Chapter III: The ‘Clerks’--The Great Betrayal (2)

I do not ask so much. Is there a single prelate in any pulpit of Europe who would now dare to pronounce: ‘The Christian is both a cosmopolitan and a patriot. These two qualities are not incompatible. The world indeed is one common fatherland, or, to speak in more Christian terms, one common exile.’ (Pastoral letter ‘On the pretended philosophy of modern infidels,’ by Le Franc de Pompignon, Bishop of Puy, 1763. The ‘infidels’ here are those who refuse the Church the right to be cosmopolitan.)

Some ‘clerks’ do better, and assert that by extolling national particularisms they are in complete harmony with the fundamental spirit of the Church, especially with the teaching of the great Doctors of the Middle Ages. (This is the thesis which opposes Catholicism to Christianity.) Need I recall the fact that the most national of these Doctors limited themselves to considering national particularisms as an inevitable condition of an earthly and inferior world, which must be respected like everything else which is the will of God? Or that they never exhorted men to intensify this feeling in their hearts, still less did they ever think of putting this intensification before them as an exercise in moral self-perfection?

When the Church in past times did approve of something in patriotism, it was fraternity among fellow-citizens, like love of man for other men, but not his opposition to other men. She approved of patriotism as an extension of human love, and not as a limitation of it.[66]

But the most remarkable thing in all this is that recently--precisely since the time when Benedict XV was reproached during the last war for not having denounced the arrogance of German nationalism--there has arisen a school in the bosom of the Church which tries to prove that by acting in this way the Holy Father had simply obeyed the teaching of his Divine Master, who is supposed to have preached explicitly the love of a man for his own nation. Could anything better symbolize the determination of the modern ‘clerks’ to place their credit and their activities at the service of lay passions than these Churchmen making Jesus an apostle of nationalism?

These strange Christians express themselves thus:

‘Jesus does not look beyond the frontiers of his own country with the idea of bestowing his benefactions upon other nations. He declares to the Canaanitish woman, whose daughter he heals against his own wish, that “his mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. xv, 24). He sent his first disciples among the Israelites. And notice how he insists that they shall not go elsewhere. “Go not on the paths of the Gentiles, and enter not the cities of the Samaritans, but go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. x, 6.) Later on, it will be time enough to announce the good news to foreigners, but first of all we must bring it to our own people. This is what he means by the words, so full of patriotic meaning and love: “the house of Israel.” A group of human beings possessing the same blood, the same language, the same religion, the same tradition, form “a house”. These particularities are so many dividing walls.’[67]

They also say:

‘The most striking thing about Jesus when he consents to pay tribute to Caesar and refuses the crown which the people offer him in the desert, is not so much his prudence and his disinterestedness, as his patriotism ... One of the most important characteristics of Jesus’s teaching is its absolutely national character....’[68]

If the reader desires, he will himself go and find out the solidity of the proofs on which these teachers base their thesis (one of these proofs is that Jesus was strongly attached to the institutions of his nation, which he showed by accepting circumcision eight days after he was born). The point I wish to insist on is the eagerness of these Christians to make their Master a supporter of national egotism, at least at one period of his life.

These views on the attitude of the Church towards nationalism seem to me to remain unmodified by the recent declarations of the Holy See concerning a certain type of French nationalism, for these declarations only condemn an openly anti-Christian nationalism (hence a very exceptional form of nationalism) and do not utter a word of blame for the desire of the peoples to set themselves up as distinct from others and to reject universalism. Moreover, this is how a universalist is answered by a publication which is to some extent the official organ of Pontifical views:

‘Yes, all men are sons of one Father; but they were divided in the beginning and have never been brought together again. The family was broken up and never joined up again. On the contrary. Certainly, I am glad to recognize the fraternity of all living beings; but are all the dead our fathers? Have they all loved us? Have they all suffered and laboured for us? Some lived on the other side of the globe, and, so to speak, in another world. Some laboured against us, or, if they supported our ancestors, it was in the hope of safeguarding or enriching their own bequest to others, not to us. Where is the debt? If the home is open to all comers, it is no longer a home but an inn.’[69]

It appears that we must look among those who have left the Church, to find Christian ministers who proclaim the true teaching of their Master, and who declare with no beating about the bush: ‘The Gospel of Jesus does not imply any country, but obliterates the fatherland.’[70]

