In all political and religious creations, whatever their object and importance, it is a general rule that there is never any proportion between cause and effect. The effect is always immense in relation to the cause, so that man knows that he is but an instrument, and that he himself can create nothing.
The French National Assembly, which had the guilty folly of calling itself Constituent, seeing that all the legislators in the world had decorated the frontispiece of their laws with a solemn homage to the Divinity, felt obliged to also make a profession of faith, and I know not what involuntary spasm of a dying consciousness tore these paltry lines from the pretended legislators of France.1
The National Assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, etc.2
In the presence: no doubt, to their misfortune; but under the auspices: what madness! It is not a turbulent multitude, agitated by vile and furious passions, that God has chosen for the instrument of His will, in the exercise of the greatest act of his power on earth: the political organization of peoples. Wherever men gather and become restless, wherever their power unfolds with a crash and pretension, there the creative force is not to be found: non in commotione Dominus [“but the Lord was not in the earthquake”].3 This power is announced only by the gentle wind.4 It has been oft-repeated in recent times that freedom is born among storms: never, never. It defends itself, it is strengthened during storms, but it is born in silence, in peace, in darkness; often even the father of a constitution does not know what he is doing in creating it; but the centuries that pass prove his mission, and it is Paul-Emile5 and Cato who proclaim the greatness of Numa.
The more human reason trusts in itself, the more it seeks to draw all its strength from itself, the more absurd it is, the more it reveals its impotence. Hence the greatest scourge in the world has always been, in all ages, what we call philosophy, since philosophy is nothing but human reason acting alone, and human reason reduced to its own forces is nothing but a brute whose whole power is reduced to destroying.6
An elegant historian of antiquity has made a remarkable observation on what were called in his day, as now, the philosophers. “So far am I,” he says, “from regarding philosophy as the teacher and blessed perfector of life, that I judge no men more in need of instruction in how to live than several of those engaged in discussing it. For I see that a great part of those who speak most eloquently of propriety and restraint in the schools are the very same men who live plunged headlong into all manner of vice.”7
When, in olden days, Julian the philosopher called his colleagues to court, he made a cesspool of it. The good Tillemont, writing the history of this prince, thus names one of his chapters: “Julian’s Court is filled with philosophers and condemned men;” And Gibbon, who is not suspect, naively observes that “it is awkward not to be able to contradict the accuracy of this title.”8
Frederick II, philosopher in spite of himself, who paid these people to praise him, but who knew them well, thought no better of them; common sense forced him to say what everyone else knows, that “if he wanted to lose an empire, he would make it governed by philosophers.”
Thus, it was not a theological exaggeration, it was a simple truth rigorously expressed, this sentence of one of our prelates who, fortunately for himself, died when he could still believe in a renewal: “In its pride, philosophy has said: ‘It is to me that wisdom, science, and dominion belong; it is to me that the conduct of men belongs, since it is I who enlighten. In order to punish it, to cover it with disgrace, it was necessary that God should condemn it to reign for a moment.’”
Indeed, it has reigned over one of the most powerful nations in the world; it reigns, it will doubtless reign long enough that it cannot complain that it wanted for time; and never was there a more deplorable example of the absolute deficiency of human reason reduced to its own forces. What spectacle did the French legislators present us? Aided by all human knowledge, lessons from all philosophers ancient and modern, and the experience of all ages, masters of opinion, expending immense wealth, having allies everywhere, in a word, fortified in every human power, they have spoken on their own behalf; the world is witness to the result: human pride has never had more means; and, putting aside its crimes for a moment, never has it been more ridiculous.
Our contemporaries shall believe as they will, but posterity shall doubt not that the most senseless of men were those who ranged themselves around a table and said: “we will deprive the French people of their ancient Constitution and will give to it another” (this one or that, no matter). Although this derision is common to all parties that have desolated France, yet the Jacobins present themselves as destroyers first rather than builders, and they leave in the imagination a certain impression of grandeur as a result of the immensity of their successes. One can even doubt that they had seriously planned to organize France into a Republic, for the Republican Constitution they made is nothing but a kind of comedy played to the people to distract it for a moment, and I cannot believe that the least enlightened of its authors could have believed in it for a moment.
But the men who appeared on the scene in the early days of the Constituent Assembly really thought themselves legislators: quite seriously and visibly, their ambition was to give France a political constitution, and they believed that an assembly could decree, by majority vote, that such and such a people would no longer have such and such a government, but some other. Now, this idea is of the utmost extravagance; and from all the Bedlams in the world the like has never emerged. So from these men springs only the idea of feebleness, ignorance, and disappointment. No feeling of admiration or terror equals the kind of angry pity inspired by this constituent Bedlam. The palm of villainy belongs by right to the Jacobins; but posterity will unanimously award the Constitutionalists that of folly.
