Russia’s long borders, most without natural barriers to protect its cities, requires military planning that is not only careful but well integrated into whatever regime prevails in the state. For this reason, “the Russian view of strategy is broader and more encompassing than recognized in the West,” whose rulers tend to ‘compartmentalize’ military strategy, political strategy, and economic strategy. Indeed, “an inclination to holism is characteristic throughout the Russian intellectual tradition in literature, religious philosophy and the sciences.” Persson wisely attempts to understand Russian thinkers as they have understood themselves, never imposing analytical ‘frameworks’ alien to Russia. 

Modern Russian military thought originated in the eighteenth century with Czar Peter the Great, Petr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev, and Alexandrovich Suvorov. Even before that, however, “when Russia consisted of little but Muscovy, the army was an integral part of the state and the ruling elites.” The flat steppes of that region lent themselves to raids and counterraids, many of them defensive responses to intruders. To expand, the regime needed to enforce strict loyalty, made possible by the close association of civilian and military officers, all drawn from the aristocracy. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Russia confronted the principal political/military powers of northern and central Europe: Sweden (‘The Hammer of Europe,’ as it was then known) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Muscovy was successful, doubling its size in the seventeenth century. By the time Peter declared his country an empire, he had transformed Russia into a modern, centralized state featuring an efficient standing army and navy coordinated with its diplomatic corps. As an enthusiast of the Enlightenment, Peter established military councils that met sometimes as often as twenty times a year to debate strategy; Czar Peter adjudicated, and his decision became Russia’s authoritative military doctrine. Previously, education in Russia was the exclusive domain of Orthodox Christian priests; Peter founded a system of military school teaching mathematics, navigation, artillery and engineering. His formidable successor, Catherine the Great, founded a comprehensive system of primary and secondary education which could prepare Russian youth for careers in these technical fields. During her eighteenth century, “Russia was almost constantly in a state of war,” fighting Sweden, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Tatars of Crimea (a country it incorporated into the empire in 1783), Poland, and revolutionary France. It was under Catherine that Rumiantsev wrote Customs of Military Service, setting down organizational practices, and Thought, a memorandum successfully arguing for increased military funding, “given the territorial expansion of the empire.” He was careful to emphasize that Russia’s unique geopolitical characteristics (including its “wicked neighborhood”) meant that its military officers could learn from foreign strategists but implement only those practices fit for Russia. Conversely, Russian strategists needed to understand their many enemies not by Russian standards but “by working out what we might do if we were in his place” (emphasis added). 

Responding to Russia’s geographic vulnerability within the armature of a modern state, these strategists emphasized offensive military operations, departing from Muscovy’s defensive stance. Whether predominantly offensive or defensive, Russia’s wars have been numerous. In the centuries between 1500 and 1900, it was at war for 353 years. At the end of this period, the head of the General Staff Academy pointed to Russia’s defeat of Napoleon, saving not only itself but Prussia and Austria, as the army’s premier achievement, while observing that “war was always and throughout all times been, spontaneously and consciously, a sacred, great, an important act in the life of the state,” fought under the principles, “Faith, Czar, and Fatherland”—religion, regime, and state, fully coordinated. Rumiantsev’s contemporary, General Suzorov, emphasized “speed, assessment, attack.” Given the vast Russian peasantry and its small aristocratic officer corps, both of these classes needed to be well understood in order for their command-and-obey relationship to succeed. To do so, he appealed to the shared sentiment of patriotic pride, formulating the chant: “Subordination, Exercise, Obedience, Education, Discipline, Military Order, Cleanliness, Health, Neatness, Sobriety, Courage, Bravery, Victory! Glory! Glory! Glory!” His relentlessly offensive strategy (retreat, he thought, was equal to weakness) comported well with his spiritedness.

The following century found its major strategist in Nikolai V. Medem, the first professor of strategy at the Imperial Military Academy. In his An Overview of the Most Famous Rules and Systems of Strategy, he described the thought of such important Western strategic thinkers as Jomini, Frederick II, and Clausewitz. Against Jomini and with Clausewitz, he insisted that there can be no “immutable laws in strategy that can guide the actions of the commander in war,” but that ever-changing circumstances must be observed and respected. In chess, learning the rules doesn’t make you much of a chess player. A strategist, he wrote, must have “the knowledge of the characteristics of all strategic elements and means,” perform “the assessment of their mutual influence.” and study “the importance of each individual element in relation to the actual military actions.” Persson cites this as a characteristic example of the “holistic view of strategy” that “has remained one of the constants of Russian strategic thought” to this day.