The modern ‘clerk’ denounces the feeling of universalism, not only for the profit of the nation, but for that of a class. Our age has beheld moralists who have declared to the bourgeois world (or to the working classes) that, far from trying to check the feeling of their differences from others and to feel conscious of their common human nature, they should on the contrary try to feel conscious of this difference in all its profundity and irreducibleness, and that this effort is fine and noble, whereas every desire for union is here a sign of baseness and cowardice, and also of weakness of mind. This, as everyone knows, is the thesis of the ‘Reflections on Violence’, which has been praised by a whole galaxy of apostles of the modern soul. There is certainly something more novel in this attitude of the ‘clerks’ to class differences than in their attitude towards national differences. To discover the results of this teaching and the additional hatred (hitherto unknown) which it has given to either class in doing violence to its adversary, you have only to look at Italian Fascism for the bourgeois class, and at Russian Bolshevism for the working class.[71]

Here again we see realism trying to shelter under cover of the Church. We see certain Catholic teachers striving to prove that, by encouraging the bourgeois class, _in the name of morality_, to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from the opposing class, to plunge religiously into consciousness of the characteristics which are proper to their own class, and especially (Johannet) to _intensify their feeling of property_, these teachers are merely acting in conformity with the teaching of the Church.[72]

It is easy to point out the equivocation upon which this claim is based. The Church does indeed admit class distinctions. She exhorts the faithful to recognize and even to respect them, as something imposed by God upon a fallen world. She also exhorts the privileged to accept their situation, to carry out the activities it implies, and to perform ‘the duties of their state of life’. She even tells them that by performing these duties they are pleasing God and ‘making an act of prayer’. But the Church never exhorted them to glorify in themselves the feeling of this distinction, still less did she ever do so in the name of morality. On the contrary, she exhorted them in the name of morality to extinguish (beneath this privileged life) all belief in a particularity of essence in their persons, and told them to feel conscious of themselves in that humanity which is common to all men beneath the inequality of ranks and states of life.[73] Jesus Christ, the Church states explicitly and constantly, _only accepts the man who is reconciled_, i.e. the man who has obliterated from his heart every feeling of difference between himself and other men. (See Bossuet’s _Sermon on Reconciliation_.) It seems unnecessary to insist further on the unimpeachable character of this Christian teaching--I am speaking of teaching, not of practice. But one cannot meditate too much on the eagerness of so many modern Church teachers to try to find some means of sanctifying bourgeois egotism through the words of the Gospels.[74]

Let me point out another and remarkable form of this extolling of particularism by the ‘clerks’: the extolling of particular systems of morality and the scorn for universal morality. During the past half century a whole school, not only of men of action but of serious philosophers, has taught that a people should form a conception of its rights and duties from a study of its particular genius, its history, its geographical position, the particular circumstances in which it happens to be, and not from the commands of a so-called conscience of man in all times and places. Moreover, this same school teaches that a class should construct a scale of good and evil, determined by an inquiry into its particular needs, its particular aims, the particular conditions surrounding it, and should cease to encumber itself with such sensibilities as ‘justice in itself’, ‘humanity in itself’ and other ‘rags and tatters’ of general morality. To-day with Barrès, Maurras, Sorel, even Durckheim[75] we are witnessing the complete bankruptcy among the ‘clerks’ of that form of soul which, from Plato to Kant, looked for the notion of good in the heart of eternal and disinterested man. The example of Germany in 1914 shows the results of this teaching which exhorts a group of men to set themselves up as the sole judges of the morality of their actions, shows what deification of their appetites it leads to, what codification of their violence, what tranquillity in carrying out their plans. One day perhaps we shall see the same thing throughout Europe exemplified by the bourgeois class, unless the doctrines of that class are turned against itself and we see it exemplified by the working classes.[76]

I dare to say that the indignation of certain French moralists at the action of Germany in 1914 surprises me, when I reflect that some sixteen years earlier, during the famous ‘affair’ which I have already mentioned, these moralists preached to their compatriots exactly the same doctrines, urging them to reject the concept of absolute justice, and to desire only a form of justice ‘adapted to France’, to its particular genius, its particular history, its particular, eternal, and present needs.[77] For the honour of these thinkers--I mean for the honour of their consistency--one likes to think that their indignation in 1914 was not the result of any moral conviction, but only of the desire to place the enemy of their nation in the wrong with a naïve universe.

This last-named activity of the ‘clerks’ seems to me one of those which best display their determination and skill in serving the passions of the laymen. If a man exhorts his compatriots to recognize only a personal morality and to reject all universal morality, he is showing himself a master of the art of encouraging them to want to be distinct from all other men, i.e. of the art of perfecting national passion in them, at least in one of its aspects. The desire to take none but oneself as a judge of one’s actions and to scorn every opinion of other people is undoubtedly a source of strength to a nation, as every exertion of pride is a source of strength to an institution, whose fundamental principle--whatever may be said to the contrary--is the assertion of an ego against a non-ego. What ruined Germany in the last war was not its ‘irritating arrogance’, as is asserted by certain visionaries who have made up their minds that malevolence of soul must be an element of weakness in practical life, but the fact that its material strength was not equal to its arrogance. When arrogance finds an equivalent material power at its disposal, it is very far from ruining nations; witness Rome and the Prussia of Bismarck. The ‘clerks’ who, thirty years ago, exhorted France to make herself the sole judge of her own actions and to despise eternal morality, showed that they possessed in the highest degree the perception of the national interest, insofar as that interest is wholly realist and has nothing to do with disinterested passion. It remains to be seen, once more, whether the function of the ‘clerks’ is to serve this sort of interests.