True legislators have all felt that human reason could not stand alone, and that no purely human institution could last. Hence they have, so to speak, interlaced politics and religion, so that human weakness, bolstered by supernatural support, could be reinforced by it. Rousseau admires the Judaic law and that of the child of Ishmael, which have survived for so many centuries: this is because the authors of these two famous institutions were at once high priests and legislators: because in the Koran as in the Bible, politics is made divine; because human reason, crushed by religious ascendancy, cannot infuse its atomizing and corrosive poison into the machinery of government: so that the citizens are believers whose fidelity is exalted to faith, and obedience to enthusiasm and fanaticism.
Great political institutions are perfect and enduring as far as the union of politics and religion is perfect. Lycurgus distinguished himself on this fundamental point, and all the world knows that few institutions can compare to his for duration and wisdom. He imagined nothing, he proposed nothing, he ordered nothing but on the faith of oracles. All his laws were, so to speak, religious precepts; through him Divinity intervened in the councils, in treaties, in war, in the administration of justice, to the point that “he entered into a design to remove the kings of the Spartans, but sensed that he could not do so without the help of the gods, because the Spartans were accustomed to refer all things to the oracles; first, he tried to corrupt Delphi, etc.”9 And so, when Lysander wished to destroy kingship at Sparta, he first tried to corrupt the priests who gave the oracles, because he knew that the Spartans did not undertake anything important without consulting them.10
The Romans were another example of the strength of the religious bond introduced into politics. Everyone knows that famous passage of Cicero where he says that the Romans had superiors in everything, except in the fear and worship of God.
“O conscript fathers,” he said, “let us flatter ourselves as we will, yet we surpass not the Spanish in numbers; nor the Gauls in vigour; nor the Carthaginians in cunning; nor the Greeks in skill; nor, lastly, the Italians and Latins in that natural and domestic sensibility native to the peoples of this country—but in piety, religion, and that singular wisdom wherein we have seen that all things are ruled and governed by the will of the gods, we surpass all peoples and nations.”11 Numa had given to Roman politics that religious character which was the sap, the soul, the life of the Republic, and which perished along with it. It is a constant fact among all learned men that the oath was the true cement of the Roman Constitution: it is by oath that the unruliest plebeian, bowing his head before the council which demanded his name, displayed under the flags the docility of a child. Livy, who had seen the birth of philosophy and the death of the Republic (in the same age), sometimes pines for those happy times when religion assured the welfare of the state. At the point where he tells the story of that young man who came to inform the consul of a fraud committed by the keeper of the auspice chickens, he adds: “this young man was born before men were taught to despise the gods.”12
It was especially in the comitia that the Romans manifested the religious character of their legislation: the assemblies of the people could not take place until the presiding magistrate had taken the Auspices. Their scruples in this respect were boundless, and the power of the Augurs was such that they were known to annul the comitia’s deliberations several months after the fact;13 with that famous word alio die, the augur broke up the whole assembly of the people.14 Any magistrate superior or equal to the one who presided over the comitia was also entitled to take the Auspices. And if he declared that he had looked aloft to the heavens (se de coelo servasse) and had discerned thunder or lightning,15 the comitia were dismissed.
It was in vain that abuses were feared, which were even palpable on certain occasions.
It was in vain that the least astute plebeian saw in the doctrine of the augurs an infallible weapon in the aristocracy’s hands to impede the projects and deliberations of the people: the ardour of party spirit slackened before respect for Divinity. The magistrate was believed even if he had forged the auspices,16 because it was thought that an object of this importance should be left to the magistrate’s conscience, and that it was better to expose oneself to deception than to offend religious custom.
In the same age when it was written that an augur could scarcely look another augur in the face without laughing, Cicero, whom a plotter had flattered by securing the office of augur for him, wrote to his friend: “I admit it, only that could have tempted me,”17 so deeply rooted in the Roman imagination was the regard attached to this kind of priesthood.
It would be useless to repeat what has been said a thousand times, and to show what the religion of Romulus had in common with that of other nations; but in this people, religion had aspects that distinguish it from others and that it is well to observe.
The Roman legislator or magistrate in the Forum was, so to speak, surrounded by the idea of Divinity, and this idea even followed him into the military camp. I doubt if it would have occurred to another people to turn the principal part of a camp into a temple where military symbols mixed with statues of the gods became veritable deities and changed these trophies into altars.