The Crimean War (1852-1856) ended or at least interrupted the peaceful decades following the Napoleonic Wars. After Crimea, Europeans followed Prussia’s policy of universal military conscription; Russia took its time, finally introducing it in 1874. The democratization of war was complemented with important technological innovations in weapons, which could be mass-produced for mass armies as industrial economies replaced agrarian ones. Historicism and positivism dominated philosophic thought. As a result, “the study of military science became more systematic and professionalized.” The need to coordinate such technologies as steam railways, telegraphs, and the rifled muskets and cannons that enabled militaries to strike one another at greater distances, coupled with the further need to coordinate technology with the training of mass armies and with building up industrial production, made military planning more complex than ever. A better-educated, professionalized officer class was now indispensable. All of this required substantial increases in funding, which meant that economic prosperity more than ever became a precondition of military survival and victory.

The geopolitical event of the century was German unification under Prussian auspices. This ruined French hegemony on the continent, as seen in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), which closely followed Prussia’s defeat of Austria, its sole possible competitor for dominance among the German states. Prussia’s king was proclaimed emperor of Germany as William I. Excluded from Germany, Austria sought to counterbalance its neighbor by forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dual monarchy. Italy finally realized Machiavelli’s envisioned structure, its several states uniting in one nation-state in 1870. 

In Russia, Czar Alexander II foresaw the need for much larger armies, which is why he emancipated the serfs in 1861, thereby more closely attaching them to what they could now think of as their country. That was also the year that Dmitri Alekseevich Miliutin assumed the duties of War Minister. As Tocqueville had observed some two decades earlier, ‘democracy’ understood as civil-social equality could flourish as readily under a monarchic regime as under a republic. Miliutin affirmed “the unity and integrity of the state” and the “equality of all its members” under the czar. For Russia to thrive, he continued, it must “cast away all outdated, outlived privileges” and “take leave, once and for all, of the rights of one social group over another”; again as per Tocqueville, no aristocracy or oligarchy must stand between the monarch and his people. With respect to educating the officers, Miliutin followed with schools that reward talent, not ‘birth.’ And he instituted mandatory literacy classes in literacy for the common soldiers, who would read books and listen to speeches extolling Russian nationality. 

Largely blocked from expansion in Europe, whose statesmen had advanced more rapidly into modernity, Russians instead sought territory in Central Asia, seizing Turkistan, Chimkent, Tashkent, and Samarkand in the 1860s, adding several khanates in the following decade. Perssons ascribes these moves to a desire for “defensible borders,” not the quest for raw materials or imperial ambition as such. One important War Ministry document identified a Western Europe full of enemies, Prussia-ruled Germany being the most dangerous. Russian strategists worried three possible hostile coalitions: Austria and Germany; Austria, Germany, Turkey, and Sweden; Austria, Turkey, France, Italy, England. Russia, they feared, had no reliable allies.

The head of the Military-Scientific Committee of the Russian army, Nikolai Obruchev, authored Considerations on the Defense of Russia, which Perssons describes as “the basis for all of the war plans up to 1909.” Obruchev understood that regime differences among states may lead to war; no longer would wars be based on “personal quarrels among the European sovereigns,” as they had been when rival monarchist dynasts faced one another, hungering for territory or eager to avenge some perceived slight. Further, “the transition from war to peace had become instantaneous,” given modern technologies. At the time, Russia ruled Poland, and Obruchev wanted that substantial territory as a geopolitical buffer in the west; in his judgment, “the position on the Vistula was the only really good one from which to mount an offensive.” (Having stayed in a hotel overlooking that river on the outskirts of Krakow, a hotel occupied by Nazi officers during the Second World War, I can attest that the view is indeed good, and not only in an esthetic sense. One enjoys what’s called a ‘commanding’ view of things.) Obruchev foresaw that a future European war “would take place on Polish territory,” and he planned preemptive attacks on Austria and Germany from there, if war seemed imminent. This strategy in turn made Russian strategists particularly concerned about rising nationalist and therefore anti-imperialist sentiments among European nations, very much including Poland. The unification of the Germanies was the most alarming example. For its part, Russia might be unified around its army.