But the modern ‘clerks’ have held up universal truth to the scorn of mankind, as well as universal morality. Here the ‘clerks’ have positively shown genius in their effort to serve the passions of the laymen. It is obvious that truth is a great impediment to those who wish to set themselves up as distinct; from the very moment when they accept truth, it condemns them to be conscious of themselves in a universal. What a joy for them to learn that this universal is a mere phantom, that there exist only particular truths, ‘Lorrain truths, Provençal truths, Britanny truths, the harmony of which in the course of centuries constitutes what is beneficial, respectable, _true in France_’[78] (the neighbour similarly speaks of what is _true in Germany_), that in other words Pascal had the mind of a clown, and that what is true on one side of the Pyrenees may perfectly well be error on the other side! Humanity hears the same teaching about the classes and learns that there is a bourgeois truth and a working-class truth; better still, that the functioning of our minds should be different according to whether we are working men or bourgeois. The source of your troubles (Sorel teaches the working classes) is that you do not think in the mental way suited to your class. His disciple, Johannet, says the same thing to the capitalist class. Perhaps we shall soon see the results of this truly supreme art of the ‘clerks’ in exasperating the feeling in their differences among the classes.

The cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal is a reversal of values quite generally characteristic of the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’, who proclaim them in a far higher sphere of thought than politics. The metaphysics adopted in the last twenty years by almost all those who think or pretend to think, set up as the supreme state of human consciousness that state--‘duration’--where we succeed in taking cognizance of ourselves in what is most individual, most distinct from everything not ourselves, and in freeing ourselves from those forms of thought (concept, reason, habits of speech) through which we can only become conscious of ourselves in what is common to us and others. These metaphysics put forward as a superior form of cognizance of the world that which grasps each thing by what is unique in it, distinct from every other, and is full of scorn for the mind which seeks to discover general states of being. Our age has seen a fact hitherto unknown, at least from my point of view; and this in metaphysics preaching adoration for the contingent, and scorn for the eternal.[79] Nothing could show better how profound is the modern ‘clerk’s’ desire to exalt the real, the practical side of existence, and to degrade the ideal, the truly metaphysical side. In the history of philosophy this veneration for the individual comes from the German thinkers (Schlegel, Nietzsche, Lotze), while the metaphysical cult of the universal (added to a certain contempt for the experimental) is pre-eminently a legacy of Greece to the human mind. So here again, and moreover in its profoundest part, the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’ shows the triumph of Germanic values and the bankruptcy of Hellenism.

I should like to point out another form, not the least remarkable, which this preaching of particularism assumes among the ‘clerks’. I mean their exhortations to consider everything only as it exists _in time_, that is as it constitutes a succession of particular states, a ‘becoming’, a ‘history’, and never as it presents a state of permanence beyond time under this succession of distinct cases. I mean especially their assertion that this view of things in their historical aspect is the only serious and philosophical view, and that the need to look at them in their eternal aspect is a form of the child’s taste for ghosts, and should be merely smiled at. Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought? It exists among a whole group of literary critics, who, on their own showing, inquire far less whether a work is beautiful than whether it expresses ‘the present’ aspirations of ‘the contemporary soul’.[80] It may be seen in a whole school of moralist-historians who admire a doctrine, not because it is just or good, but because it embodies the morality _of its time_, the scientific spirit _of its time_. (This is the principal reason why Sorel admires Bergsonism and why Nietzsche admires the philosophy of Nicolas de Cuse.) It may be seen especially in all our metaphysicians. Whether they put forward _Entwickelung_ or _Duration_ or _Creative Evolution_ or _Pluralism_ or _Integral Experience_ or the _Concrete Universal_, they all teach that the absolute is developed _in time_, in the circumstantial, and proclaim the decadence of that form of mind which, from Plato to Kant, hallows existence as conceived beyond change.[81] If, with Pythagoras, we assume that the Cosmos is the place of regulated and uniform existence, and the Ouranos the place of the becoming and the moving, we may say that all modern metaphysics place the Ouranos at the top of their scale of values and hold the Cosmos in very slight esteem. Is it not remarkable to see the ‘clerks’, even in the lofty function of metaphysicians, teaching the laymen that the real alone is worthy of consideration, and that the supersensible is only worthy of derisive laughter?[82]

(_B_) _The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the practical, and denounce love of the spiritual_

But the ‘clerks’ with their doctrines have inflamed the realism of the laymen in other ways besides praising the particular and denouncing the universal. At the very top of the scale of moral values they place the possession of concrete advantages, of material power and the means by which they are procured; and they hold up to scorn the pursuit of truly spiritual advantages, of non-practical or disinterested values.

