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    Orthodox Christianity: Is Mysticism a Higher Form of Rationality?

    May 27, 2025 by Will Morrisey

    Vladimir Lossky: The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Chapters 1-3. Translated by Members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Original French version published in 1944.

     

    Lossky begins by stating his intention: an exposition of “a spirituality which expresses a doctrinal attitude.” That is what he means by “mystical theology.” In this, he insists on a sane balance: “in a certain sense, all theology is mystical, inasmuch as it shows forth the divine mystery,” namely, “the data of revelation”; however, mysticism must not be understood as utterly unknowable, entirely personal or ‘subjective,’ which would put it beyond theology—beyond a logos about God derived from God’s revelation. Properly understood, “theology and mysticism support and complete each other,” inasmuch as “the mystical experience is a personal working out of the content of the common faith,” while “theology is an expression, for the profit of all, of that which can be experienced by everyone.” Neither ‘subjectivism’ nor ‘objectivism’ will do: “Outside the truth kept by the whole Church personal experience would be deprived of all certainty, of all objectivity. It would be a mingling of truth and of falsehood, of reality and of illusion: ‘mysticism’ in the bad sense of the word. On the other hand, the teaching of the church would have no hold on souls if it did not in some degree express an inner experience of truth, granted in different measure to each one of the faithful”—if its noetic content did not change souls, reorient them in a manner that manifests itself in practice, in life. The purpose of theology is what Lossky calls “deification,” which most decidedly does not mean that human beings can become gods, as the Gnostics imagined. What it can do is aspire to “union with God,” but only thanks to the grace of God. The nature of that union needs careful inquiry, which Lossky seeks both to provide and to spur in his readers. Throughout its long history of opposing heresy, the Church addresses “the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God.”

    ‘Church’ means ‘assembly,’ and ‘assembly’ implies a regime, a ruling organization. Every regime has a purpose, and the purpose of the Church regime can only be to uphold the doctrines of the Church in order to change souls, bringing them closer to God. To understand the regime of the Orthodox Church, one must not fall into the error of taking it as “a federation of national churches, having as its basis a political principle,” namely, “the state-church.” This error is understandable, inasmuch as one speaks of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and so on. But “the view that would base the unity of a local church on a political, racial or cultural principle is considered by the Orthodox Church as a heresy, specifically known by the name of phyletism,” Greek for tribalism. Tribalism or nationalism obviously contradicts Christian universality or catholicity; Orthodox Christianity is no less catholic than Roman Catholicism. The territories governed by the Orthodox bishops or patriarchs “do not necessarily correspond to the political boundaries of a state,” a modern nation-state. At the same time, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Christians have no equivalent of the Pope even if the Patriarch of Constantinople “enjoys a certain primacy of honor, arbitrating from time to time in disputes, but without exercising a jurisdiction over the whole body of the ecumenical Church.” Church unity primarily “expresses itself through the communion of the heads of local churches among themselves”; its catholicity “is realized…in the richness and multiplicity of the local traditions which bear witness unanimously to a single Truth.” It is true that this has led to a “restless and sometimes agitated” ecclesiastical life, but Lossky regards this as “the price paid for religious vitality.” 

    The apex of Orthodox Christian mystical theology may be seen in monasticism, “the most classical” of the “forms of the spiritual life,” whereby monks seek “union with God in a complete renunciation of the life of this present world.” The way of life of the monastic regime harmonizes contemplation and activity in two ways: “the ascetic rule and the school of interior prayer” themselves “receive the name of spiritual activity“; moreover, the physical work the monks undertake in order “to overcome their rebel nature” and to “avoid idleness, the enemy of the spiritual life.” In order to “withstand all the assaults of the enemy,” Satan, and “every irrational movement of our fallen nature,” the monks must exercise “an unceasing vigil.” More, “human nature must undergo a change; it must be more and more transfigured by grace in the way of sanctification, which has a range which is not only spiritual but also bodily—and hence cosmic.” The monasteries have exerted “religious and moral influence” on political life, without aspiring to direct rule. Obviously, this influence cannot mean direct access to the monk’s spiritual life by outsiders, as “the way of mystical union is nearly always a secret between God and the soul concerned, which is never confided to others unless, it may be, to a confessor or to a few disciples.” Rather, by their fruits you shall know them, as the monks may transmit “wisdom, understanding of the divine mysteries” via “theological or moral teaching” to their fellow monks or to the laity. But the “inward and personal aspect of the mystical experience…remains hidden from the eyes of all.” Eccentricity does not arise because “the inner experience of the Christian develops within the circle delineated by the teaching of the Church: within the dogmatic framework which molds his person.” To show how this is possible, Lossky points to the way in which ‘secular’ political regimes do the same thing. Likely thinking of malign effects of tyrannical ideology in his lifetime, he observes, “Even now a political doctrine professed by the members of a party can so fashion their mentality as to produce a type of man distinguishable from other men by certain moral or psychical marks.” More broadly, as political philosophers have understood, regimes generally foster certain human types, often by habituation in accordance with custom: the Roman centurion, the Yankee trader.

    To elucidate Orthodox mystical theology, Lossky turns to the fifth-sixth century writer who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, thereby associating himself with the teaching of a first-century disciple of Paul who served as an Athenian judge, and eventual Bishop of Athens. Lossky considers Dionysius’ book, Concerning Mystical Theology, to be “a text inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Dionysius distinguishes “cataphatic” or “positive theology” via “apophatic” or “negative theology.” Of the two, negative theology is superior. Since “God is beyond all that exists,” one can only approach Him by “deny[ing] all that is inferior to Him, that is to say, all that which is.” One proceeds by negations of what one knows, through the senses or through reasoning about what we know through the senses—the way of classical philosophy—ascending “all that can be known,” all “knowledge of created things,” “in order to draw near to the Unknown in the darkness of absolute ignorance.” In the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas “reduces the two ways of Dionysius to one, making negative theology a corrective to affirmative theology,” but for Dionysius and the Eastern Orthodox Church generally, apophaticism is “the fundamental characteristic of the whole theological tradition.” “It is necessary to renounce both sense and all the workings of reason, everything which may be known by the senses or the understanding, both that which is and all that is not, in order to be able to attain in perfect ignorance to union with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge,” abandoning “all that is impure and even all that is pure.” Dionysius finds in Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai and his meeting with God a series of events, of “detachments,” in which the prophet “is freed from the things that see and are seen,” and reaching out to “what is entirely untouched and unseen: “he is united to the best of his powers with the unknowing quiescence of all knowledge, and by that very unknowing he knows what surpasses understanding.” At this ultimate level of ascent, Moses conceives of God not as an object of knowledge, not as an ‘object’ at all; he achieves “mystical union with God, whose nature remains incomprehensible.”

    Lossky carefully distinguishes Dionysius from the neo-Platonists whom he resembles, contrasting Concerning Mystical Theology with Plotinus’ Sixth Ennead. Plotinus is a philosopher. The neo-Platonic ascent to God negates, abstracts, detaches itself from “the realm of being,” which is “necessarily multiple,” to comprehend “the absolute simplicity of the One.” That is, “the God of Plotinus is not incomprehensible by nature. Plotinus does not transcend being in the manner of Dionysius; Plotinus reduces being “to absolute simplicity.” The God of Dionysius is absolutely incomprehensible, neither One/Unity nor Many: “He transcends this antimony, being unknowable in what He is.” Thus, “the God of revelation is not the God of the philosophers,” not a nature but a Person. (Although Lossky too-generously describes Origen as a “great Christian thinker,” it should be clear that he is fundamentally a Neo-Platonist, on precisely the grounds that he conceives of God as “a simple, intellectual nature.”) It is also crucial to understand that this ascent cannot be undertaken by divinely ‘unassisted’ human effort but only by grace, by what Clement of Alexandria calls “God-given wisdom which is the power of the Father.” 