Professor of strategy at the General Staff Academy Genrikh Leer, who eventually served as commandant of the Academy in the 1890s, also advocated a tight ‘fit’ between the regime and the armed forces, calling the military system “a reflection of the political system.” Again, Prussia and the new Germany it had organized and now dominated was the example. War, Leer wrote, is “the political bayonet” which “finally determines the most important political issues.” Complementarily, the regime is likely to influence or even determine “the kinds of war” a state will conduct. In this, Leer adopted Montesquieu’s tripartite classification of regimes. He observed that despotic (as distinguished from constitutional) monarchies will likely prosecute offensive wars, whereas democracies (he was thinking of ancient Athens) incline toward defensive wars. Monarchies—centralized states with monarchic regimes animated by the rule of law—can and will conduct both offensive and defensive wars. The overall civil-social democratization of modernity, now common to all three regimes, as Tocqueville had observed, meant that militaries could no longer rely on small professional armies; mass armies in which officers enjoyed the trust of their soldiers beneath them and the civilian authorities above them were not the order of the day, and of course the General Staff Academy was exactly the kind of educational institution designed to improve both the technical competence and the morale of the military.

With these strategic elements in hand, Russia could continue to keep its West European rivals at bay while serving as Europe’s defender against incursions from Asia. Leer pointed to Peter I as the founder of this policy, emphasizing military history as a principal component of his educational curriculum. “Leer is described as the founder of the ‘critical-historical’ school in Russian military thought,” a school which searched “for eternal rules of warfare by choosing appropriate examples from military history.” Among these “laws” were the claim that war is natural, “a part of human life”; that war is obviously destructive but also civilizing (as seen, for example, in Rome’s conquests); and that military strategy has moral, material, and political elements, which must be coordinated in order for a military campaign to succeed. 

Leer found a critic among his colleagues in Mikhail Dragomirov, who denied that military science could really exist. Such a science, he wrote, “is as unthinkable as a science of poetry, art, and music.” Students of military history should look at past battles not as phenomena that can be reduced to a science but rather “just as a painter or a composer studies masterpieces—not to copy them, but to be inspired by them.” Theory is too general for actual use, and the events chronicled by historians can be mined for ‘proofs’ of any theory: which example “to pick is the choice of the one picking.” Chance played too great a part in any battle, let alone any war, to enable a commander to rely on some scientific theory. This notwithstanding, Dragomirov did concur with Leer’s judgment that war is natural, “arguing against Tolstoy’s pacifist views on war”. For Russia, given its geopolitical circumstance, it must seem so. Therefore, Dragomirov advocated a policy whereby common soldiers would be trained only in those skills they need to fight effectively; at the same time, in a nod to civil-social democratization, he insisted that officers treat the men with respect. Consistent with these points, he recommended training in the use of the bayonet, “not because firing is not important but because the bayonet attack require more psychological strength, which is more difficult to train and take longer to acquire.” His geopolitical stance, resembled Leer’s: that Russia should guard against incursions from Asia while disagreeing with Czar Nicholas II’s push into the Far East, which led to the collision with Japan. The 1905 Japanese defeat of Russian forces, “a blow to Russia’s international prestige,” confirmed the prudence of his worries about military overextension. 

World War I saw not only the defeat of Russia’s military but the collapse of the monarchic regime, resulting in a civil war won by the Bolsheviks, who established the Red Army in January 1918 under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. That army supported the regime, “not only on the battlefield” but with “agitation, propaganda, and literacy campaigns”—Trotsky being something of a littérateur, himself. Trotsky went so far as to assert that “our state orientation has long been formed by Marxist methodology and there is no need to form it again in the bosom of them military administration.” Among the important Soviet military strategist in this first decade of the regime was Andrei Snesarev. Snesarev understood the dictatorship of the proletariat as ‘totalitarian’—to take the word coined by Communism’s enemy-twin, Benito Mussolini, who used it to describe Italian Fascism. “Wars in the future, according to Snesarev, would become increasingly large-scale and ever more complex, requiring the entire effort of the state”; this would require the state “to prepare for war in peacetime, involving not only the army and soldier but also the entire population.” A reader of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, Snesarev brought some philosophic heft to ‘totalitarian’ military strategy. 