This they have done, first of all, as regards the State. For twenty centuries the ‘clerks’ preached to the world that the State should be just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should care nothing about being just. (Remember the attitude of the chief French teachers during the Dreyfus affair.) Convinced that the strength of the State depends upon authority, they defend autocratic systems, arbitrary government, the reason of State, the religions which teach blind submission to authority, and they cannot sufficiently denounce all institutions based on liberty and discussion.[83] This denunciation of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to History, especially on the part of the French. With their eyes fixed on the powerful State, they have praised the State disciplined in the Prussian manner, where everyone has his post, and under orders from above, labours for the greatness of the nation, without there being any place left for particular wills.[84] Owing to their cult of the powerful State (and also for other reasons I shall mention later), they want the military element to preponderate in the State, they want it to have a right to privileges and they want the civil element to agree to this right. (See _L’Appel au Soldat_, and the declarations of numerous writers during the Dreyfus affair.) It is certainly something new to see men of thought preaching the abasement of the toga before the sword, especially in the country of Montesquieu and Renan. And then they preach that the State should be strong and contemptuous of justice, above all in its relations with other States. To this end they praise in the head of the State the will to aggrandisement, the desire for ‘strong frontiers’, the effort to keep his neighbours under his domination. And they glorify those means which to them seem likely to attain these ends, i.e. sudden aggression, trickery, bad faith, contempt for treaties. This apology for Machiavellianism has inspired all the German historians for the past fifty years, and in France it is professed by very influential teachers, who exhort France to venerate her Kings because they are supposed to have been models of the purely practical spirit, exempt from all respect for any silly justice in their relations with their neighbours.

The novelty of this attitude among the ‘clerks’ can best be displayed by quoting the famous answer of Socrates to the realist in the _Georgias_:

‘In the persons of Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, you praise men who made their fellow citizens good cheer, by serving them with everything they desired without caring to teach them what is good and right in food. They have enlarged the State, cry the Athenians, but they do not see that this enlargement is nothing but a swelling, a tumour filled with corruption. This is all that has been achieved by these former politicians by filling the city with ports, arsenals, walls, tributes, and the like follies, and by not adding Temperance and Justice.’

Up to our own times, in theory at least (but it is with theories I am dealing here) the supremacy of the spiritual proclaimed in those words has been adopted by all those who, explicitly or otherwise, have proposed a scale of values to the world, whether through the Church, or the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century. One can guess the derisive laughter of a Barrès or any Italian moralist (to speak only of the Latin races) at this disdain of power for the benefit of justice, and their severity for the manner in which this son of Athens judges those who made his city materially powerful. For Socrates, in this respect the perfect model of the ‘clerk’ who is faithful to his essential function, ports, arsenals, walls are ‘follies’, and the serious things are justice and temperance. Those who to-day should perform the duties of a Socrates consider that it is justice which is a folly--‘a cloud’--and the serious things are the arsenals, the walls. To-day the ‘clerk’ has made himself Minister of War. Moreover, one of the most revered modern moralists definitely approves of the judges who condemned Socrates, as good guardians of worldly interests.[85] And that is something which has not been seen among the educators of the human soul since the evening when Crito closed his master’s eyelids.

I say that the modern ‘clerks’ have _preached_ that the State should be strong and care nothing about being just; and in fact the ‘clerks’ do give this assertion the characteristic of preaching, of moral teaching. I cannot insist too often that in this lies their great originality. When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ‘The Prince,’ says Machiavelli, ‘must have an understanding always ready to do good, but he must be able to enter into evil when he is forced to do so’; thereby showing that for him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the _moralists_ of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good. This position is evident in Hegel, in the Pangermanists and in Barrès; it is no less evident among realists like M. Maurras and his disciples, in spite of their insistence in declaring that they profess no morality. Perhaps these teachers do not profess any morality, at least expressly, in what concerns private life, but they very clearly profess a morality in the political order of things, if by morality is meant everything which puts forward a scale of good and evil. For them as for Hegel, the practical in politics _is the moral_, and if what the rest of the world calls moral is in opposition to the practical, then _it is the immoral_. Such precisely is the perfectly moralist meaning of the famous campaign of ‘false patriotism’. It seems as if we might say that for M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and that his ‘atheism’ consists less in denying God than in shifting Him to man and his political work. I think I can describe the work of this writer accurately by saying that it is the _divinizing of politics_.[86] This displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement of the modern ‘clerks’, and the most deserving of the historian’s attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labours to relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the example of Germany a decade ago.[87]

The extent to which the modern ‘clerks’ have made innovations may be judged by the fact that up till our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato’s, and it said: ‘Morality decides politics’; the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said: ‘Politics have nothing to do with morality.’ To-day they receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: ‘Politics decide morality.’[88] However, the real departure is not that this doctrine should be put before them, but that they should accept it. Callicles asserted that force is the only morality; but the thinking world despised him. Let me also mention that Machiavelli was covered with insults by most of the moralists of his time, at least in France.