    God is unknowable in part because He is infinite. Unlike a natural object, unlike nature in its entirety, the cosmos, the soul in union with God does not thereby reach a telos, an end in the sense that it no longer desires, achieving noetic satisfaction. “Filled with an ever-increasing desire, the soul grows without ceasing, goes forth from itself, reaches out beyond itself, and, in so doing, is filled with yet greater longing” in an ascent that “becomes infinite, the desire insatiable.” In the words of John Damascene, “All that we can say” about God is that, in His revelation, He “does not show forth His nature but the things that relate to His nature,” or, as rabbis say, He ‘does not lack wisdom,’ ‘does not lack justice.’ Atheists who deny the existence of God are correct, but they fail to see that God is “above existence itself.” Nor does God’s unknowability imply agnosticism, suspension of belief. Nor does it imply nihilism, the assertion of nothingness by means of willful destruction. Gregory of Palamas puts it this way: “If God be nature, then all else is not nature. If that which is not God be nature, God is not nature, and likewise He is not being if that which is God is being.”

    In terms of the soul, in Platonism and Neo-Platonism alike the ascent on Diotima’s ladder, the purification of the soul necessary for that ascent, the conversion or ‘turning around’ of the soul is “above all of an intellectual nature,” a turning away from the idols of the Cave that represents the opinions that rule the polis, with reason ruling the spirited and appetitive elements of the soul. In his “refusal to accept being as such, in so far as it conceals the divine non-being,” in renouncing “the realm of created things in order to gain access to that of the un-created,” Dionysius aspires to an “existential liberation involving the whole being of him who would know God” by acknowledging that “the only rational notion which we can have of God will…be that of His incomprehensibility.” Socrates know that he knows nothing but never supposes that he has achieved union with God thereby, having no revelation of God as Person. That is the most important difference between Socrates and Dionysius. “There is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man,” to become ‘deified’ not in pride, in the Machiavellian or Baconian sense, but in humility, giving oneself and all else up to God, a “communion with the living God.” “He who, in following this path, imagines at a given moment that he has known what God is has a depraved spirit”; apophaticism is “the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth.” In this, apophaticism utterly rejects idolatry, even the highest idolatry of Being, seen in philosophy. “There is no philosophy more or less Christian. Plato is not more Christian than Aristotle. The question of the relations between theology and philosophy has never arisen in the East.”

    Where, then, does “cataphatic” or affirmative theology fit in? Instead of ascending toward God, affirmative theology “is a way that comes down to us” from God, in the “manifestations of God in creation.” The perfect such manifestation is “the incarnation of the Word,” Jesus Christ. “The Super-essential was manifested in human substance without ceasing to be hidden after this manifestation,” Dionysius writes, “or to express myself after a more heavenly fashion, in this manifestation itself.” It is also manifested in His Creation, in nature seen as a manifestation of His will.

    This suggests that most Christians will never ascend to union with God in this life, even as they remain Christians. It is true, Gregory Nazianzen writes, that “the multitude” of men are “unworthy of [the] height of contemplation” reached by a Moses. Let such a lesser soul “remain below and listen to the voice alone, and the trumpet, the bare words of piety.” Lossky comments, “This is not a more perfect or esoteric teaching hidden from the profane, nor is it a gnostic separation between those who are spiritual, psychic or carnal, but a school of contemplation wherein each receives his share in the experience of the Christian mystery lived by the Church”—the same “divine Wisdom,” but “practiced in varying degrees, with greater or lesser intensity,” largely by the grace of God. It leads neither to One nor to Many but to the Holy Trinity, to a discussion of which Lossky now turns.

    Although God evidently manifests Himself as a Person in Biblical account, Lossky demurs.  While Orthodox apophaticism “is not an impersonal mysticism” along the lines of the ‘Eastern’ religions, its goal emphatically is “not a nature or an essence,” since the Trinity “transcends all notion both of nature and of person.” If the Trinity is neither a ‘what’ nor a ‘who,’ if it is beyond “what the mind can conceive,” how can one speak or write about ‘it’? 

    Created being changes, but “the Trinity is an absolute stability.” The “Godhead” or divine Essence cannot be contained by “created intelligence.” Created intelligence can approach rather than comprehend the Trinitarian Godhead by means of created intelligence’s very motion, “pursuing now the one, now the three, and retuning again to the unity,” “swing[ing] ceaselessly between the two poles of the antinomy, in order to attain to the contemplation of this threefold monad.” “Those unimaginative and pedestrian souls who are incapable of rising above rational concepts” must reconcile themselves to being left behind. The antimonies of reason are dualities, but the Trinity obviously is not: “Two is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation: the one and the many find themselves gathered and circumscribed in the Trinity.” Lossky cautions that “there is no question here of a material number which serves for calculation and is no wise applicable in the spiritual sphere, where there is no quantitative increase.” It is divine grace, not the human power of reason, that lifts the soul to the contemplation of the Trinity. The human mind inclines toward Sabellianism, the thought that the Trinity is “the essence [ousia] of the philosophers with three modes of manifestation,” three personae; alternatively, the mind might divide the Trinity “into three distinct beings, as did Arius.” But “Revelation sets an abyss between the truth which it declares and the truths which can be discovered by philosophical speculation.” That is, philosophy must admit, like Socrates, that it knows that it does not know.

    So, how to speak about this? In the words of St Basil, “adoring the God of God, confessing the individuality of the hypostases, we dwell in the monarchy without dividing the theology into fragments.” Again, how? “It was a question of finding a distinction of terms which should express the unity of, and the differentiation within, the Godhead, without giving the preeminence either to the one or to the other.” For this, Greek philosophic vocabulary needed to be ‘baptized’ or ‘born again’ to fit the revealed Word. Ousia now means “all that subsists by itself and which has not its being in another.” Although hypostasis is sometimes used as a synonym for ousia, for the Church Fathers the difference is that “between common and particular.” The particular entities or hypostases that constitute the Trinity share the same ousia. “Though the Latins might express the mystery of the Trinity by starting from one essence in order to arrive at the three persons; though the Greeks might prefer the concrete as their starting point (that is to say, the three hypostases) seeing in them the one nature, it was always the same dogma of the Trinity that was confessed by the whole of Christendom before the separation” of West and East, Rome and Byzantium. The Father is “unbegotten”; the Son is “begotten” by the Father; the Holy Spirit is “proceeds” from the Father. These hypostases “dwell in one another,” while distinct from one another, but not in the manner of distinct human persons, whose works and wills are distinct, each from another. The works of the ‘persons’ that are the Trinity are those of “a single will, a single power, a single operation.” 

    What, then, is this matter of unbegotten, begotten, and proceeding? John Damascene rejects the inquiry. “You hear that there is generation? Do not waste your time in seeking after the how.” Orthodox theologians nonetheless distinguish their doctrine from the Roman Catholic doctrine, which holds that the Holy Spirit “proceeded from the Father and from the Son.” This was the filioque (i.e., ‘from the Son’) controversy that arose in the 9th century AD, “the primordial cause, the only dogmatic cause of the breach between East and West.” Otherwise, the ways of West and East “were both equally legitimate so long as the first did not attribute to the essence a supremacy over the three persons, nor the second [Person or Entity] to the three persons a supremacy over the common nature.” But the Eastern Church “saw in the formula of the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son a tendency to stress the unity of nature at the expense of the real distinction between the persons.” That is “the principle of unity in the Trinity is the person of the Father,” the “Source of the relations whence the hypostases receive their distinctive characteristics.” The Roman Catholic doctrine of the filioque “seems to impair the monarchy of the Father.” “The Father—source of all divinity within the Trinity—brings forth the Son and the Holy Spirit in conferring upon them His nature, which remains one and indivisible, identical in itself in the Three.” And so, as Gregory Nazianzen puts it, “When we look at the Godhead, or the First Cause, or the Monarchy, that which we conceive is One; but when we look at the Persons in whom the Godhead dwells, and at those who timelessly and with equal glory have their being from the Frist Cause—there are Three whom we worship.” As to the originating Father, he “derives from Himself His being” as “the beginning and cause of the existence of all things both as to their nature and mode of being.” “It is the Father who distinguishes the hypostases ‘in an eternal movement of love,’ according to an expression of St. Maximus,” conferring “His one nature upon the Son and upon the Holy Spirit alike,” although conferring that nature differently in each one. And so, for example, one can ‘know’ the Son only by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

    Lossky is quick to insist that the Father does not occupy a position of superiority over the Son and the Holy Spirit. Each Person of the Trinity is equally God, “each God when considered in Himself,” as Nazianzen writes. The Holy Trinity is the “primordial fact, ultimate reality, first datum which cannot be deduced, explained or discovered by way of any other truth; for there is nothing which is prior to it.” This is what Orthodox theologians mean when they speak of the “incomprehensibility” or “unknowability” of God; there is nothing to explain him by, nothing behind or above Him. Everything else is ‘beneath’ Him—created by Him. His human creations can approach Him not by apprehending His nature but by “deification,” that is, by “possessing by grace all that the Holy Trinity possesses by nature,” by their “participation in the divine life of the Holy Trinity.” This approach, “deification,” participation is the path of “apophatic ascent,” a kind of crucifixion of the human-all-too-human elements of our nature, by discarding ‘worldly’ things. “This is the reason why no philosophical speculation has ever succeeded in rising to the mystery of the Holy Trinity” but can “receive the full revelation of the Godhead only after Christ on the cross had triumphed over death and over the abyss of hell.”