A non-Marxist, Aleksandr Svechin, was permitted to publish his thoughts on strategy up until 1938, when Stalin decided to have him executed. Svechin regarded political and military defense as “the most prudent for Russia,” writing that “war is not a cure for the internal diseases of the state but the most serious exam on the health of internal politics,” an exam he evidently was not entirely sure that Soviet Russia could pass. Nor could Russia’ geographic vastness protect it, as it had when Napoleon took Moscow, only to be beaten back by ‘General Winter.’ Modern technology “had rendered distances less significant.” “We are not wearing any geographic armor,” he warned; “our chests are open to blows” and “the enemy is not asleep.” This ran afoul of Stalin’s hopes, based upon the notion that a war against the USSR would be “a struggle against the proletarian revolution” first and foremost, a war whose outcome would be “determined by the real balance of international class forces,” not so much “territorial successes.” Those class forces were assumed to favor the great homeland of socialism, and so, instead of strengthening the military, Stalin conduced several purges against Red Army officers, beginning in the late 1920s and continuing into the late Thirties. “Almost the entire military intelligentsia was obliterated” for having failed to regard Communist Party operatives as the supremely sagacious strategists of the coming world revolution.

Hitler, tyrannical heir to Bismarck’s unified Germany, made the Communists pay for their ideologically inspired folly before the Nazis themselves were driven back by forces led by some of the few survivors of the Stalinist depredations. After the Man of Steel’s welcome death, such strategists as Marshall Vasily Danielovich Sokolovsky and Admiral Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov attempted to reconcile Marxism-Leninism with military reality. War with the ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ Western regimes was inevitable. “Therefore,” as Persson nicely summarizes, “the ‘peace-loving’ Soviet Union was forced to take action in order to defend itself.” Such defense required preparation for the inevitable war, a defense that in turn would like require the innocent Communist regime to strike first—offense being the best defense, in accordance with longstanding Russian, not only Soviet, strategy. Nuclear weapons, though obviously devastating, didn’t change this mindset. According to Sokolovksy’s Soviet Military Strategy, published in 1962, Soviet policy aimed at a first strike aiming at the annihilation of both the enemy’s military forces and the ruin of his civil society. This world war between “two opposing social world systems” would inevitably (as per the Marxist-Leninist ‘laws of history’) end in victory for Communism, a victory guaranteed by the coming superiority of socialist economies over capitalist economies. Meanwhile, propaganda must be intensified at home and abroad, unifying Communists worldwide and disunifying the capitalist enemy. As Stalin had intoned, “It is impossible to defeat the foe without learning to hate him with all the forces of one’ soul,” and the post-Stalinist strategists continued his legacy in this regard; this was quite consistent with the regime’s aim at forming the ‘new Soviet man,’ animated by an ethos that comported with the regime of socialist collectivism. As a complement to this, “clearly, by the early 1960s Russia’s war planners were planning to destroy cities and bomb civilians using nuclear weapons in a future war” in an initial phase that would be followed by a ground invasion of Europe resulting in a swift military sweep through Europe that would “reach the English Channel within days.”

Gorshkov’s naval strategy followed from these principles. “Soviet strategy considered submarines armed with nuclear missiles to be the main fighting weapon of the navy and vastly more effective than surface vessels.” It should be remarked that submarine-based missiles, necessarily smaller than most types of land-based missiles, are useful not so much against hardened military targets as they are against ‘soft’ targets: cities and their civilians. The ‘totalitarian’ regime prefers ‘total’ war. Gorshkov regarded his navy as one element supporting an overall military and political strategy. “Gorshkov’s naval principle for Soviet strategy would be ‘specific in form, socialist in content.'” With his fleet’s most important function (as he put it) “being actions against [enemy] land,” the Soviet navy “played a significant role in the local wars conducted by the imperialists,” making it “the state’s political weapon” against them. Gorshkov’s “vision was of an oceangoing fleet with the strategic task of conducting actions against enemy territory,” a vision that “has not always been understood in the West.”