The modern world also hearkens to other moralists of realism, who are not lacking in influence as such; I mean the statesmen. Here I shall point to the same sort of change as above. Formerly, leaders of States practised realism, but did not honour it; Louis XI, Charles the Fifth of Spain, Richelieu, Louis XIV, did not claim that their actions were moral. They saw morality where the Gospel had showed it to them, and they did not attempt to displace it because they did not apply it.[89] With them morality was violated, but moral notions remain intact; _and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization_. Signor Mussolini proclaims the morality of his politics of force and the immorality of everything which opposes it. Like the writer, the man of government, who formerly was merely a realist, is now the _apostle_ of realism; and the majesty of his function--if not of his person--gives weight to his apostleship.

The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality, a metaphysics, a mysticism. Richelieu, who need account only to his King, is able to talk only of the practical, and leaves visions of the eternal to others. Mussolini, Bethmann-Hollweg, Herriot, are condemned to these heights.[90] Moreover, this shows how great to-day is the number of those whom I can call ‘clerks’, since by that word I mean all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner. Consequently, I have a right to demand that they give an account of their acts _as ‘clerks’_.

The preachers of political realism often claim to base themselves on the teaching of the Church, and call her a hypocrite when she condemns their theses. This claim has little foundation as regards the teaching of the Church before the nineteenth century, but has much more foundation if we consider the present age. I doubt whether one could now find from the pen of a modern theologian any passage so brutally denunciatory of a war of aggression as the following:--

‘Glaringly unjust is the war of him who declares war only from ambition and from the desire to extend his dominions beyond their legitimate boundaries, from the desire to possess a more commodious country in which to establish himself, from the fear of the great power of a neighbouring prince with whom he is at peace, or from the desire to despoil a rival solely because he is thought unworthy of the possessions or States he holds or of a right which legitimately belongs to him, because a ruler is inconvenienced by him and wants to get rid of this inconvenience by force of arms.’[91] On the other hand, there are an immense number of works to-day which need only a little twisting to make them justify every attempt at conquest. For instance, the view that a war is just ‘if it can invoke the necessity of safeguarding the common good and public tranquillity, the recapture of things unjustly carried off, the repression of rebels, the defence of the innocent’.[92] And the view which asserts that ‘war is just when it is necessary to a nation either to defend itself against invasion, or _to overthrow the obstacles thwarting the exercise of its rights_.’[93] At the beginning of the last century the Church still taught that war could only be just for one of the two belligerents.[94] It is heavy with consequences that she has now abandoned this position and to-day asserts that war may be just on both sides at once, ‘from the moment when each of the two adversaries, without being certain of its right, considers it as simply probable after having taken the opinion of its counsellors’.[95] Here is another serious thing: In the past, war would only be declared just when it was against an adversary who had committed an injury _accompanied by a moral intention_, whereas to-day it may be declared just if it is directed against a material injury caused without any malice,[96] for instance, an accidental violation of frontier. It is certain that to-day Napoleon and Bismarck could find in the teaching of the Church more justification than ever for their incursions.[97]

The modern ‘clerks’ have preached this realism to the classes as well as to the nations. They say to the working class as well as to the bourgeois class: ‘Organize yourselves, become the stronger, seize on power or exert yourself to retain it if you already possess it; laugh at all efforts to bring more charity, more justice or any other “rot”[98] into your relations with the other class, you have been cheated long enough by that sort of thing.’ And here again they do not say: ‘Become so, because necessity demands it,’ they say, and that is the novelty of it: ‘Become so, because morality, aesthetics demand it; to wish to be powerful is the sign of an elevated soul, to wish to be just the sign of a base soul.’ This is the teaching of Nietzsche,[99] of Sorel, applauded by a whole thinking (so-called) Europe; this is the enthusiasm of Europe, when it is attracted by Socialism, for the doctrines of Marx, its scorn for the doctrines of Proudhon.[100] The ‘clerks’ have said the same thing to the parties contending within the same nation. ‘Make yourself the stronger,’ they say to one or other, according to their own passion, ‘and do away with everything which obstructs you; free yourself from the foolish prejudice which exhorts you to make allowances for your adversary, to establish with him a system of justice and harmony.’ We all know the admiration professed by a whole army of ‘thinkers’ in all countries for the Italian government, which simply outlaws all citizens who do not approve of it. Until our own times the educators of the human soul, disciples of Aristotle, urged mankind to denounce as infamous any State which was an organized faction. The pupils of Signor Mussolini and M. Maurras learn to reverence such a State.[101]