    How is this mystical union, this “deification,” possible? In one sense, we can participate in the divine nature, in another sense we obviously cannot really become God. God is both “totally inaccessible and at the same time accessible.” His nature is what is “inaccessible, unknowable and incommunicable,” but His “energies or divine operations, forces to and inseparable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth from himself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself,” are revealed to His human creatures. Gregory Palamas expresses the distinction: “to say that the divine nature is communicable not in itself but through its energy, is to remain within the bounds of right devotion.” Lossky distinguishes the term “theology,” which refers to teaching “about the divine being itself—the Holy Trinity,” from “the exterior manifestations of God—the Trinity known in its relation to created being—[which] belong[s] to the realm of economy.” The term Logos refers typically to this manifestation, this “economy,” which “is” God as Son, as Christ, from and of God the Father. “The very name of the Word—Logos—attributed to the Son is itself primarily a designation of the ‘economic’ order, proper to the second hypostasis as manifesting the nature of the Father.” Lossky quotes John Damascene: “all we can say positively of God”—i.e., not apophatically—manifests “not His nature but the things about his nature” that He chooses to reveal. These energies are not created things but energies that “flow eternally from the one essence of the Trinity,” “determined by a decision of the common will of the three Persons.” Creation ex nihilo is the first manifestation of divine will and energy. And the energies manifest God’s many “names”: Wisdom, Life, Power, Justice, Love, Being, indeed the name “God” itself. The name Logos “is the exterior manifestation of the nature of the Father by the Son.” And as for the Holy Spirit, it is by him that we know Christ, the Son. But we know the Trinity through the manifestations of the single will that they share, not directly, not noetically. That is why “the Trinity can remain incommunicable in essence and at the same time come and dwell within us,” thanks to divine grace. In receiving this gift, “the deifying energies, one receives at the same time the in-dwelling of the Holy Trinity.” “The union to which we are called is neither hypostatic—as in the case of the human nature of Christ—nor substantial, as in that of the three divine Persons: it is union with God in His energies, or union by grace, making us participate in the divine nature, without our essence becoming thereby the essence of God.” Christ became Man by His incarnation; we humans are already incarnate, but we can ‘become’ God, or more precisely participate in godliness, thanks to this indwelling of God in our souls.

     

     

     

    Filed Under: Bible Notes

    The French Malaise

    May 14, 2025 by Will Morrisey

    Chantal Delsol: Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age. Andrew Kelley translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

     

    “I am a French woman who is critical of France.” Why so?

    While “it is so good to live in France”—one of the most materially prosperous countries in the world, blessed with natural beauty and some of the world’s most elegant architecture and cuisine, no longer worried “about either tyranny or war—the French nonetheless maintain a sour mood about their life. Nothing is ever good enough; they have “a propensity to expect perfection here below,” and the quotidian perennially disappoints such expectations. They have cultivated “the habit of the ideologue.”

    Not only France but Europe generally has encouraged the mindset of ‘globalization,” the belief that because we humans are all of one species, we as individuals can establish strong and satisfying social and even political bonds with all other individuals worldwide, as fellow ‘citizens of the world.’ The problem is, we can’t. Our families, our neighbors, our co-workers, our country—what Delsol nicely calls “the atmosphere of our existence”—constitute the real, as distinguished from the imagined, world we actually live in. In the ancient world, the world of small poleis, of civil religions, of families who knew who their ancestors were without any need for extensive research, this was obvious. More, the ‘ancients’ regarded the political community as superior to the individual. In modern France, Charles de Gaulle attempted to revive something of ‘the spirit of the city’ under conditions of modern statism, but today’s France has begun to wake up to the fact that France lacks the grandeur he ascribed to it, that it is “mediocre and ordinary” among the nations of the world. Reality having disappointed them, the French look beyond it to an imaginary France fully integrated into an imaginary world. They are perpetually frustrated utopians.

    Hélas, if you drive reality out with a pitchfork, she will return. “Each people finds its own identity in some reality or concept that characterizes it and that is close to its heart.” In France, this is a regime, “its republican state,” which is as much an identity for them as empire is for Russians and freedom is for Americans. Yet “in France, the republican state is losing its substance and is beginning to look like the other neighboring states,” an EU-ified entity, a dilute being. It is crucial to understand that we are all of the same species, lest we fall from patriotism into nationalism, from freedom into slaveholding. Nor should we define human beings as merely poor, bare, forked animals, as that way (especially if not relieved by religious conviction) leads to the cynicism that animates and abets tyrants. But we cannot live as if we were human beings, simply. More than that, families, neighbors, co-workers, fellow citizens not only bring us serious and satisfying attachments; they keep us grounded in reality. Flights of fantasy can’t last if you are dealing with the neighbor’s dog.

    What once gave the French a sense of national pride? Delsol recalls the story of Clovis, “the first barbarian king to be baptized,” entitling France to be called the “eldest daughter of the Church.” When the French Catholic Church suffered partial eclipse during the Enlightenment and the revolution (the Revolution) that the Enlightenment inspired, the French could now boast of their country as “the eldest daughter of the revolution.” To this day, “France persists with the view that it invented universalism,” even if “the United States can say the same,” and this claim gives it a sense of ‘exceptionalism.’ Yet, the more ‘universal’ the rest of the world becomes, the less exceptional France must be. “If France is doing poorly today, it is…on account of something that has been lost or that one thinks, rightly or wrongly, has been lost, and this is what one could call our historical grandeur.” France resembles “an older person who was once famous.” She awaits her close-up in vain.

    The Republic: Delsol distinguishes republicanism from democracy, and it is important to understand how she defines those terms, since she does not define them the way an American is likely to do. Following the lead of James Madison in Federalist #10, an American might define republicanism as representative government, distinguishing it from democracy, a regime in which the people rule directly, as in the New England town meetings Alexis de Tocqueville saw and esteemed. Insofar as government officials are elected by the citizens, and insofar as institutions of federalism, of various levels of self-government prevail, America can rightly call itself a democratic republic, without contradiction, even while distinguishing republicanism and democracy as regimes. What Delsol means by ‘republic’ is the “pre-modern holism” of the ancient polis. That republic featured citizens who “depended closely on one another and that did not really exist in terms of individuals”; they were citizens in close union, so much so that they identified that union as the political good, condemning any sign of individuality (Socrates, for example) as suspect. For the ancients, “the good is sum-bolos, while evil is dia-bolus, separation.” And there is something to this. Fraternity is indeed “a natural tendency” in the human heart, even before it becomes codified into an element of morality. “Man is not only inclined to evil, he is also inclined to good, which means attention to the other”; “the disinterested feeling is a natural penchant,” seen in all human societies first of all in the family, in the care of parents for children.