This comprehensive, Marxist-Leninist strategy may be seen in the writings of Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1977 to 1984. Two decades earlier, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev had introduced his policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the Western democratic republics, a supposed “pause from the Marxist-Leninist dogma of the inevitability of a war between the socialist and capitalist camps.” As Persson knows, Lenin had first formulated the notion, a complement to his New Economic Policy on the domestic front. As in more or less all Communist policy, peaceful coexistence, eventually followed by “detente,” wasn’t quite what it seemed. “It did not mean peace.” Economic, political, and ideological warfare would continue, and as for the military substance of it, Ogarkov ascribed war to (of course) “the emergence of private property.” With “the spread of socialism in the world,” the “real and objective conditions to abolish war from social life” might well prevail, were it not for malignant Western imperialism. Warfare, and not only nonviolent warfare, could still be pursued, especially by supporting ‘anti-imperialist’ proxy wars in the impoverished ‘Third World.’ Nuclear war was the kind of war to be avoided, if possible. Ogarkov’s grand strategy consisted, in his words, of an assessment of “the degree of probability of future war and against which enemy; the character of that war and the way it would take the country and its armed forces; the goals and missions that could be assigned to the armed forces and what kind of armed forces are necessary to meet these goals”; and, finally, “the military programs that should be accomplished and the preparations needed by the army and the country for war” along with “the means with which the war should be conducted if it breaks out.” According to this Communist variant of “the Great Russian perspective,” “Russia had never attacked anyone” but “was forced by others to react, in spite of abundant historical evidence to the contrary.”

“It was not until the mid- to late 1980s that Russian strategists drew on the lessons of World War II and seriously challenged the offensive strategy,” recently dressed up as defensive. After all, Soviet Russia had lost about 27 million lives during the war, roughly half of them soldiers. Nuclear war quite obviously would be worse, unless (somehow) the Soviets could contrive a first strike on U.S. missiles that would wipe out America’s second-strike arsenal—highly improbable, inasmuch as Americans had submarine-launched missiles, too. Accordingly, Ogarkov adjusted Soviet doctrine. As late as 1979, he had insisted that nuclear war “was winnable for the entire socialist camp, due to the “just missions of the war, the superior character of these societies, and their political systems,” but after the Reagan Administration jettisoned detente and began to augment its nuclear deterrent, he started writing about ‘no first use,’ suddenly deeming prevention of nuclear war both possible and necessary. 

This avenue closed, Defense Minister Dmitri Federovich Ustinov pushed for more military spending, focusing on ground forces arrayed against NATO and against Afghanistan. His policy contributed to the financial crisis of the central state, which Premier Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to overcome by reducing the number of men under arms, signing a treaty limiting intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and rearranging troops in Europe in a defensive configuration. As is well known, this proved too little, too late; the empire collapsed and the regime changed—sort of. 

Marxism-Leninism eschewed, Russian territory reduced by twenty-five percent, their borders well away from the coveted ports on the Baltic and Black seas, “the civilian and military leadership” nonetheless “maintained a continued consensus on relying on military power as “the basis for Russia’s status in the international arena.” By the 2010s, under the premiership of Vladimir Putin, “the offensive force posture had returned.” The no-first-use policy had been quietly dropped in the mid-1990s. With conventional forces, Putin seized Crimea under the pretext, as he put it, of “correcting historical injustices.” There were many more to correct: Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov, Odessa, Kherson, and others were all the “historical territories” of Russia, deserving of retrieval by force. Russian policymakers gave up their line about American imperialism but substituted “NATO eastern expansion” and the “unipolar world” dominated by the United States. Expansion threatened regime change in Russia, a thought not to be countenanced. Foreign Minister Evgenii Primakov averred that “the use of force is the most efficient problem-solver if applied decisively and massively,” with negotiations useful only “as a cover for military action.” Although written in 2000, his doctrine anticipated the invasion of Ukraine, two decades later. 