This extolling of the ‘strong State’ by the modern ‘clerks’ appears also in certain teachings which, it may be asserted, would greatly have amazed their ancestors, at least the great ones:--

(_a_) _The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past_ (to the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force) in opposition to the rights of reason. I say the affirmation of the _rights_ of custom. The modern traditionalists do not simply teach, like Descartes or Malebranche, that custom is upon the whole quite a good thing, and that there is more wisdom in submitting to it than opposing it. They teach that custom has a right, _the_ right, and consequently that custom should be respected not only from the point of view of interest, but of justice. The arguments in favour of the ‘historical right’ of Germany to Alsace, the ‘historical right’ of the French monarchy, are not purely political positions, they are moral positions. They claim to be accepted in the name of ‘true justice’, of which (they say) their adversaries have a false conception.[102] To determine what is just by the ‘accomplished fact’ is certainly a new sort of teaching, especially among the peoples who for twenty centuries derived their conception of what is just from the companions of Socrates. Here again, the soul of Greece has given place to the soul of Prussia among the educators of mankind. The spirit which speaks here--and from all the teachers of Europe, Mediterranean as well as Germanic--is the spirit of Hegel: ‘The history of the world is the justice of the world.’ (_Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht._)

(_b_) The extolling of _policy founded on experience_--by which is meant that a society should be governed on principles which have proved that they can make it strong, and by ‘illusions’ which would tend to make it just. It is in this narrowly practical sense that the cult of experimental politics is a new thing among the ‘clerks’. For if we mean by the phrase the respect for principles which have showed that they are fitted to make a society not only strong but just, the recommendation of such a policy in opposition to a purely rational policy appeared in the thinking world long before the disciples of Taine or Auguste Comte.[103] Long before our ‘organizing empiricists’ Spinoza wanted political science to be an experimental science, and desired that the conditions under which States endure should be sought from observation at least as much as from reason. (See his attack on the Utopians, _Treatise_, I, i.) But he believed he learned from observation that these conditions do not solely consist in States possessing good armies and obedient peoples, but in their respecting the rights of citizens and even of neighbouring peoples.[104] The cult of experimental politics to-day is accompanied in those who adopt it by a posture which they evidently mean to be striking, and which in fact is so. We all know with what fatalistic visages, what scornful inflexibility, what dark certainty of grasping the absolute, they declare that in matters of politics ‘they consider only the facts’. Here, especially among the French thinkers, is a new kind of Romanticism, which I shall call the _Romanticism of Positivism_, the chief representatives of which will rise up in the imagination of my readers without its being necessary for me to name them. Moreover, this cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an acquisition of the nineteenth century,[105] i.e. the belief that the teachings to be drawn from the past (supposing that they exist) will come straight out of an examination of the _facts_, viz. desires which have been realized. As if the desires which have not been realized were not as important, and perhaps more important, if you reflect that they may quite well come to fill the world’s stage now.[106] Let me add that this cult of fact also claims to be the sole discoverer of ‘the meaning of history’ and ‘the philosophy of history’, which there again shows a weakness of mind from which the preceding ages seem to have been free. When Bossuet and Hegel built up philosophies of history they were certainly no more metaphysicians than Taine or Comte or any of their noisy disciples, but at least they knew that they were so, that they could not be otherwise, and were not so naïve as to think themselves ‘pure scientists’.

(_c_) The assertion that political forms should be adapted to ‘man as he is and always will be’ (viz. unsocial and bloody, therefore eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions). This effort of so many modern teachers to assert the imperfectability of human nature appears as one of their strangest attitudes, if you realize that it tends towards nothing less than asserting the complete uselessness of their function, and proving that they have completely ceased to realize its very essence. When we see moralists, educators, professional providers of spiritual guidance, assert at the spectacle of human barbarism that ‘man is thus’, that ‘he must be taken thus’, that ‘you will never change him’, we are tempted to ask them what is their reason for existing. And when we hear them reply that ‘they are positive minds and not Utopians’, ‘that they are concerned with what is, not with what might be’, we are staggered to see that they do not know that the moralist is essentially a Utopian, and that the nature of moral action is precisely that it creates its object by affirming it. But we recover when we notice that they are in no wise ignorant of this, and know perfectly well that by affirming it they will create that eternity of barbarism necessary to the maintenance of the institutions which are dear to them.[107]

