It is impossible for an order which is higher and therefore infinitely above another to be represented in it except by something infinitely small. A grain of mustard seed, an instant mirroring eternity, etc …
The point of contact between a circle and a straight line (a tangent). This is the presence of the higher order in the lower under the form of what is infinitely minute.
Christ is the point of tangency between humanity and God.
Unobtrusiveness—the infinitesimal character of pure good …
Equilibrium is the submission of one order to another, the order which transcends the first being present in it under the form of something infinitely small.
Thus a true royalty would constitute the perfect city.
Each one, in society, is the infinitely small representative of the order transcending and infinitely greater than the social.
s o c i a l h a r m o n y
171
The love of the citizen for his city and of the vassal for his lord should be a supernatural love.
Equilibrium alone destroys and annuls force. Social order can be nothing but an equilibrium of forces.
As it cannot be expected that a man without grace should be just, there must be a society organized in such a way that injustices punish each other through a perpetual oscillation.
Equilibrium alone reduces force to nothing.
If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale. Although the weight may consist of evil, in handling it with this intention, perhaps we do not become defiled. But we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’.
The meaning of the famous passage in the Georgics about geometry. No unlimited development is possible in the nature of things; the world is entirely based on measure and equilibrium, and it is the same with the city. All ambition is an absence of measure, absurdity.
γεωµετρ α γα`ρ αµελε .
What the ambitious man entirely forgets is the notion of relationship.
‘Peuple stupide à qui ma puissance m’enchaine,
Hélas! mon orgueil même a besoin de tes bras.’1
The feudal bond, in making obedience a matter between one 1
‘Foolish people, to whom my power enthrals me,
Alas! my very pride has need of your arms.’
172
g r a v i t y a n d g r a c e
man and another, greatly reduces the part played by the Great Beast.
The law does so better still.
There should be no obedience except to the law or to a man.
That is almost what happens in the monastic orders. The city should be built on this model.
Obedience to the overlord, to a man, but a man stripped bare, adorned only with the majesty of the oath and not with a majesty borrowed from the Great Beast.
A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.
The meaning of Plato’s Politics is that power should be in the hands of a social group composed of conquerors and conquered.
But that is against nature except when the conquerors are barbarian. From this point of view the victory of barbarians over civilized peoples, when it is not destructive, is more fruitful than that of civilized peoples over barbarians.
Technical development, which puts force and civilization on the same side, makes such regenerations impossible. It is accursed.
Apart from such moments of fusion, the division of power between the strong and the weak is only possible through the intervention of a supernatural factor.
The supernatural element in society is legitimacy in its double form: law and the assignment of supreme power. A monarchy tempered by laws could perhaps achieve the combination advo-cated in the Politics. But there can be no legitimacy without religion.
Obedience to a man whose authority is not illuminated by legitimacy—that is a nightmare.
s o c i a l h a r m o n y
173
The only thing which is able to turn pure legitimacy—an idea absolutely devoid of force—into something sovereign is the thought: ‘Thus it has always been and thus it will always continue to be.’
That is why a reform should always appear, either as the return to a past which has been allowed to degenerate, or as the adaptation of an institution to new conditions, an adaptation which has as its object not a change but, on the contrary, the maintenance of an unchanging relationship. For instance, supposing there were the relationship 12/4 and 4 became 5, the real conservative would not be he who wanted 12/5, but he who made 12 into 15.
The existence of a legitimate authority puts a finality into the work and actions of social life, a finality other than the thirst for one’s own advancement (the only motive recognized by liberalism).
Legitimacy represents continuity in time, permanence, something unchanging. It gives as a finality to social life something which exists and which is conceived of as having always existed and as having to exist for all time. It obliges men to wish for exactly that which is.
Uprooting, the break in legitimacy, when it is not due to conquest, when it is brought about in any country as a result of the abuse of lawful authority, invariably leads men to become obsessed with the idea of progress, because finality is then turned towards the future.
Atheistic materialism is necessarily revolutionary, for, if it is to be directed towards an absolute good here on earth, it has to place it in the future. In order that this impetus should have full effect there must therefore be a mediator between the perfection to come and the present. This mediator is the chief—Lenin, etc.
