The Executioner (Penguin Great Ideas)

by Joseph de Maistre

We accuse Providence to be dispensed from accusing ourselves. We raise against Providence difficulties that we would blush to raise against a sovereign or a simple administrator whose wisdom we can appreciate. How strange! It is easier for us to be just to men than to God.

Undoubtedly physical evil could only have come into the world through the fault of free creatures. It can only be there as a remedy or an expiation, and in consequence it cannot have God as its direct author.

Suppose that each moral action were paid, so to speak, by some temporal advantage; the act, having nothing more of the supernatural, would no longer merit a recompense of this kind. Suppose, on the other hand, that in virtue of some divine law the thief’s hand should fall off the moment he committed a theft. People would refrain from theft as they refrain from putting their hands under the butcher’s cleaver. The moral order would disappear entirely.

God, wanting to govern men by men, at least exteriorly, has handed over to sovereigns the eminent prerogative of punishing crimes, and it is in this matter especially that they are his representatives.

Evil exists on the earth and acts constantly, and by a necessary consequence it must constantly be repressed by punishment.

For my part, I cannot disagree with the opinion of a recent apologist who held that all illnesses have their origin in some vice proscribed by Scripture, and that this holy law contains true medicine for the body as well as the soul, so that if a society of just men made use of it, death would be no more than the inevitable term of a sane and robust old age. This opinion was, I believe, that of Origen.

As with sins, there are illnesses that are actual and original, accidental and habitual, mortal and venial.

Moreover observe that there are crimes that have distinctive characteristics, and consequently distinctive names in every language, such as murder, sacrilege, incest, etc., and others that can only be identified by general terms, such as fraud, injustice, violence, corruption, etc. In the same way there are distinctive diseases such as dropsy, consumption, and apoplexy, etc., and others that can only be identified by the general terms of malaise, discomfort, aches, and nameless fevers, etc. Now the more virtuous the man, the more immune he is from illnesses that have names.

A beautiful analogy between illnesses and crimes can be drawn from the action of the divine author of our religion. Since he was the master certainly, he could have confirmed his mission in men’s eyes by enkindling volcanoes or bringing down lightning, but he never derogated from the laws of nature except to do good things for men. Before healing the sick who were presented to him, this divine master never failed to remit their sins or to render public testimony to the faith that had reconciled the sinner.

For example, we have repeated a thousand times the old adage, that the table kills more men than war, but there are very few men who reflect enough on the deep truth of this axiom. If everyone examines themselves severely, they will remain convinced that they eat perhaps half again more than they should. For excesses of quantity let us pass to excesses of quality. Examine in all its details this perfidious art of exciting a deceptive appetite that kills us.

Philosophy alone discovered long ago that all human wisdom is to be found in two words: SUSTINE ET ABSTINE [suffer and abstain].

And although philosophy is a feeble legislator whose best laws may even be ridiculed because it lacks the power to make itself obeyed, nevertheless we must be fair and give it credit for the truths that it has published. It has understood very well that man’s strongest inclinations are vicious to the point of obviously tending towards the destruction of society, that man has no greater enemy than himself, and that when he has learned to vanquish himself, he knows everything.

If we could clearly perceive all the evils that result from disordered procreation and from innumerable profanations of the first law of the world, we would recoil in horror. This is why the only true religion is also the only one that, without the power to say all things to man, nevertheless lays hold of marriage and submits it to its holy ordinances.

So men have brought upon themselves most of the evils that afflict them;

So leaving aside from this discussion everything that could be seen as hypothetical, I am still entitled to pose this incontestable principle: Moral vices can augment the number and intensity of diseases to a degree that is impossible to determine. Reciprocally, this hideous empire of physical evil can be restrained by virtue to limits that are also impossible to fix.

Men of our age, in this season, must prescribe for themselves a conventional night of peaceful sleep,

Original sin, which explains everything and without which nothing is explained, unfortunately repeats itself at every moment in time, although in a secondary way.

every individual or national degradation is immediately heralded by a rigorously proportional degradation in language.

This need, this hunger for knowledge, which agitates man, is only the natural tendency of his being, which carries him towards his original state and alerts him to what he is.

Wherever you find an altar, there civilization is to be found. The poor man in his cabin, covered with straw is undoubtedly less learned than we are, but more truly social if he learns his catechism and profits from it.