    The fraternity cited in the French revolutionary formula of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity signifies an attempt to bring the spirit of ancient republicanism into the large modern state, which is very far from the intimacy of the ancient polis. But in such a large place, democracy requires the institutional articulations provided by federalism, and this is precisely what the French have abandoned since the centralizing, Machiavellian, Bourbon dynasty brought the aristocrats to Versailles, the better to corrupt and keep an eye on them. This is where Tocqueville enters into Delsol’s analysis, not so much the Democracy in America as The Old Regime and the Revolution, in which Tocqueville shows how the centralized republican regime of the Jacobins imitated the centralized monarchic regime of the Bourbons and issued in the centralized despotic regimes of the Bonapartes, greater and lesser. In such modern states, whatever their regime, there flourishes a sort of familial care; under monarchic regimes paternalism, under republican regimes the fraternity of “civic friendship, of which the ancients spoke when describing a well-ordered city.” Under conditions of modern statism, the attempt to bring centralization and a strong sense of political union to large populations living in extensive territories must prove utopian. Indeed, even in the ancient poleis this proved utopian, the stuff the dreams of Socrates City in Speech were made of.

    Thus, “the great, current drama of republican fraternity comprises both its utopian character and, in the end, its dissolution” in contact with the hard rocks of the real world. “So as not to lose this fraternity,” this treasured illusion, “one confuses it with compassion, which has no limit.” There are no borders, the Doctors without Borders hope. That is, “the republican idea is more moral than political.” Since “civic friendship is a virtue,” an element of a morality, and morality requires consent, individual liberty, a republic (democratic or not) “begins from the presupposition that citizens are freely able to forget themselves in the face of the public entity,” capable of regretting that they have but one life to give for their country. Morality requires effort, action, practice, a “going beyond oneself” that is not “antinatural.” Such freedom goes against the establishment of “censors who impose republican virtue,” which would be “a false virtue for a subjugated people,” without the consent of the governed. And just as the republican way of life cannot simply be imposed, so it cannot sit well with “modern individualism,” with a populace in which people walk past one another, paying attention not to their fellow citizens but “to their own music.” Henry David Thoreau adjured his readers to march to the drumbeat they hear, no matter how measured or far away, but Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, alone.

    “Made for ancient, holistic societies and revived in the modern era to serve a political ideal, the republican model is probably obsolete,” which is not to say that some currently democratic regime might not try it again, at some point, or have it imposed upon it by some foreign regime. What has prevailed in France is a strong but not tyrannical central state that has broken up local and regional communities, leaving the French guarding the one thing they still control: their individuality, now hardened into individualism. “Today, the contradiction between the republican ideal and the importance of individual wills produces disastrous effects.” Putting it in terms of French political thought, Delsol asks, “Is the society inaugurated by Jean Bodin still viable in the era of mobile phones?” Under modern conditions, both republicanism and individualism are ideologies, unrealizable ideals, vehemently asserted against one another.

    Both republicanism and individualism undercut democracy as Delsol defines it. “Democracy is an anthropology; it supposes, rightly or wrongly, that all the adults in the city are capable of thinking and expressing the common good,” and “a political system” based on that anthropology. “A republic is an ideal of communion, which is quite a different thing”; it is “a moral atmosphere and hope.” The perversion of democracy is “the triumph of the masses,” majority tyranny; the perversion of republicanism is “moral hypocrisy,” talking the communal talk while walking the self-interested walk—the sort of thing one sees in any clerisy, religious or secular. In these terms, Americans, emphasizing liberty as self-government, founded a democracy while the French, emphasizing unity, fraternity, founded a republic, or tried to. This is why many among the French aspired to socialism when it became obvious that republicanism would never bring the communalism they craved, only to fall back to the republican ideal when communism failed. But since the newly revived republicanism supposes that France must “work for the entirety of humanity and not for a particular group of people,” and since, moreover, “there is no solidarity without a face,” this ideal too now “withers in disappointment.” “This entirely messianic manner of considering the republic allows us to understand why France is so undemocratic,” having “always privileged the union of hearts in comparison with people’s freedom.” Putting the matter in cogent metaphorical terms, Delsol remarks, “For the United States, the revolution consisted in becoming emancipated from the English motherland and in waiting for the constitution from the founding fathers. The French Revolution was organized around the murder of the king”—a father—which “was symbolic at first, then real, but subsequently it coalesced around the symbol of Marianne, the mother of the republic.” The French state mothers the French, and “its maternal attitude corresponds to the infantile attitude of its citizens.”

    In all of this, Delsol performs a very fine task. She brings Tocqueville’s argument into the twenty-first century. As per The Old Regime and the Revolution, she remarks that “the republic fears democracy because the latter, by conferring power to intermediate governing bodies in the name of freedom, always more or less becomes similar to an oligarchy.” In this mistrust of subsidiarity, of federalism, France prefers “a direct alliance of the supreme chief (be it the king or the president) with the people.” While an enemy of the old lines of the French monarchy, Bonaparte practiced a “version of enlightened despotism,” dissolving the old provinces and redividing the country into departments directly subservient to the central state that he ruled, all in the hope that this would make the French happy. But making the French happy isn’t an easy thing to do. “What a utopia! And at the same time, he worked for what is universal: his work is meant to open up a blank slate valid for all peoples,” as he conquered his way through Europe. But equality under Napoleon abolished the old oligarchies only to establish a new one, with bureaucrats occupying the offices of the central state, “as one will see later with the Soviet Union.”

    In Delsol’s judgment, de Gaulle was a sort of Bonapartist, a nominally Catholic centralizer in the manner of Charles Maurras. [1] De Gaulle “hated political parties,” “only want[ing] a direct agreement between himself and the people.” “Isn’t this the beginning of tyranny this rejection of intermediaries?” This isn’t quite fair to de Gaulle, however. De Gaulle hated the political parties not as such but because they upheld the regime of parliamentary rule, with an executive so weak that the country failed to defend itself against Hitler, accelerating the decline of France in the world. With their petty bickering over spoils, the parties made France smaller, made the French smaller-souled. De Gaulle’s intention was first to establish a strong executive, a regime in which citizens could elect a president empowered to make firm decisions, especially respecting foreign policy, and then to devolve substantial state power to intermediary bodies. It was the French, not de Gaulle, who rejected this, precipitating his resignation from office in 1969, just as the resumption of parliamentary rule had precipitated his resignation in 1946.

    This left France with exactly the regime Delsol describes: a centralized and technocratic pseudo-republic. “Democracy in France is still very primitive”; “we have a long way to go before we reach democratic maturity.” Currently, the French government “wants to hold all the conditions of the lives of its subjects in its grasp” through what Tocqueville called “soft despotism” and what the French call the état-providence, the provider-state or “welfare state.” The state doesn’t mind if the French enjoy “the freedom to squabble perpetually about metaphysical questions” as “inveterate pontificators on all matters that have no reality,” so long as they never think in practical terms, which might lead to reasoned political action, citizenship. Leave the real world to us, the statists imply. “Centralization makes citizens unlearn solidarity,” even as it permits them to dream about it. It is a formula for burning, impotent resentment.

    How do the French justify this regime, ‘in their own minds,’ as the saying goes? In answering the question, “Is it better to obey a single, distant government or a multitude of smaller governments close to oneself?” the French, as individualists, have preferred distant and “anonymous authoritarianism” to the local authoritarianism that knows them as individuals. To know me as an individual is to compromise my privacy; to know me as a statistic is to keep your distance from my inner world, my precious if unrealizable ideals. Local government, government that is on my own ‘level,’ also offends my sense of equality, as “it is shameful to obey one’s equals.” “In order to agree to obey, one must find a higher-level leader,” a lion, a great man, a leader. While the Federal Republic of Germany owes its federalism, philosophically, to Johannes Althusius, France produced, then followed, Bodin. [2] Under Bodin’s state, “the more the state helps me, the more my initiative diminishes, and the more my initiative diminishes, the more I need the state,” my mother in perpetuity.

