According to a current cliché, the barbarism of the 20th century compels one to re-examine the discredited dogma of Original Sin. In the cruelty and sacrilege of ideology's Holy Wars, it is said, we perceive anew the divine in man by its mirror image, the demonic. The sheer scale of the slaughter illustrates the lesson Eliot learned from Baudelaire—that the glory of man lies as much in his capacity for damnation as in his capacity for salvation.
The reality is, however, quite contrary to the cliché. Forced to view his capacity for damnation, modern man has chosen to avert his vision - losing at the same time the brief glimpse of his capacity for salvation. He assumes that all discussion of principle leads to ideology, and therefore bans the a priori from politics. Since this taboo prevents him from analysing the deep causes of his civilisation's disaster, he is content to describe the surface phenomena in such terms as 'totalitarianism' and 'authoritarianism', and the 'human rights' which both supposedly violate. Conceding to the ideologists the desirability of their Utopia and the inevitability of their revolution, he institutionalises a gradual revolution in order to attain the Utopia while avoiding the violence. He therefore becomes a liberal progressive. [Note 1] He tries to hold off his totalitarian adversaries abroad by appeasement and by admonitions to imitate his humane gradualism: this is the diplomatic strategy of the convergence theory. But the gradual revolution still involves coercion: some therefore adopt a libertarian position and call themselves conservatives, even though the status quo they seek to conserve is a liberal one. Their individualism stems not from convictions concerning the sanctity of the individual but from doubt whether human nature can be known; if they strive for constitutional limits on sovereignty it is because they cannot define authority.
In the end, 'Original Sin' serves only as a romantic metaphor for the bestial side of man and the inevitability of suffering. No firm intuition of the reality of good came out of that fleeting impression of the reality of evil; there is, therefore, no renewed faith in a Creator who is responsible for His fallen creatures and engaged in the work of redemption. Turning away from the necessity of combating evil, the liberal and his twin, the liberal conservative, seek only to mitigate pain. Philosophically they are not sceptics but obscurantists.
METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM
The alternative to liberal obscurantism, I believe, is a metaphysical conservatism, which attempts to account for the Divine purpose in history and which raises the uncomfortable issue of truth. Such an outlook recognises that the nature of truth is mystery and that existence in untruth leads to degradation and disaster. Every society's political order incarnates a vision of truth: Christianity places the ground of existence in God, Marxism places it in matter; meanwhile, Liberalism pretends to have no ground, though in practice it falls back on the Marxian one. The metaphysical conservative knows this and therefore denies all legitimacy to liberalism; whence comes his inner strength. A conservative position that concedes nothing to its opposition may have no direct political use. Nevertheless conservative politicians, in the difficult business of compromise and survival, need intellectual and spiritual guidance. As much as their opponents they depend upon the intellectual élite that provides a vision and insinuates its ideas into the culture. The intellectual conservative must create the vocabulary for a discussion which cannot presently occur because the concepts have been lost, and he must draw political discourse towards himself by his very intransigence.
The phrase 'metaphysical conservatism' well describes the tradition of the European right in the 19th century, from the French ultra-royalists to the early Prussian conservatives and the Slavophiles. The fountainhead of this movement was the Savoyard jurist and diplomat, Count Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821), who had a profound political influence at the Restoration even though he was not a politician, and even though he spent much of his career in virtual exile as the King of Sardinia's envoy to Czar Alexander I.
Maistre's name is closely identified with a cult of the extreme. Sainte-Beuve charmingly says, 'During his long sojourn in Russia, this noble mind, so alive, so continually sharpened by work and study, had almost never been cautioned, had almost never encountered anyone in conversation who said stop to him. Is it so astonishing that he should have many times drawn or pushed his ultraverities too far?' But Maistre freely admitted his tendency to bold assurance and exaggeration; he deliberately chose these rhetorical modes 'to force the kind reader to know what he believes.' The 'extremist' component in Maistre's outlook resides in his adherence to ultimate values. As Baudelaire's friend Barbey d'Aurevilly noted, 'only for de Maistre, this original thinker, who explained everything by its origin, original sin sufficed.'