To get to that, however, military reform was necessary, as the campaign to wrest South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, though successful, exposed an unimpressive land invasion force. Russia undertook a transformation “from a conventional mobilization army to a permanently combat-ready force,” a transformation involving improvements to the command-and-control system, force structure, military education, and an arms buildup. But while Andrei Kokoshin, who has served in numerous high-level position in the Russian government and academia, emphasized the importance of “the assessment of oneself and of the most likely enemy” as the foundation of strategy, such assessments evidently had not been properly undertaken by February 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine, citing itself as “the legal successor of the Soviet Union” and the protector of “historical truth.” “Russia is perceived as being under attack from a hostile West, and the Russian Armed Forces are tasked with defending Russia’s historical and spiritual traditions”—the latter embodied by the Russian Orthodox Church, still firmly under control of the central state, as it has been for a very long time. Under such circumstances and with such authority, Putin declared in 2021, Ukraine had no right to independence from its rightful mother country, especially as it was being used as the thin end of the Westernizing wedge, “alien to the Russian people” and coated with immoralist poisons, including “violence, egotism, permissiveness, immorality, and nonpatriotism,” and “objective threat to Russia’s national interests,” bound up as they are with the ideal of “Holy Russia,” with its capital of Moscow as “the Third Rome.” Defending this mythologized version of Russian history forms part of Russia’s official military doctrine. Thus does Russia “prepar[e] itself for a long-term conflict with the West, whose “destructive influence” on innocent Russian youths must be stopped.

What went wrong for the Russians in Ukraine? They sent in far too few troops—only 200,000 against a country of more than forty million. This assumed that the Ukrainians believed Russian claims that they were really Russian, that they would welcome the invading troops as liberators. But there was no “mass surrender” and on their own side, the Russian soldiers weren’t adequately informed about the purpose of the war or given any strong motive to fight it. Whatever the outcome, it evidently will have come at a brutally high cost for Russia.

Persson concludes his study by identifying several constant themes in Russian military strategy. Because the state has been so thoroughly militarized for so many centuries, whatever regime rules it features military force as an integral part of the whole. As a consequence, military strategy shapes the regime fundamentally, even as the regime guides the strategy according to its own principles; Western analysts often overlook “the primacy of policy over strategy” in Russia. Those regimes have never taken natural rights as their foundation, looking instead to history, although ‘history’ might range from Russian Orthodox providentialism to Marxist-Leninist dialectic. Whatever the history, it typically casts the West—Roman Catholicism, democratic republicanism, capitalism—as the enemy of Russia. Given the geographic insecurity of its borders, the enemy must be attacked, not merely defended against; territorial expansion makes it less likely that Russia’s center will be overrun. This leads to fits of overexpansion, followed by humiliating retrenchment. The difficulties in maintaining Russian strategic policies derives from its centralization. The policies are designed to strengthen the centralized state, which attempts to rule some 150 ethnic minorities over a vast territory, but over-centralization weakens the state. For example, the various sorts of Russian monarchs, whether czars, commissars, or presidents, have inclined to rule by fear, and to kill or fire the most prominent military thinkers. This leads to “institutional loss of memory” and, more profoundly, a moral atmosphere of distrust in regimes of despotism. 

Max Boot counts 180 landings U.S. Marine landings between 1800 and 1934, with “the army and navy add[ing] a few small-scale engagements of their own.” In victory or defeat, “most of these campaigns were fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers pursuing limited objectives with limited means,” sometimes punitive, sometimes protective, sometimes pacifying, sometimes profiteering, and at times a combination of two or more of these objectives. In America’s first century, in its overseas conflicts the United States often worked as “a junior constable” for Britain, “the world’s policeman,” defending “freedom of the seas and open markets in China, Japan, and elsewhere,” occasionally targeting the slave trade. In the next half-century, up to the Second World War, America began to rival Britain for its dominance of the seas, remaining active in Asia but also “establish[ing] itself as a hegemon” in Latin America—as effectively announced by President Theodore Roosevelt, when he issued his “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting a right to foreclose any European intervention in the New World if a country proved delinquent in its debt payments to Old World governments or banks. America made that policy credible in the Spanish-American War, in which it acquired Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, the Philippines, and the Virgin Islands and turned Cuba into an American protectorate. This policy included regime change in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during the Wilson Administration. During and after the Second World War, America’s status as the world’s preeminent military power gave it responsibilities throughout the world, typically in opposition to the predominant tyrannies of the time—first, the Axis Powers, then the several Communist regimes, including the members of the Warsaw Pact. The World War was of course no small one, the Cold War no short one, but most of the wars during that time were short and, except for the war in Vietnam, not prolonged.