The dogma of the incurable wickedness of man has another root among some who profess it. This is a Romantic pleasure in picturing the human race as walled in by an inevitable and eternal woe. From this point of view we may say that there has grown up among certain political writers of our time a real _Romanticism of Pessimism_, as false in its absoluteness as the Optimism of Rousseau and Michelet, in hatred of whom it has arisen, while its haughty and so-called scientific attitude is most impressive to simple souls.[108] This doctrine has undoubtedly borne fruits outside the world of literature, and at its voice there has arisen a humanity which believes in nothing but its egotisms and merely laughs at the naïve persons who still think that it might become better. The modern ‘clerk’ has accomplished a truly new work--he has taught man to deny his divinity. The import of such a work is obvious. The Stoics claimed that pain is abolished if it is denied; the thing is disputable in the matter of pain, but it is absolutely true in the matter of moral perfectability.

I shall point out two more teachings inspired in the modern ‘clerks’, by their preaching of the ‘strong State’, and it will not be necessary to add that they are new in the ministers of the spiritual:--

The first is the teaching whereby they declare to Man that he is great to the extent that he strives to act and to think as his ancestors, his race, his environment thought, and ignores ‘individualism’. Thirty years ago many of the French teachers hurled anathemas against the man who ‘claimed to seek truth for himself’, to arrive at his own opinion, instead of adopting the opinion of his nation which had been told what it ought to think by its vigilant leaders. Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is contemptible. It is moreover certain that a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself.[109]

The second is the teaching whereby they declare to men that the fact that a group is numerous constitutes a right. This is the morality which the over-populated nations hear from many of their thinkers, while the other nations hear from many of theirs that if their low birth-rate continues they will become the objects of a ‘legitimate’ extermination. The rights of numerousness admitted by men who claim to belong to the life of the mind--that is what modern humanity sees. But it is certain that if a nation is to be strong, it must be numerous.

This cult of the strong State and the moral methods which ensure it have been preached to mankind by the ‘clerks’ far beyond the domain of politics, and on a wholly general plane. This is the preaching of _Pragmatism_ whose teaching during the past fifty years by nearly all the influential moralists of Europe is one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will ‘to power’, that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its ‘will to live’ wherein it is most ‘hostile to all reason’, that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.[110]

I should like to point out certain particularly remarkable aspects of this preaching, which are probably not sufficiently realized.

I said that the modern ‘clerks’ teach man that his desires are moral insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the expense of the surrounding world.[111] In other words, the old morality told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent that he is in opposition to it. The former exhorted him not to set himself in Nature ‘like an empire within an empire’; the latter exhorts him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, ‘We desire now to feel conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.’ The former, like the master of the _Contemplations_, said: ‘Believe, but not in ourselves’; the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: ‘Believe, and believe in ourselves, only ourselves.’

Nevertheless, the real originality of Pragmatism is not in that. Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes: Pragmatism exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of matter. (See the glorifications of the _homo faber_ by Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson.)

Moreover, the modern ‘clerks’ extol Christianity insofar as it is supposed to have been pre-eminently a school of practical, creative virtues, adjusted to the support of the great human institutions. This amazing deformation of a doctrine which in its precepts is so obviously devoted to the love of the spiritual alone, is not only taught by laymen, who are quite within their rights in trying to place their practical desires under the patronage of the highest moral authorities; it is also professed by the ministers of Jesus themselves. Pragmatist Christianity, as I mean it here, is preached to-day from all Christian pulpits.[112]

This exhortation to concrete advantages and to that form of soul which procures them, is expressed by the modern ‘clerk’ in another very remarkable teaching: By praise of the military life and the feelings which go with it, and by contempt for civil life and the morality it implies. We know the doctrine preached in Europe during the past fifty years by its most esteemed moralists, their apology for war ‘which purifies’, their veneration for the man of arms ‘the archtype of moral beauty’, their proclamation of the supreme morality of ‘violence’ or of those who settle their differences by duels and not before a jury, while they declare that respect for contracts is the ‘weapon of the weak’, the need for justice the ‘characteristic of slaves’. It is not betraying the disciples of Nietzsche or Sorel--that is, the great majority of contemporary men of letters who attempt to set up a scale of moral values for the world--to say that according to them Colleoni is a far superior specimen of humanity to l’Hôpital. The estimates of the _Voyage du Condottiere_ are not peculiar to the author of that work. Here is an idealization of practical activity, which humanity had never before heard from its educators, at least from those who speak dogmatically.

I shall be told that Nietzsche and his school do not extol the military life because it procures material advantages, but on the contrary, because it is the type of disinterested realism, and in opposition to the realism which in their opinion is the characteristic of civilian life. Yet it is none the less true that the way of life praised by these moralists is in fact that which pre-eminently brings material advantages. Whatever may be said by the author of _Reflections on Violence_ and his disciples, war is more profitable than the counting house; to take is more advantageous than to exchange; Colleoni possesses more than Franklin. (Naturally, I am speaking of the successful military man, since Nietzsche and Sorel never speak of the merchant who goes bankrupt.)