174
g r a v i t y a n d g r a c e
He is infallible and perfectly pure. In passing through him evil becomes good.
We have either to see things in that way or to love God, or else to allow ourselves to be tossed to and fro by the little things—good and evil—of everyday life.
The link between progress and the lower level (because the aims of any generation from the moment that the preceding one has come to a stop are necessarily exterior) is an example of the kinship between force and that which is low.
The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the nine-teenth century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upwards into the air.
The supreme atheistic idea is the idea of progress, which is the negation of experimental ontological proof, for it implies that the mediocre can of itself produce the best. But all modern science combines in rejecting the idea of progress. Darwin destroyed the illusion of internal progress which was found in Lamarck. The theory of mutations only leaves chance and elimination as valid. The theory of energetics postulates that energy deteriorates and never increases, and this is applicable even to vegetable and animal life.
Psychology and sociology will only become scientific through an analogous application of the notion of energy—an application incompatible with any idea of progress; then they will be resplendent with the light of true faith.
The eternal alone is invulnerable to time. In order that a work of art should be admired for all time, that a love, a friendship should last throughout a life (even stay pure for an entire day, perhaps), in order that a conception of the human condition should remain constant despite the manifold experiences and
s o c i a l h a r m o n y
175
vicissitudes of fortune—there must be an inspiration from on high.
A future which is completely impossible, like the ideal of the Spanish anarchists, degrades us far less and differs far less from the eternal than a possible future. It does not even degrade us at all, except through the illusion of its possibility. If it is conceived of as impossible, it transports us into the eternal.
The possible is the realm of the imagination, and thus of degradation. We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist—or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming. The past, not when the imagination takes pleasure over it but at the moment when some meeting calls it up before us in its purity, is time coloured with eternity. The feeling of reality in it is pure. There we have pure joy. There we have beauty. Proust.
We are attached to the present. We manufacture the future in our imagination. Only the past, when we do not remanufacture it, is pure reality.
Time as it flows wears down and destroys that which is temporal. Accordingly there is more of eternity in the past than in the present. The value of history properly understood is analogous to that of remembrance in Proust. Thus the past presents us with something which is at the same time real and better than ourselves, something which can draw us upwards—a thing the future never does.
The past: something real, but absolutely beyond our reach, towards which we cannot take one step, towards which we can but turn ourselves so that an emanation from it may come to us. Thus it is the most perfect image of eternal, supernatural reality.
176
g r a v i t y a n d g r a c e
Is it for this reason that there are joy and beauty in remembrance as such?
Whence will renewal come to us—to us who have defiled and emptied the whole earthly globe?
From the past alone, if we love it.
Contraries. Today we thirst for and are nauseated by totalitarianism, and nearly everyone loves one totalitarianism and hates another.
Is there always identity between what we love and what we hate? Do we always feel the need to love under another form that which we hate, and vice versa?
The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands. But except for souls which are fairly near to saintliness, the victims are defiled by force just as their tormentors are. The evil which is in the handle of the sword is transmitted to its point. So the victims thus put in power and intoxicated by the change do as much harm or more, and soon sink back again to where they were before.
Socialism consists in imputing good to the conquered, and racialism in imputing good to the conquerors. But the revolutionary wing of socialism makes use of those who, though lowly born, are by nature and by vocation conquerors. Thus it ends up by having the same form of ethics.
Modern totalitarianism is to the Catholic totalitarianism of the twelfth century what the spirit of laïcism and freemasonry is to the humanism of the Renaissance. Humanity deteriorates at each swing of the pendulum. How far will this go?
s o c i a l h a r m o n y
177
After the collapse of our civilization there must be one of two things: either the whole of it will perish like the ancient civilizations, or it will adapt itself to a decentralized world.
It rests with us, not to break up the centralization (for it automatically goes on increasing like a snowball until the catastrophe comes), but to prepare for the future.
Our period has destroyed the interior hierarchy. How should it allow the social hierarchy, which is only a clumsy image of it, to go on existing?
You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.