In Maistre's view, the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars were a divinely appointed scourge to atone for the Enlightenment's contempt of God. The ancien régime fell because it became infected with error and ceased to believe in the principles of its own authority; this historical disaster, in turn, created the intellectual mission of conservatism—to rearticulate and clarify the principles of authority. 'You must know how to be royalists: in the past this conviction was based on an instinct; today it is scientific.' But in the 'political science' of his time, Maistre said, any obvious and rational proposition was bound to be historically false. The true science of politics is founded on history, 'which is experimental politics,' and on a science of invisible and supernatural causes—'true metaphysics,' not that spurious article practiced by the philosophes. In fact, the true science of politics is 'the metaphysics of politics.'
Maistre offers certain observable 'laws' for his political science. He totally rejects written constitutions, a universal constitution, any sort of arbitrary and ahistorical political construction, a fact that ought to endear him to the British. He distinguishes between sovereignty and authority—between the power of government which is by nature absolute and undivided, and a legitimate right to power, a moral prestige which rests ultimately in divine sanction. He believes that political freedom is the natural product of a spiritual discipline which no charter can create; in any event, no human government can deprive man of his free will. (Burke understood that society is ordered by a moral balance: 'Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.') In an age of libertinism, Maistre was called to reassert the doctrine of restraint.
What are the invisible and supernatural causes to which Maistre's political metaphysics appeal? Transcendental forces, such as divine love and grace, guilt and evil. These forces operate not simply between God and the individual, but between individuals through a network of moral bonds of duty, obligation, and loyalty, formalised in such institutions as the family, the Church, the state—a network that has a historical dimension and crosses generations through the eternal social contract. This is the Burkean view of society as a 'spiritual corporation;' it owes something to Plato's 'anthropological principle,' that the State is Man Writ Large, and also to the Christian idea of the spiritual community of believers as the Body of Christ. Hence the themes of punishment and sacrifice recur in Maistre, not because he is obsessed with pain, but rather because they illustrate the doctrines of transference of guilt and vicarious atonement, while proving the reality of the spiritual corporation. Maistre cites St Paul in declaring that 'THIS WORLD IS A SYSTEM OF INVISIBLE THINGS VISIBLY MANIFESTED.'
Maistre inspires the modern metaphysical conservative by his comprehensiveness, standing as an example of one who can both uphold classical reason and defend cultural tradition on transcendental (rather than merely pragmatic) grounds. Today there are two chief representatives of 'metaphysical conservatism' who, taken together, embody de Maistre's completeness: Eric Voegelin, the inventor of a 'new science of politics' (which he sees only as a 'recovery of reason') [Note 2]; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a pragmatic observer of history who employs the novel to capture his metaphysical vision. Since Maistre never did expound a philosophy systematically, one must do it for him—and one could do so by quoting only these modern writers. It would be more than an exercise. For, in defiance of the incompetent historian of ideas who finds in de Maistre a handy villain, this Voegelinian-Slavophile explication would reveal the normality and balance of his outlook. . . .
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Note 1: See Eric Voegelin, "Liberalism and Its History," in The Review of Politics (Notre Dame) Oct. 1974, Vol 36 No 4, and in Published Essays, 1953-1965, Vol 11 of the Collected Works, p. 83.
Note 2: See Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (1952) and The Ecumenic Age (Order and History, Vol 4, 1974). My use of the term "metaphysics" in this essay differs from Voegelin's. His attack on the term is not an attack on the quest for knowledge of being but rather on a reified or instrumentalized 'science' of being that suggests or supposes absolute possession—a stage of decline or derailment from classical philosophy leading ultimately to 'ideology.' In an analogous case, one can speak of metaphysical assumptions underlying the thought of Edmund Burke even though he attacks the Jacobins as political 'metaphysicians.' Burke's attack (in agreement with Maistre's) is an attack on a simplistic, reductively rationalistic apriorism that treats humans and their institutions as arithmetic units.
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