Moreover, no one will deny that the irrational activities, of which the military instinct is only one aspect, are extolled by their great modern apostles for their practical value. Their historian has put it admirably: The Romanticism of Nietzsche, Sorel, and Bergson is a _utilitarian_ Romanticism.

Let me insist that what I am pointing to here, is not the modern ‘clerk’s’ extolling of the military spirit, but of the warlike instinct. It is the cult of the warlike instinct, outside all social spirit of discipline or sacrifice which is meant by the following assertions of Nietzsche, glorified by a French moralist whom himself has numerous followers:--

‘The values of the warrior aristocracy are founded on a powerful bodily constitution, excellent health, without forgetting all that is necessary to the upkeep of that overflowing vigour--war, adventure, hunting, dancing, physical games and exercises, and in general everything which implies a robust, free and joyous activity.’

‘That audacity of noble races, a mad, absurd, spontaneous audacity ... their indifference and scorn for all safety of body, for life, comfort ...’

‘The superb blond beast wandering in search of prey and carnage ...’

‘The terrible gaiety and profound joy felt by heroes in all destruction, in all the pleasures of victory and cruelty.’

The moralist who quotes those remarks (Sorel, _Reflexions sur la Violence_, p. 360) adds, in order to leave no doubt about his recommendation of them to his fellow human beings: ‘It is quite evident that liberty would be seriously compromised if men came to look upon the Homeric values’ (which, for him, are the values just praised by Nietzsche) ‘as being characteristic of the barbarous peoples only.’

Is it necessary to observe how, here again, the moral presentation dominant among the world’s educators is essentially Germanic, and shows the bankruptcy of Graeco-Roman thought? Before our times you do not find in France a single serious moralist (including de Maistre) or even a poet (if you consider only the great ones) who praises the ‘pleasures of victory and cruelty’.[113] And it is the same for ancient Rome, among the nations to whom war had given world supremacy. I do not find a single passage which puts forward the instincts of prey as the supreme form of human morality in Cicero, Seneca, or Tacitus, or even in Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. On the other hand, I find a great many which attribute this rank to the instincts on which civil life is based.[114] Moreover, in primitive Greece, long before the philosophers, the myths very soon give an important place to civil morality. In a poem of Hesiod the tomb of Cycnus is engulfed in the waters by Apollo’s command, because Cycnus was a brigand. The defence of warlike instincts by Mediterranean moralists will be one of the amazements of history. Some of them, moreover, seem uneasy about it, and feel they ought to claim that the Homeric values (we have seen what they mean by that) ‘are very close to the values of Corneille’[115]--as if the French poet’s heroes, with all their sense of devotion to duty and the State, had anything in common with lovers of adventure, prey, and carnage!

It will be observed that these passages from Nietzsche praise the military life apart from any political aim.[116] And, in fact, the modern ‘clerks’ teach men that war implies a morality _in itself_ and should be exercised even apart from any utility. This thesis, so familiar in Barrès, has been defended in its full splendour by a young hero who is an educator of the soul for a whole French generation:

‘In my country we love war and secretly desire it. We have always made war. Not to conquer a province, not to exterminate a nation, not to settle a conflict of interests.... We make war for the sake of making war, with no other purpose.’[117]

The old French moralists, even the soldiers (Vauvenargues, Vigny), looked upon war as a sad necessity; their descendants recommend it as a noble inutility. Yet, here again, the cult preached as apart from the practical and as an art happens to be eminently favourable to the practical--useless war is the best preparation for useful war.

This teaching leads the modern ‘clerk’ (we have just seen it in Nietzsche) to confer a _moral_ value upon physical exercise and to proclaim _the morality of sport_--a most remarkable thing indeed among those who for twenty centuries have exhorted man to situate good in states of the mind. The moralists of sport, moreover, do not all shuffle over the practical essence of their doctrine. Young people, Barrès clearly teaches, should be trained in physical strength, for the greatness of the country. The modern educator goes for his inspiration, not to those who strolled in the Lyceum or to the solitaries of Clairvaux, but to the founder of a little town in the Peloponnesus. Moreover, our age has seen this new thing: Men who claim to belong to the spiritual life teaching that the Greece to venerate is Sparta with her gymnasiums, not the city of Plato or Praxiteles, while others maintain that in antiquity we should honour Rome and not Greece. All these things are perfectly consistent in those who desire to preach to humanity nothing but strong constitutions and solid ramparts.[118]

The preaching of realism leads the modern ‘Clerk’ to certain teachings, whose novelty in his history is not sufficiently noticed, nor what a break they form with the teaching which his class has given to men for the past two thousand years.