    Mothers protect. They also praise their good little boys and girls, nurturing “the French passion for positions of status” which the mother-state provides on condition of proper behavior. Even “well before the revolution, the ambition of every upstanding member of the bourgeoisie in France was not to become a somebody and make a fortune in business,” in the manner of those tedious Englishmen, “but to be able to buy a ‘position.'” When the practice of purchasing a government office was abolished in the name of bureaucracy, France turned to education, to state examinations, as a more democratic means of supporting the new oligarchy. (Jesuit missionaries had seen that system in China, bringing the idea of the mandarinate back to France in the late eighteenth century. In his effort to counter the parliamentarians and to empower the executive, de Gaulle promoted what became the École Nationale d’Administration, the ENA, with its graduates, the French mandarins, called the Énarchs. As with all regimes, this regime produced a characteristic human ‘type,” “a specific type of person,” one who loves France, “serv[ing] it with all his heart,” “devot[ing] himself to the general interest with the self-abnegation of a monk” while denigrating businessmen as “greedy people who think only about money and acquire it by any means possible,” regardless of the common good. The problem is that “a society where there are only annuities does not work,” as it promotes not industriousness and satisfying achievement but “laziness, negligence, permanent unhappiness.” In such “egalitarian, and thus unrealistic systems, the elites—or people on the nomenklatura list—always end up simultaneously lying to themselves and exempting themselves from the common condition,” as seen in the state officials who run the national education system, “this great drunken vessel,” “one of the world’s most expensive and most poorly rated,” while placing their own children in private schools. Thus, while “our system was supposed to be based solely on dedication to public service,” most understand “that this is not really the case” while “pretend[ing] to ignore it.”

    If the democratic anthropology assumes that human beings are capable of governing themselves, the anthropology of French administrative-statist republicanism assumes that “subjects are incapable of managing their affairs without the help of a public authority.” Because every long-established regime “orients one’s temperament”—although not irrevocably, as a regime “is not a matter of essence, but a way of being and thinking that is linked to customs and laws”—the French regime “confirm[s] the definitely childish nature of lambda individuals, who cannot decide their complete destiny on their own.” The “disarmed citizen” of France “thinks only, to the detriment of others of saving his or her own skin,” an ethos that inclines individualism and statism at the same time. Because (as a remnant of aristocratic pride), French people prefer honor over commerce, this, along with democratic and republican egalitarianism, yields a “culture of envy.” I can no longer command your respect, but if you dare to rise above me, I sure as Hell will drag you back down. Delsol carefully insists that “human beings are profoundly equal at their core: both in the tragedy of their fate and their quest for meaning in life.” But equality isn’t egalitarianism. Egalitarianism “can lead to an understanding of fraternity as the erasure of differences,” as when “every difference is called ‘discrimination’ or when individual merit, an essential quality of liberal society, is criticized in the same way as any inequality of wealth or birth.” On the extreme Left, this means “always cherishing the egalitarian ideal that can be attained only via terror.” As social and economic differences narrow, bitterness against those that remain intensifies; “the greater is the equality, the greater is the feeling of inequality.” And so, in France “egalitarianism and the love of privileges constantly clash in real life,” with the latter being the love that dares not speak its name, closeted, an object of mistrust. Mistrust among citizens defeats the republican quest for unity. 

    Add to this the distrust of the provinces, which remain to some extent traditional societies, for Paris, its residents priding themselves on their modernism, their chic-ness, their cosmopolitanism, their progressivism, and one sees how difficult the establishment of any genuine federal democracy must be. Exacerbating the divide, at least since the eighteenth century, has been the rise of the French “intellectual,” born “at the very moment in which the prestige of the clergy fades”—a “matter of substitution,” as rationalist and universalist secularists pushed aside the often quite reasonable Catholic (i.e., universalist) clergy. The intellectuals have been for the most part utopians, ideologues—a term invented by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who meant by ‘ideology’ the “science of ideas.” That science was pursued by Henri de Saint-Simon’s followers, “a new clergy capable of implementing a politics guided by science,” and by Auguste Comte’s ‘positivists.’ By the beginning of the twentieth century, “the majority of French intellectuals sided either with fascism or with communism,” both ideological and purportedly scientific. Despite such honorable exceptions as Raymond Aron and Julien Freund, “France is a country that is particularly smitten with ideologies,” “prefer[ring] ideas to realities.” The Leftist ideologies valorize ever-advancing progress toward a vaguely defined “emancipation” of human beings; the Rightist ideologues are equally historicist in their orientation, but they want to go much more slowly and never to leave the old ways entirely behind. As if they were good democrats, both claim that the people are on their side, as indeed Lenin once did, only to rage and to recur to mass murder when he learned otherwise. Ideology always carries inside it the potential for self-righteous murder because the attempt to make ideality into reality must overcome the recalcitrant body. Fascism and communism were both materialist, to be sure, but they were dialectical materialisms aimed at eliminating all social and economic ‘contradictions’ on the road to an imagined supreme and perpetual unity.

    Christianity also envisioned such a unity, but one only to be consummated by divine intervention. In this world, Christianity promoted secularization: the distinction between Jerusalem and Athens, revelation and reason, Church and State, not necessarily as enemies but as possible complements to one another. The establishment of a certain political and social space between Church and State permits a degree of liberty for citizens. Delsol contrasts secularization with the secularism of the modern West (and indeed with the modern East). Secularism wants ‘Athens,’ rationalism, and State to subsume ‘Jerusalem,’ reason, and Church. This subsumption has been especially pronounced in France, where, since Voltaire and his Enlightenment allies, religion is supposed “to be the real villain of history.” In contemporary French life, this has caused two problems: scientific progress hasn’t made religion go away, as “human beings have an intrinsic need to seek out mysteries,” knowing “that they have to die” and not knowing “the meaning of their existence” without searching for it. Moreover, the presence of Islam in France, a religion that tolerates no secularization, has unsettled the would-be secularization of lambda man, menacing both his secularism and his lambdanianism, threatening to take the lambda to the slaughter.

    Delsol accordingly turns to “the present state of religion” in France. “Today, in France, what does Catholicism, which is traditionally the country’s dominant religion, represent?” Maurras, she writes, dominated much of French religio-political thought before the Second World War. But Maurras wasn’t a real Catholic; he held to a form of Machiavellianism, regarding religion as a thing for “the weak-minded—children, women, and fools,” a useful instrument with which to foster the civic order. Delsol objects, “if religion is a pleasant tale that serves only to bind society together, it will fade away at the first opportunity,” and it did, with atheist Marxism taking its place among many intellectuals in the second half of the century—even infiltrating the Church itself, with its then-fashionable “left-wing Catholics” who “abandoned religion before Marxism.” With Marxism’s refutation in ‘history,’ the only standard its proponents recognized, some of this generation of French have returned to Catholicism. French Catholic converts are “not numerous”, but they are important “because they are active and because they are in the process of supplanting the old communist elite.” They form families more cohesive than the families of the secularists, whose esteem for family life inclines to the tepid. Catholic families can better “withstand the educational and social crisis” in France better than “individualist-decomposed-recomposed families.” “An elite is forming in this crucible.” As it has among the Muslims. Given the long history of European Christianity against Islam, the tensions may not end well. And both oppose the new pantheism (anticipated by Tocqueville in his Democracy in America), which has found a home in ‘environmentalism,’ in ‘ecology,’ combining science with the worship of Gaia, Mother Earth—Marianne in Birkenstocks. “Ecology is unquestionably the great religion of the coming century, and its status as a natural religion encourages the worship of nature,” with Greta Thunberg as its prophetess. “The new religious conflicts are between supporters of transcendence and those of paganism.”

    As to the Muslims in France, they began their emigration after decolonization in the early 1960s. This worked well, providing a source of laborers for French industry, so long as the families of the workers remained at home. But the Jacques Chirac administration authorized family reunification in the mid-1970s, the Muslim population increased just as the postwar economic prosperity had begun to decline. The children of Muslim families struggled in school, suffered unemployment and ostracism, turning “to traditional and radical Islam, so as to regain a lost identity.” France is not the only honor-loving society; Islam, with its quite literally militant fervor, presents it with a thumotic rival, one now embedded in, but separated from, French life. While “the United States manages to federate diverse cultures through pride in being American and saluting a common flag,” Muslims take no pride in being French—France being the land of their birth but not the object of their allegiance. 

