The Mystagogue's Blog

Moving between a rock and a hard place

Antoine de Rivarol may have never wished to be twinned for eternity with his rival Chamfort, though both epigrammists wrote with an acerbic pen after all. But Rivarol was part-prophet. He posessed the realism of the vanquished. Buried somewhere unknown to us in Berlin, where he passed away in exile, he may well have been a huckster. Born in Bagnols, Languedoc, he and his brother claimed a relation to the noble Rivaroli family, originally from Piedmont. Detractors would claim there was no such relation. But both in his aphorisms and his long form work, you can gage a thorough understanding of the true nature of political society. A thoroughbred aristocrat by thought. He began his intellectual journey after leaving the priesthood for Paris in 1776, where he joined became acquainted with Voltaire, Diderot and Buffon. In his previous life prior to the tumult of the Revolution, he produced a lauded French translation of Dante’s Inferno and also wrote a monograph on the universality of the French language, winning a prize from the Berlin Academy and a commendation from Frederick the Great for the latter. I would argue, as Panagiotis Kondylis did, that his ouevre had great theoretical uniqueness. Man is driven by the impetus of passions, channeling La Rochefoucauld and mirroring Nietzche(Rivarol would quip, “the stomach is the soil from which thought grows”), but neither does Rivarol deny the coupling of the passions with logic, nor does he dispense with the notion of good and evil. A master of social anthropology who blurred the distinction between Providence and Nature, as was evident in his time when the two seemed to have manifested in the same breath. He was at root a consequentialist, much as Maistre himself was. Like the Savoyard he is a window and can be read by and related to those with aesthetic sensibilities in a fallen time. As Ernst Jünger did in 1945 when the occupation of Paris drew to a close and again in 1956 as recorded by Armin Mohler, when he produced an introductory essay to his translations. Here are some gems from the counter-revolutionary tour de force, the “Tacitus of the Revolution”, Jünger’s fencing master:

“A fatal curiosity and an indefinable interest mixed with horror attract us in spite of ourselves to those monstrous monsters that appear in certain epochs; we inquire details about those perverse beings that are in this world the scandal of Providence…”

“In a word, the only contract that nature has made with us is that of the eternal powers of motion; the only thing it has promised us is the harmony of the physical world: it is up to us to create and maintain the harmony of the moral world.”

“The theory I have just expounded gives an unshakable basis to justice and religion: I know of no other, humanly speaking, more true, more imposing, more suitable for founding the social order: there is no politics without justice and without religion.”

“When a man is thus locked up in the state of a brute, he would have to stay there – definitely: no tiger has ever strangled a traveler for his gold; but these sophists want to reason in one order and enjoy in the other.”

“We live at a time in which obscurity is better protection than the law and more comfort than innocence”

“The body politic is like a tree: to grow, it has as much need of heaven as of earth”

“(Of)philosophers, there is no pact: to satisfy them, it is necessary either that the government should abdicate, or that it should allow them to stir up the people. In one word, philosophy divides men by opinions; religion unites them in the same principles: there is therefore a contract between politics and religion. Every State is, if I dare say it, a mysterious ship, which has its anchors in the sky.”

“In spite of the diversity of languages, there is but one Word on earth; so also, in spite of the plurality of cults, there is but one religion in the world; it is the relation of man to God, the dogma of a Providence: and the admirable thing is that every people believes that it possesses the most beautiful language and the true religion.”

“On the other hand, the impious themselves are forced to recognize that, in great nations, the cult was purified day after day. Freed of the subtleties of the scholastics and of some old practices, too superstitious, religion approached the worship of a supreme Being and was reduced to fundamental dogmas linked to ceremonies as noble as they were moving: the lights of the clergy equaled those of the philosophers; simplicity was combined with majesty, to the double satisfaction of the spirit and the senses: the tree was well grafted and judiciously pruned, and it was the moment the philosophers chose to fell it. It happens, then, with cults as with governments: they do not pull them down except when they are too good and too soft.”