Just as the most abject and revolting substances are nevertheless still capable of a certain degradation, so are the natural vices of humanity even more vicious in the savage. He is a thief, he is cruel, he is dissolute; but he is these things in a different way than we are. To become criminals we must overcome our nature; the savage follows his. He has an appetite for crime, and no remorse at all. While the son kills his father to spare him the inconvenience of old age, his woman destroys in her womb the fruit of their brutal lust to escape the fatigue of nursing it. He rips off the bleeding scalp of his living enemy; he tears him to pieces, roasts him, and devours him while singing. If he comes upon strong liquor, he drinks to intoxication, to fever, to death, deprived equally of the reason that would command a man to fear it and of the instinct that warns the animal by distaste. He is visibly perverted; he has been stricken in the deepest layers of his moral being. He makes the observer who knows how to see tremble. But do we want to tremble for ourselves and in a very salutary way? Let us reflect that with our intelligence, our morals, our sciences, and our arts, we are to the primitive man precisely what the savage is to us.

I have been thinking about war ever since I began to think; this terrible subject has seized my full attention, and yet I have never gone into it deeply enough.

Although the military is in itself dangerous to the well being and liberty of every nation, because the motto of this profession will always be, more or less, that of Achilles, Jura nego mihi nata [I claim that for me no laws exist], nevertheless the nations most jealous of their liberties have never thought differently than the rest of mankind about the pre-eminence of the military profession. Antiquity thought no differently than we do on this point; it is one of those on which men have always agreed and always will. So this is the problem I want to pose for you: Explain why the most honourable thing in the world, according to the judgement of all of humanity, without exception, has always been the right to shed innocent blood innocently? If you look at the matter closely, you will see that there is something mysterious and inexplicable in the extraordinary value that men have always attached to military glory, the more so in that, if we took into account only theory and human reasoning, we would be led to directly opposite ideas. So it is not a question of explaining the possibility of war by the glory that surrounds it, but of explaining this glory itself, which is not easy.

one never has too many weapons against error.

Much is said about the licence of camps. No doubt it is great, but usually soldiers do not find vices in the camps; they carry them there. A moral and austere people always furnishes excellent soldiers, terrible only on the battlefield. Virtues, even piety, combine very well with military courage; far from enfeebling the warrior, these virtues exalt him.

Man, suddenly seized by a divine fury foreign to both hatred and anger, goes to the battlefield without knowing what he intends nor even what he is doing. How can this horrible enigma be explained? Nothing is more contrary to man’s nature, yet nothing is less repugnant to him; he does with enthusiasm what he holds in horror.

Thus, from the maggot up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living things is unceasingly fulfilled. The entire earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be immolated without end, without restraint, without respite, until the consummation of the world, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.

War is divine by the way in which it breaks out. I do not want to excuse anyone too easily, but how many of those regarded as the immediate authors of war are themselves carried along by circumstances!

History is full of inconceivable events that disconcerted the finest speculations.

Moreover, if you take a more general look at the role that moral power plays in war, you will be convinced that nowhere does the divine hand make itself felt more vividly to man. One could say that this is a department, if you will allow me the term, whose direction Providence has reserved to itself, and in which man is only allowed to act in an almost mechanical way, since success here depends almost entirely on what he can least control. Never is he warned more often and more vividly of his own powerlessness and of the inexorable power ruling all things than in war.

It is imagination that loses battles.

People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there? Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him?

I have a particular hatred of exaggeration, which is the falsehood of honest men.

Because he sang only of the Eternal, his hymns participated in eternity. The fiery accents imparted to his divine lyre still resound in all parts of the world after thirty centuries. The synagogue preserved the Psalms; the Church hastened to adopt them. The poetry of all Christian nations has laid hold of them, and for more than three centuries the sun has never ceased to shine on churches whose vaults resound to these sacred hymns. They are sung in Rome, Geneva, Madrid, London, Quebec, Quito, Moscow, Peking, and Botany Bay; they are whispered in Japan.

How the reign of prayer has been weakened, and what means have not been used to extinguish its voice! Has our century not asked Of what use are those who pray?

Moreover, to return to the night and to dreams, we see that the greatest geniuses of antiquity, without distinction, never doubted the importance of dreams, and that they even went so far as to sleep in temples to receive oracles there.

For myself, I do not believe that I have yet acquired the right to be impertinent.