    And then there is Europe, that is, the ‘European project,” the European Union. Its eighth president, Jacques Delors, understood that the Union consisted of several states, with distinct ways of life contributing to “the culture of Europe as a whole.” “However, he was a French mandarin, convinced bout the unparalleled value of the state and all that comes with it.” Ingeniously enough, he set about to turn the principle of subsidiarity “into a Jacobin principle” by claiming that the several subsidiary states were incompetent to the tasks the Union proposed. “If, for example, the ecological common good that is required [by the Commission] is the ecological level of Denmark, then all other countries will be declared insufficient and will lose their autonomy to Europe,” that is, to the Commission. This is how “institutional Europe has, over the years, become a vast, centralized technocracy governed by a liberal-libertarian current of thought that has replaced Marxism among Europe’s elites.” The technocracy hands down not laws but “directives,” their authority founded on the claim that “government is a science” animated by materialism and pragmatism. Since science means knowledge, there is no need pressing need for elections by ignorance populaces. And many of the elected executives among the constituent states of the Union themselves “reflect the ‘progressive’ ideology desired by Europe: globalism, multiculturalism, individualism, and unlimited emancipation”—Angela Merkel and France’s own Emmanuel Macron being among the prominent examples. Progressives of their stripe “do not want opponents with whom they debate; they want only enemies who represent Evil par excellence”—Marine le Pen, Viktor Orban. Having “arrogate[d] right and legitimacy to itself alone,” Progressivism implicitly denies politics—ruling and being ruled, in turn—and, increasingly, the principle of consent. Delsol doubts that this can end well, if continued.

    “It is utopia that depresses us. France certainly does not suffer from a lack of finance, talent, or luck: it suffers from being unrealistic.” And, increasingly, Americans have contracted the French malaise.

     

     

     

    Notes

    1. On Maurras, see “The Monarchist Kulturkampf of Charles Maurras” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
    2. Althusius, who died in 1633, was one of the few anti-centralizers among German jurists and philosophers, but his ideas were revived by Carl J. Friedrich, who collaborated with post-World War II jurists in drafting the constitution of the Federal Republic.

     

    Filed Under: Nations

    Chateaubriand in Jerusalem

    May 7, 2025 by Will Morrisey

    François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Books, 2011. [1811].

    Part Three: Rhodes, Jaffa, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea.

    Part Four: Jerusalem.

    Part Five: Jerusalem—Continued.

    Part Six: Egypt.

    Part Seven: Tunis and Return to France.

     

    Chateaubriand voyaged to Jerusalem on a ship with some 200 Greek pilgrims, joyful at the thought of visiting the Holy Land, fearful of Mediterranean storms on the way. (“The ancient Greeks were, in many respects, no more than delightful credulous children, who passed from sadness to joy with extreme fluidity; the modern Greeks have retained aspects of that character: happy at least in having recourse to levity to combat their misery.”) Listening to his fellow passengers, he observed, “the chanting of the Greek Church possesses considerable sweetness, but lacks gravity,” although he admires “the sadness and majesty” of the Kyrie eleison, “doubtless a remnant of the ancient singing of the primitive Church.” He was disappointed that the captain refused to land near the plain of Troy (“though our agreement obliged him to do so”), as “it is a rare destiny for a country to have inspired the finest verse of two of the world’s greatest poets,” Homer and Virgil, neither a singer lacking in gravity. But on balance, “Who could not bless religion, whilst reflecting that these two hundred pilgrims, so happy at this moment, were nevertheless bowed under an odious yoke?”—the yoke of the Ottoman Turks. “They were traveling to the tomb of Jesus Christ to forget the lost glories of their homeland, and find solace from their present evils.” As for himself, “I was about to reach a land of wonders, the source of the most astonishing poetry, places where, even speaking of mankind alone, the greatest of events occurred, that changed the world forever, I mean the coming of the Messiah.” Contemporary reality nonetheless intrudes. Along the coast off Caesarea, he saw “Arabs, wandering the coast, follow[ing], with a covetous eye, our ship passing by on the horizon, anticipating the spoils of shipwreck on the same coast where Jesus Christ commanded us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.”

    He lodged at a monastery, where the monks “were lively but modest—; familiar but polite; no pointless questions, no idle curiosity,” concerned only with his trip, especially “on the measures needed for me to complete it in safety.” They well represented “the land where Christianity and charity had their birth.” He should not go to Jerusalem alone, they tell him, as the Arabs will rob and possibly kill him. Go with some guides, disguise yourselves as poor pilgrims. The Arabs’ avariciousness results from tyranny. Although the soil “appears to be extremely fertile,” “thanks to the despotic Muslims, the ground on all sides offers only thistles and dry withered grasses, interspersed with stunted patches of cotton, sorghum, barley and wheat.” Still, “if I live a thousand years, I shall never forget that desert which seems to breathe again the greatness of Jehovah and the terror of death (our old French Bibles call death the king of terror).” As a Frenchman, he thinks not only of the prophets and saints of the Bible but of the Crusader, Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the triumphant First Crusade against the Sunni Muslim Turks of the Seljuk Empire and briefly King of Jerusalem. His successor, Baldwin I, built the strong walls of the next monastery Chateaubriand lodged in, which “could easily resist a siege against the Turks.” He arrived in Bethlehem. The monastery in the place of Jesus’ birth housed “three or four thousand skulls, those of monks massacred by the infidels” over the centuries. From the monastery, he could see Jerusalem, “a heap of shattered stone,” a “city of desolation, in the midst of a desolate solitude,” truly “the Queen of the Desert.”

    Moving next to the shores of the Dead Sea, “we found ourselves on the paths of the desert Arabs, who gather salt from the sea, and wage pitiless war on the traveler,” following a “Bedouin morality [that] has begun to deteriorate through too much traffic with the Turks and Europeans,” permitting them to “prostitute their daughters and their wives, and slaughter travelers, whom they were once content merely to rob.” They resembled the Amerindians physically, but “in the Americas everything proclaims the savage who has not yet reached the state of civilization; amongst the Arabs all proclaims the civilized man fallen once more into a state of savagery.” He prayed on the banks of the Jordan River, drinking from it; “it did not seem as sweet as sugar, as a good missionary has said,” but a bit salty, potentially improved “if purged of the sand it carries.” 

    In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher burned down a year after Chateaubriand’s return to France, so he takes care to describe it as it was, a building “roughly in the form of a cross,” with a dome that was supported by cedar beams from Lebanon. Inside, priests from eight Christian sects abide: Latins, Abyssinians, Greeks, Egyptian Copts, Armenians, Nestorians (from Chaldea and Syria), Georgians, and Maronites. The priests rotate in and out, with two-month stints, since the staleness and “unhealthy coolness” of the air would make any longer stay dangerous. Nonetheless, Chateaubriand met a solitary Franciscan who had lived there for twenty years, busily maintaining the many lamps and keeping the holy places clean. The Sepulcher encompasses the place Jesus was crucified and the tomb where He was resurrected, although these claims have been disputed. Chateaubriand will have none of that. “It is, indeed, with the Bible and the Gospel in our hands that we must travel to the Holy Land. If one wishes to bring to it a spirit of contention and argument, it is not worth the trouble of making the long journey to Judea.” For himself, “all I can state is that in sight of that victorious tomb I felt only my own feebleness.” Death, where is thy victory? “Where might one find anything as moving in all antiquity, anything as wonderful as the last scenes of the Gospel? Here are not the bizarre adventures of some deity alien to mankind: here is a story filled with pathos, a story that not only causes one to shed tears at its beauty, but of which the consequences applied to the universe, have changed the face of the earth.”

    Outside the Church, he does not fail to stop at monuments to Godfrey and Baldwin, “those royal knights, who deserve to rest near to the great sepulcher they had delivered.” As always, Chateaubriand mixes reverence for the universal Church with patriotism: “Those ashes are French, the only ones buried in the shadow of the tomb of Jesus Christ. What a badge of honor for my homeland!”