“The most ardent enemy of the political order, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, says that man is naturally free, just and good; but it refers to the solitary man; it is a mockery: there is no virtue
And yet, with this false idea, this philosopher launched himself into the political field, always looking for the man among men, the independence between bonds and duties, the independence between the ties and duties…”

“Yes, if we temper these savage and bloodthirsty hordes, which feed on human spirit, everything that has served to bring them out of this horrible state is not only legitimate, but admirable; hell or paradise, angel or devil, who cares: Aesop or Zoroaster, truths called fables, fables called truths: everything is good, as long as it serves and saves.

“Nature, which we call unequal in its productions, is likewise unequal in the gifts it bestows, and we call this inequality variety. (Why not give the same name to the inequality of rank and to the inequality of social conditions? Ranks, you will say, are odious, and great fortunes unbearable. But is the law then under the orders of envy, and must ugliness and folly be consulted on the value of genius and beauty? They wanted to make of France a great lottery in which everyone could win without betting anything.”

“Montesquieu, with all his genius, saw everywhere the parliaments of France. It was necessary, then, to form a good constitution, the concurrence of three forces; the legislative power was to be shared by the people, the senate and the king, and the executive power was to be entirely in the hands of] the prince…The experience of the past centuries shows that all the times that the people have exercised the three branches of government on their  own, the democracy was transformed into anarchy: violent orators agitated the multitude, like winds that lift the wings; and the people, flattered by the demagogues, had all the defects of the tyrants: they abrogated the best laws, condemned the best citizens, and squandered the public monies. In the Athens of antiquity, the Sovereign was mad and the State suffered.”

Every force in nature is despotic, like every will in man. A single gram would populate the earth in a short time; a single herring, by multiplying, would fill the seas, if the other plants and other fish allowed them to do so. But as each plant and animal tends equally with the same energy to occupy all the earth, it happens that these different equally despotic forces repress each other; a compensation is made between them whose laws escape us, but from which it follows that, without ever destroying each other, they retain each species within its own limits.

Real Essentialism by Antoine de Rivarol…

That is why we have called qualities of objects the various sensations that they make us experience. But, in the analysis, almost all these qualities are in us, and only remain to matter its laws, its movements, its extension, and the different fractions of this extension, which, being limited, necessarily have a figure for our eyes.

Mistress of the elements and of the masses, nature is at work from the inside out; it unfolds itself in its works, and we call the boundaries where it stops forms. But man works only on the outside; the bottom continually flees from him; he sees and touches nothing but forms.

The proportions, finally, get us out of trouble in thorny questions about nomenclature. For example, the genera and classes of natural history are our own work: it is then up to us to find precise characters on which to base our methods and help our memory. Nature is answerable only to species and individuals; and with the stability of its elementary substances, we need not fear either the disappearance of known species or the appearance of unknown ones. We call individuals those organized beings which cannot be divided without ceasing to be the same person. Thus, for example, the wing of a bird is no longer a bird; a branch is no longer a tree, but a fragment of stone remains a stone. As to the collective names given to the various objects of nature and art, it is for our proportions, and not for mathematical rigor, to decide the question. The difference between a mountain and a hill, or between an army and a body of troops, does not depend on a grain of sand or a soldier more or less; and it is not a house or a glass of water that distinguishes a city from a village, or a river from a stream: masses are only judged by proportions.

In a word, the ancients never approached corpuscles of identical nature, and were thus powerless to explain the laws of their movements, the continuous variety of their aggregates, and the causes of their disintegration: for homogeneity is as absurd in nature as absolute equality among men, and is as much opposed to the harmony of the world.

Christianity came and spoke to the senses, to the mind and to the heart: by retaining the pomp of paganism, the metaphysics of the Greeks and all the purity of Stoicism, this religion was perfectly suited to the human nature. She consecrated the cradle of all the monarchies of Europe; she favored the progress of light, by feeding the fire of disputes; she made the useful scandals of the popes, the idleness of the cloisters, the triumphs of the wicked and the efforts of the unbelievers, rebound to the benefit of the nations; and I know not what all her assembled adversaries may put in her place, if ever Europe constitutes them arbiters between man and God.

Would be criminal to not include this one,

Le mouvement entre deux repos est l’image du present entre le passé et l’avenir. Le tisserand qui fait sa toile fait toujours ce qui n’est pas.

“Movement between two rests is the image of the present between past and future. The weaver who makes his cloth always makes what is not.” Answer = Motion is the true vision of the present.

From the Ouevres de Rivarol(1853).