism," and against "parliamentarianism," all of which he terms variant forms of "insanity." [14] He writes of the "health of the organism" [society] as being more important than the health of any particular organ [institution]; and he affirms even more totally the immoveable and complete unchanging truth of Catholicism in the face of all modern rationalist heresies. [15] And he protests that he has never defended tyranny, only that he writes of things as they actually are, not through a gauzy romantic haze. What he is fundamentally attacking, he writes to Cardinal Fornari, is "heretics" and "heresies," "ancient errors that appear before our eyes today." [16] Society is "poisoned with the venom" of "irksome heresy." The theme of revolution as fever or as illness in society is by no means limited to Donoso's work. We find it, for example, in the earlier writings of the great German theosopher Franz von Baader. But in Baader, we do not find the kind of extremism that we see in Donoso Cortes -- quite the opposite. In Baader's view, revolutions may represent an "inflammation" in society, but what is called for is not therefore "dictatorship" or "repression," so much as an organic return to natural balance and health. And Baader was Catholic, like Donoso -- yet he did not insist on papal infallibility but rather called for a conciliar union of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, and for an end to the institution of the papacy itself. Baader is useful here, in other words, as an instance of how a devout Catholic might reach very different conclusions and responses from those of Donoso, even if beginning with the same metaphor of health and illness. But Donoso took a different course: driven at least in part by his own decaying body, he strove to impose infallible Catholic dogmatic order on the world around him by way of his writing. He insisted, as Maistre did before him, on the importance of extirpating modernist "heresy" and "poison" from the social body. There is, in the compressed fury of his writing, often a sense that he would extirpate if he could people as well as ideas. In his masterwork, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism, he writes that "it is absurd to endeavor to extirpate the evil from the society in which it exists by incidence only, without touching the individuals in whom it was originally and essentially." [17] He cites among the Church Fathers, Tertullian, and he extols the infallibility of the Church and its power at triumphing over heretics. [18] The "doctrinal intolerance" of the Church has alone "saved the world from chaos." [19] Not surprisingly, Donoso also approves of Augustine and his dualistic notion of the "City of God" from which the Donosian and Maistrean line of thought takes its origins. What we see in Donoso is a total reaction against the perceived chaos of modernity and individualism. Everywhere he looks is heresy; everywhere he finds heretics. Modernity itself is, in his mind, nothing but a concatenation of errors, and so it is little surprise that rather than insisting upon the Inquisition to stamp out particular errors, Donoso sees the wrath of God coming down on all of humanity and in particular upon European civilization. An inquisition requires the possibility of imposing doctrinal order on society, but when things have gone too far, then nothing can ensue but the pallor of death itself, apocalyptic visions of vast wars and calamities and lunatic despotism. It is perhaps indicative that there is some truth in his vision that his prophecies of European disaster, of the baleful effects of communism and of tyranny, of world war and of totalitarianism, were borne out by history less than a century later. But Donoso was not a man who went for complexities or subtleties: for him, the world was utterly divided into the saved and the damned, into Catholic or philosophical civilizations, into doctrinal orthodoxy or total heresy. A man of extremes, his vision was nothing if not totalizing and absolute. Donoso's antimodernism was visceral, and he could see nothing worth redeeming in modernity. Protestantism, individualism, science, rationalism, philosophy -- these were all to him delusional, errors to be rejected by those who placed their entire faith in the Church. Like Maistre before him, Donoso saw the world not as progressing, but as caught in a precipitous decline. Humanity, ever more separated from its religious salvation, has to have a powerful dictatorial force to hold it back from the total abyss. A secular dictatorship is better than what he sees as the only alternative: the unleashing of total chaos. In Donoso's writing, as in Maistre's, we see the origin of the line of thought whose next incarnation is the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Thus it is no surprise that Schmitt wrote in detail, and multiple times, on Donoso's work and its significance. Of his articles on Donoso, among the most important is "The Unknown Donoso Cortes," in which Schmitt offers an overview of Donoso's importance in relation to his own political philosophy. In a no doubt deliberately misleading aside, Schmitt claims that the origin of George Sorel's work -- and by extension, of fascism, state corporatism, and communism -- lies not in figures such as Maistre and Donoso but, rather, in the antiquated and genteel socialism of Proudhon (whom Donoso vilified as Satanic, while ignoring Marx)! The truth is, of course, that there is a direct line from Maistre and Donoso through Sorel to both fascism and communism, and Schmitt knew this all too well. But he wanted to defend Donoso, and throw the reader off track, for Schmitt saw in Donoso's fierce dualism his own distinction between "friend" and "enemy." [20] Thus Schmitt concludes his essay by insisting that we should acknowledge the "purity and greatness" of Donoso, who represents "the exceptional phenomenon of a singular political intuition rooted in secular horizons." [21] But even this final sentence of Schmitt's essay on Donoso is deceptive, for we know all too well (as Schmitt himself certainly also did) that Donoso was far from being "rooted in secular horizons." The very assertion is comical, given the fanaticism with which Donoso asserted the absolute primacy of the Catholic Church. Indeed, Donoso's insistence on the infallibility of the Church and of the Pope, attested to in his letter to Cardinal Fomari, is widely credited with influencing the Catholic Church's declaration of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870. Thus Donoso would seem to be the furthest imaginable from someone who is "rooted in secular horizons." Donoso was embroiled in the hugger-mugger of daily political intrigue in Spain, and he was insistent on defending the concept of a more or less secular dictatorship. But for all that, any reader of Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo, y el socialismo could not fail to see that Donoso was rooted only in Catholicism. How do we then explain the apparent contradiction between Donoso's defense of secular dictatorship, on the one hand, and his totalistic embrace of Catholicism, on the other? Here the work of Schmitt becomes especially valuable because we see in it the actual conduit from the Maistrean/Donosian line right into the work of a primary theorist of state totalism in the twentieth century. What Schmitt, as a fascist thinker, embraced above all in Donoso is none other than Schmitt's own projected thought. Schmitt praises Donoso for being rooted in secular horizons and for coldly endorsing dictatorship -- but it is Schmitt who moved from Catholicism to secular state corporatism and who accepted Nazism and Hitler's dictatorship. Schmitt praises Donoso for his "decisionism," as opposed to the mere "discussions" of parliamentary democracy that they both detest -- but it is Schmitt who is the decisionist, a term and an idea very much bound up with the twentieth, not the nineteenth, century. [22] Donoso Cortes is an important figure because he represents the awakening of the idea that was to grow and darken the secular horizon of the twentieth century in the state corporatism of both communism and fascism. In him, we see emerging even more clearly than in Maistre the assertion of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor that man ought not be free but must live under the imposed order of state corporatist dictatorship. Because man is by nature utterly fallen, an authoritarian state must be imposed that will decide the proper course for errant individuals and thus impose on humanity the "happiness" of the ant-heap. Such an imposition is, exactly as Donoso makes it out to be, coldly "rational" just like the slaughter of millions in the twentieth century -- ruthless industrial efficiency. How can reasoning people conceive of and carry out the slaughter of millions? Only by rationalizing it. This kind of thinking, like it or not, has its origins at least in part in the work of figures such as Maistre and Donoso, and more broadly in the bloody tradition of the persecution of heretics. But in order to see another conduit in this path from the Inquisition to totalitarianism, let us turn to yet another figure instrumental in the emergence of state corporatism in the twentieth century, whom we have already met in passing, but now must meet formally: Georges Sorel.
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