    Nearby, Chateaubriand saw the ruins of a church dedicated to Mary, where, as Church tradition has it, she met her Son carrying the cross. “Saint Boniface says that the Virgin fell like one half-dead, and could not utter a single word.” “Faith is not contrary to these traditions: they show how the marvelous story of the Passion was etched in the memory of mankind,” and in the eighteen centuries since the Crucifixion, seeing “persecutions without end, endless revolutions, ruins ever falling,” nothing could “efface or hide the traces of a mother come to mourn her son.” Chateaubriand himself followed the Via Dolorosa. At Gethsemane, he recalled “the terrible degradations in life” that Jesus suffered, degradations “that virtue itself finds difficulty in overcoming,” requiring an angel “to descend from heaven to support Divinity, faltering under the burden of human misery, that merciful Divinity is betrayed by Mankind.” But after this torture and death, “while the world worshipped a thousand false deities under the sun, twelve fishermen, concealed in the bowels of the earth,” in the caves to which they had fled, “uttered their profession of faith on behalf of the human race and recognized the unity of God, the creator of those stars beneath which they dared not, as yet, proclaim his existence.” “And yet they would overthrow [the] Roman’s temples, destroy the religion of his fathers, alter the law, politics, morality, reasoning, and even the thoughts of mankind.” From these facts, Chateaubriand concludes, “Let us never despair then of the salvation of nations”; even today, Christians “mourn the waning of faith,” but “who knows if God has not planted in some neglected place that grain of wild mustard seed that multiplies in the fields?” 

    Far from a credulous believer, Chateaubriand doubts that a footprint in the rock on the spot where Jesus ascended into Heaven is really His, despite the assertions of Saints Augustine, Jerome, Paulinus, and other authorities. He concedes that even Descartes and Newton never denied such traditions; Racine and Milton “repeated them in poetry.”

    Recounting Jerusalem’s subsequent history, Chateaubriand defends the Crusades, portrayed in “an odious light” by the Enlighteners of the eighteenth century and, it might be added, by many in the centuries after Chateaubriand wrote. “The Christians were not the aggressors.” “If the subjects of Umar,” the great caliph, father-in-law of Mohammad, “leaving Jerusalem, eventually descended, after ranging through Africa, on Sicily, Spain, and even France itself, where Charles Martel destroyed them” at the Battle of Tours in 732, “why should the subjects of Philip I, emerging from France, not range through Asia Minor, as far as Jerusalem, to take vengeance on the descendants of Umar?” Moreover, the Crusaders weren’t “simply armed pilgrims seeking to deliver a tomb in Palestine.” “It was not only a question of the holy tomb, but also about which [religion] would prevail on earth, a religion which was an enemy of civilization, systematically maintaining, ignorance, despotism, and slavery, or a religion that revived the spirit of ancient knowledge in the modern world and abolished slavery,” a religion of “persecution and conquest” against a religion of “tolerance and peace.” For eight centuries, Christians endured the Muslim conquest of Spain, the invasion of France, “the ravaging of Greece and the two Sicilies,” and “the whole of Africa enchained.” “If, ultimately, the cries of so many slaughtered victims in the East, and the barbarian advance to the very gates of Constantinople, awakened Christendom and roused it to its own defense, who would dare claim that the Crusaders’ cause was unjust? Where would we be if our fathers had not met force with force?” Chateaubriand has already shown where Europe would be: it would be in the condition of Greece under “the Muslim yoke” of the Turks. Would “those who applaud the progress of enlightenment today…wish to see a religion prevail among us that burned the library of Alexandria” and “considers it a merit to trample mankind underfoot”? Far from shameful, “the era of these expeditions represents the heroic age of our history,” the “age that gave birth to our epic poetry,” with Tasso, a Christian Homer or Virgil. (“Above all a poem for soldiers, Jerusalem Delivered “breathes valor and glory.”) All that cloaks a nation with wonder ought not to be despised by that nation itself,” and “there is something in our hearts that makes us love glory,” human beings being more than utilitarian calculators of “their own good and ill.” 

    The Muslim Saladin, Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty, besieged and reconquered Jerusalem in 1187. Nominal legitimacy in Jerusalem passed to several European monarchs, and rule over the city was contended for, until 1291, when “the Christians were driven from the Holy Land, utterly.” “Is it any surprise that a fertile country was turned to a wasteland after such devastation,” having been sacked seventeen times? After that, Muslim empires contended for it, with the Turks finally seizing it from Egypt and Syria in 1516—this “pile of rubble, called a city.” As Chateaubriand understates it, “the people of the East are much more familiar than we with the ideas of invasion,” although Europeans of Napoleon’s time are sufficiently familiar with them. As a result of their violent geopolitical experiences, Asians have become “accustomed to follow the destiny of some master or other,” with “no code binding them to concepts of order and moderation; to kill when you are the stronger seems to them a legitimate proceeding; they submit to it, or exercise, it, with a like indifference…. Freedom, they do not know; rights, they have none: force is their god.” Back at the monastery, Chateaubriand encountered an example of such moeurs in the form of two drunken soldiers of the Pasha’s army, who tried to push him around. He returned the insult, with no further troubles. “A Turk once humiliated is never dangerous, and we heard nothing more of it. The monks, “guardians of the tomb of Jesus Christ,” have been “uniquely occupied, for several centuries, in defending themselves” against similar “kinds of insult and tyranny,” the “most bizarre inventions of Oriental despotism.” He notices also the Jews of Jerusalem, similarly subject, yet “fortified by their poverty,” “clothed in rags, seated among the dust of Zion, looking for insects which they devour,” but with “their eyes fixed on the Temple” and never neglecting to study the Pentateuch with their children. 

    Chateaubriand does not neglect to provide an outline of Jerusalem’s ruling offices. The regime consists of a military governor, a minister of justice, a mufti (both a religious leader and “head of the legal profession,” since the city is under the sharia or Muslim law), a customs officer, and a city provost. “These subordinate tyrants all belong, except the mufti, to a tyrant in chief, and that tyrant in chief is the Pasha of Damascus,” himself appointed by the Turks. “Every superior in Turkey…has the right to delegate his powers to an inferior, and those powers extend to control over property and life.” As for the mufti, when he is “a fanatic or a wicked man, like the one found in Jerusalem during my visit, he is the most tyrannical of all the authorities as regards Christians.” This remained so more than a century later, as seen in the tenure of Grand Mufti Mohammad amin al-Husayn, the Nazi ally during World War II. Since mounts and Bedouins stand between Damascus and Jerusalem, protests against local tyranny are often impossible to lodge, which is rather the point: the rulers “want mute slavery.” The current Pasha, “driven by sordid avarice, like almost all Muslims,” enriches himself by inducing the merchants to close their shops, thereby starving the people; when permitted to reopen, the merchants “bring in food at extraordinary prices, and the populace, dying of hunger for a second time, are forced, in order to live, to strip themselves to their last garment.” The Pasha thus takes his cut of the profits and keeps the people down. In a more straightforward maneuver, the Pasha used his cavalry to plunder Arab farmers of their livestock, which he then sold to Jerusalem butchers at exorbitant prices, which they were forced to purchase “on pain of death.” “After exhausting Jerusalem’s resources, the Pasha withdraws,” along with his soldiers, leaving the city governor with inadequate resources. Gangs of thieves take over and neighboring villages resume blood feuds previously suppressed. Once he regroups, in a year or so, the governor imposes peace by “exterminat[ing] whole tribes.” “Gradually the desert spreads further.” Walking the streets of the unpaved and deserted streets of the city, where “a few miserable shops display their wretchedness to your gaze,” the only sound to be heard is a horse bearing a Janissary “who brings the head of some Bedouin, or who is off to rob the fellahin.” Chateaubriand can leave Jerusalem, without having delivered it. For the foreseeable future, from the perspective of 1806, no human being will.

    Still, “I confess that I felt a certain sense of pleasure, in considering that I had accomplished the pilgrimage I had meditated for so long.” He expected his return to France through Egypt, the Barbary States, and Spain to be easy. “I was wrong, however.” Back on the Mediterranean, he praises the adventurousness of the sailor’s way of life, with its “continual passage from storm to storm, the rapid change of land and sky,” which “stimulate the voyager’s imagination”: “It is, in its unfolding, the very image of man here below; forever promising himself to remain in port, and forever spreading his sails; seeking enchanted islands which he will never reach, and where if he landed he would only experience ennui; speaking only of repose, yet delighting in the tempest; perishing in the midst of some shipwreck, or dying an old pilot on the shore, unknown to the young voyagers whose vessels he regrets being powerless to follow.” Chateaubriand’s immediate future would confirm those observations.