This is what the Romans did. Nothing can express the respect with which opinion surrounded the praetorium of a camp (principia). There rested the eagles, the flags, and the images of the gods. There was found the general’s tent where the laws were proclaimed, there the council was held, and the signal for battle given. Roman writers speak of this place only with a certain religious veneration,18 and for them the violation of the praetorium was a sacrilege. Tacitus, recounting the revolt of two legions near Cologne, says that Plancus, sent by the emperor and the senate to the mutinous legions, and on the point of being massacred, found no other means of saving his life than to embrace the eagles and flags, placing himself under the aegis of religion.19 Then he adds: “had the standard-bearer Calpurnius not protected him from extreme violence, the blood of a legate of the Roman people would have stained the altars of the gods in a Roman camp, a thing most rare even among the enemy.”20
The more one studies history, the more one becomes convinced of the indispensable necessity of this alliance of politics and religion.
Abuses of this kind mean nothing; we must be careful when we reason about the abuse of necessary things and take care not to make men wish to destroy the thing to get rid of the abuse, without thinking that this word abuse refers only to the disordered use of a good thing that must be preserved. But I will not persist in considering an issue that would take me too far afield.
I wished only to show that human reason, or what is called philosophy, is as useless for the happiness of states as for that of individuals; that all great institutions, moreover, have their origin and their conservation elsewhere, and that human reason is mingled with these only to pervert and destroy them.
1 Constitution of 1789. Preamble of the Declaration of Human Rights.
2 When one speaks of the Constituent Assembly, it is hardly necessary to recall that one always abstracts from the respectable minority whose healthy principles and inflexible resistance have earned the admiration and respect of the world.
3 1 Kings XIX, 11.
4 1 Kings XIX, 12.
5 [Lucius Aemilius Paullus, twice consul, in 219 and 216 BCE.]
6 <It is evident from what follows that the author does not deny reason the power to know the truth by itself, but he does deny it the power to lead man to happiness when it is reduced to its individual strengths.>
7 Tantum abest ut ego magistram esse putem vitae philosophiam beataeque vite perfectricem, ut nullis magis existimem opus esse magistris vivendi quam plerisque qui in ea disputanda versantur video enim magnam partem eorum qui in schola de pudore et continentia praecipiunt argutissime, eosdem in omnium libidinum cupiditatibus vivere. (Cornelius Nepos, Fragmenta apud Lactantium, Inst. Div. 15, 10)
8 [Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2, ch. XXIII, note 48.]
9 Iniit consilia reges Lacedaemoniorum tollere, sed sentiebat id se sine ope deorum facere non posse, quod Lacedaemonii omnia ad oracula referre consueverant, primum Delphos corrumpere est conatus, etc. (Corn. Nep. in Lysander, 3)
10 Plutarch, in Lycurgus, French translation by Amyot.
11 [Quam volumus licet, patres conscripti, ipsi nos amemus, tamen nec numero Hispanos nec robore Gallos nec calliditate Poenos nec artibus Graecos nec denique hoc ipso huius gentis ac terrae domestico nativoque sensu Italos ipsos ac Latinos, sed pietate ac religione atque hac una sapientia, quod deorum numine omnia regi gubernarique perspeximus, omnis gentis nationesque superavimus. (Cicero, De Haruspicum Responso, 9.19). Cicero makes a similar point in De natura deorum, 2.8.]
12 Juvenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus. (Livy, X, 40)
13 Cicero, De natura deorum, II, 4.
14 Cicero, De divinatione, II, 12.
15 Jove fulgente cum populo agi nefas esse [“It is forbidden to do business with the people when Jupiter was casting lightning”]. (Cicero, in Vatinium 8, De divinatione, II, 18) Adam’s Roman Antiquities, Edinburgh, 1792, p. 99
16 Etiam si auspicia ementitus esset. (Cicero, Phillipicae, II, 23)
17 Epistulae ad Atticum.
18 Stace calls it: “the sanctuary of the council and the dreadful dwelling of the flags.” Ventum ad concilii penetrale domumque verendam signorum [“Having come to the inner chamber of the council, the venerated home of the standards”]. (Statius, X, 120)
19 Caedem parant, Planco maxime… neque aliud periclitanti subsidium quam castra primae legionis: illic signa et aquilas amplexus, religione sese tutabatur [“They were on the point of killing them, Plancus especially… there was no other help for this peril than the camp of the first legion: there, clinging to the standards and eagles, he protected himself under the banner of religion”]. (Tacitus, Annals, I, 39)
20 Ac ni aquilifer Calpurnius vim extremam arcuisset… legatus populi romani romanis in castris sanguine suo altaria deum commaculavisset. (Tacitus, Annals, I, 39)