    Egypt is “the country where civilization was born, and where today ignorance and barbarism reign.” In Alexandria, once “the sanctuary of the Muses, and which echoed in the darkness to the noisy revels of Antony and Cleopatra,” “a fatal talisman has plunged into the silence of the people,” the talisman of despotism, “which extinguishes all joy an allows not even a cry of pain.” Ancient Alexandria had a population of three million; today, a million remain, “a sort of palpitating trunk that has not even the strength, between the ruins and the tombs, to free itself from its chains.” The beautiful Nile, with its magnificent Delta, lacks only “a free government and a happy people. “But no country is beautiful that lacks liberty: the most serene of skies is odious, if one is chained to the earth.” “The only thing I found worthy of those beautiful plains was the memory of my country’s glory. During the Seventh Crusade, in 1250, the French army under the command of Louis IX—Saint Louis—were defeated by Egyptian forces, which captured the king. The French knights “were avenged by the soldiers at the Battle of the Pyramids” in 1798, in one of the very few Napoleonic ventures Chateaubriand can bring himself to praise. The brief French occupation (they were expelled by the British in 1801) saw the founding of the Institut d’Égypte, institutionalizing research on ancient Egypt; it saw the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, whose bilingual texts enabled scholars to translate hieroglyphics much more fully; and it enabled the establishment of Egypt’s first newspapers, giving Egyptians a chance at self-government. But self-government is a long way off. Now a land infested with “Albanian brigands” and “foolish Muslims,” once a country “where so industrious, so peaceful, so wise, a people once lived, a people whose customs and morals Herodotus and above all Diodorus Siculus were pleased to describe for us,” Egypt illustrates what difference “the rule of law can make between men.” 

    To the past, then. Ancient Egypt’s pyramids excited Chateaubriand’s imagination. “I know the philosopher may well smile or groan at the thought that the greatest monument built by human hands is a tomb; but why see in the pyramid of Cheops only a heap of stones and a skeleton?” The pyramids are monuments not to death but to immortality, “mark[ing] the entrance to life without end, it is a species of eternal portal built on the edge of eternity.” As Diodorus Siculus remarked, the pyramid builders “give little thought to the furnishings of their palaces, but with regard to their burial they display every zeal,” unlike modern men who “prefer to believe that all the monuments had a material purpose,” never imagining “that nations might possess a moral purpose of a far superior order, which the laws of antiquity served.” “Why complain that a pharaoh sought to render that lesson eternal?” And do not such monuments, “an essential part of the glory of all human society,” not bear “glorious witness to [a nation’s] genius”? Cheops was no vain fool but “a monarch possessed of a magnanimous spirit.” “The idea of vanquishing time by means of a tomb, of forcing the sea of generations, customs, laws, ages to break against the foot of a coffin, could never have arisen from a common mind. If it is merely pride, at least it is magnificent pride.”

    No such great-souled monarch rules modern Egypt. Chateaubriand had an audience with the Pasha’s adolescent son, who was “seated on a carpet in a dilapidated room, surrounded by a dozen obliging servants who hastened to obey his every whim. I have never seen a more hideous spectacle”: the future master of the Egyptians, nurtured “on a diet of the most extravagant flattery” by servants who “degraded the soul of a child destined to lead men.” “Although I may have delighted in Egypt,” with its natural beauty, its noble monuments, its excellent wine, the capital, Alexandria, “seemed the saddest and most desolate place on earth.” 

    Christmas Day of 1806 brought him in the waters off Malta, but off Tunis, where they arrived a few days later, the sea roiled for eighteen days, and they nearly ran aground on the island of Lampedusa. Two British warships sank in that storm, but “Providence saved us,” as the wind changed and carried them into the open sea. Eventually, they reached the Kerkennah Islands, where they remained at anchor past New Year’s Day. “Under how many stars, and with what varied fortunes, had I witnessed the birth of years, the years that pass so swiftly or last so long!” From the New Year’s days of childhood, “when I received parental blessings and gifts, my heart beating with joy,” to this “foreign vessel, in sight of a barbarous land, this day arrived for me without witnesses, without pleasure, without the embrace of a family without those tender wishes of happiness for her son that a mother utters with such sincerity. This day, born in the womb of storm winds, brought to my brow only worries, regrets and white hair.” He and the crew nonetheless marked the occasion by slaughtering some chickens and offering a toast to France. “We were not far from the island of the Lotus Eaters, where Ulysses’ companions forgot their homeland: I know no fruit delightful enough to make me forget mine.”

    Safely in Tunisia at last, Chateaubriand enjoyed the hospitality of a French family; “the ashes of Dido, and the ruins of Carthage, were regaled with the sounds of a French violin.” The regime of ancient Carthage has not won the favor of later generations. If one wonders why “no one thinks of the eighty thousand Carthaginians slaughtered on the plains of Sicily,” in alliance with the Persians, “while the whole world speaks of those three hundred Spartans who died obeying the sacred laws of their country,” one might consider that “it is the greatness of the cause, not the means, which leads to true fame, and honor has been in all ages the most enduring feature of glory.” And even if Hannibal is “the greatest general of antiquity,” as Chateaubriand judges him to be, “he is not the one we love most.” “He had neither Alexander’s heroism nor Caesar’s universal talent; but he surpassed both as a master of war.” Animated “solely by hatred,” crossing the Pyrenees, Gaul, and the Alps, he crushed Roman forces in four consecutive battles. With unquestionable “superiority of mind and strength of character,” he nonetheless “lacked the noblest qualities of the spirit: cold, cruel, heartless, born to overthrow and not to found empires, he was much inferior in magnanimity to his rival,” Scipio Africanus. With Scipio “begins that Roman urbanity, which ornamented the minds of Cicero, Pompey, and Caesar, and which in those illustrious citizens replaced the rusticity of Cato and Fabricius.” Driving the Carthaginian forces south, through Spain, Scipio defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. “Hannibal had been away from his homeland for thirty-six years; he left as a child, and had returned at an advanced age,” nearly a stranger to his country. “Blind with envy,” his fellow citizens sent him into exile. “When services rendered are so exceptional they exceed the bounds of understanding, they reap only ingratitude.” He “had the misfortune to be greater than the people amongst whom he was born.” Bounced out of the prime minister’s office in 1946, discarded by French voters in 1969, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle number among the more recent examples of these phenomena. As for Scipio, Chateaubriand accepts the possibility that he died by an assassin’s hand. 

    As for France, Saint Louis arrived with his troops in 1270, his Crusaders admiring “the beauty of the country covered with olive trees.” “The chaplain of a king of France took possession of the site of Hannibal’s city with these words: ‘I proclaim the rule here of our Lord Jesus Chris, and Louis, King of France, his servant.’ This same place had heard declarations in Gaetulian, Tyrian, Latin, Vandal, Gree and Arabic, and ever the same sentiments in varying language.” After the French army drove out the Saracens, “the great ladies of France established themselves in the ruins of Dido’s palace.” 

    The occupation didn’t last. The Muslims had machines that could raise the hot sand of the surrounding deserts into the wind blowing toward the French, “an ingenious and terrible design, worthy of the wilderness that gave rise to the idea, and show[ing] to what point mankind can take its genius for destruction.” Struck by a disease that had already carried away a beloved son, Louis left a testament to his eldest son and heir. “If God send thee adversity, receive it in patience, and give thanks to Our Lord, and thin that thou hast deserved it, and that He will turn it to good. If He give thee prosperity, thank heaven with humility; that through pride or otherwise thou mayest not be the worse for that which should make thee better. For one should not war against God with His own gifts.” And “study how thy people and thy subjects may live in peace and honesty under thee.” Chateaubriand remarks, “Happy are those who can glory in that, and say: ‘The man who wrote these instructions was my ancestral king.'” And “the ambassadors of the Emperor of Constantinople were present at the scene: they could tell all Greece of a death which Socrates would have admired.”

    “I have nothing more to say to my readers; it is time for them to return with me to my homeland.” “I have written enough if my name should live on; too much if it is fated to die.”

     

     

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