The first hundred years after the Constitution was ratified saw small overseas wars aimed, typically, at protecting the commercial interests of the new commercial republic. That is, these wars derived primarily from the character of the regime. Boot begins with the Barbary Wars, fought between 1801 and 1805, then again in 1815. The enemies were Morocco, ruled by the Alawite Dynasty, Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis, which were largely self-governing entities within the Ottoman Empire. These governments preferred not to tax their merchants, seeking revenues by capturing ships sailing in the Mediterranean, taking the cargo and selling the captives into slavery or ransoming them. Initially, the United States preferred to bribe the Barbary states into leaving its ships alone (John Adams calculated that this was cheaper than building a navy, inasmuch as “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever”). Congress inclined to agree with Adams, but “this policy of appeasement, far from sating the demands of the North African rulers, only whetted their appetite for more.” Thomas Jefferson took the bellicose view, asserting “that nothing will stop the eternal increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical and more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing the insolencies.” Although Congress refused to declare war, it did authorize the president to “use all necessary force to protect American shipping overseas.” 

Army officer and Consul General to Tunis William Eaton had come to the same conclusion. The pasha had come to power by murdering his predecessor, his older brother; Eaton met with a younger brother of the despot, planning a coup d’état. This made Eaton unwelcome to the Tunisian government, but upon his return to Washington the Jefferson Administration backed his strategy—the “first of many times that an American president would plot to overthrow a foreign government.” As Jefferson explained to his Secretary of State, James Madison, “although it does not accord with the general sentiments of views of the United States to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries, it cannot be unfair, in the prosecution of a just war, or the accomplishment of a reasonable peace, to turn to their advantage, the enmity and pretensions of others against a common foe.”

Eaton set up a joint base of operations in Egypt, from which he led an expeditionary force of about 600. They took the city of Derna, only to learn that Jefferson’s special envoy, Tobias Lear, had negotiated a peace treaty with the regnant pasha, who had been alarmed at American battlefield success. “Eaton boiled over with anger at what he viewed as a sellout of his men and America’s allies,” but could do nothing. 

Hostilities resumed in 1815, as Algiers sided with Britain in the War of 1812. This time, Commodore Stephen Decatur won favorable terms from the Barbary states after several successful naval skirmishes. “The naval operations had established an important principle—freedom of the seas—and helped end for all time the threat to commercial shipping from the [Barbary] corsairs,” although the decisive act occurred when France finally took control of Algiers, adding it to its empire in 1830. “Tripoli would not become a threat to international order again until the 1970s,” when it was ruled by the notorious and now late Muammar Gadhafi.

In subsequent decades, “even if the U.S. eschewed overseas colonialism” during the Europeans’ ‘scramble for empire,’ “that hardly means the country was isolationist, as the popular myth has it”; “where commercial interests advanced, armed forces were seldom far behind,” as “the flag usually follows trade, not the other way around.” Indeed, “throughout the nineteenth century, American influence kept expanding abroad, especially in the Pacific and Caribbean.” While the army fought the Indians in North America, the navy and the very small Marine Corps defended the commercial shipping. The composition of the navy was sharply divided between the officers, culled from the gentry class—many of them “imperious, hot-blooded, quick to take offense, and above all brave, sometimes suicidally so”—and the enlisted men—for the most part uneducated and impoverished, “the dregs of the waterfront,” usually foreign-born and non-citizens, fighting alongside black freemen. The enlisted men “would not be missed overmuch if a few died in action.” The Marines acted as guards to protect the aristocrats on the upper deck from an incursion from “the lower deck rabble.” 

Their missions included chasing pirates in the Caribbean in the 1820s and off Sumatra in the early 1830s. Under orders from the Jackson Administration, the navy also bombarded Argentinian forces on the Falkland Islands, where American seal-hunting vessels had been seized. After Congress outlawed slave importation in 1807, the navy played a relatively minor role in assisting the British Royal Navy in its interception of slavers who operated out of west Africa, although the Southerners who often ran the Department of the Navy kept such activities to a minimum. The navy also gave minor assistance to Britain in its successful opening of Chinese ports to trade. “No matter how tiny, the navy had little trouble overawing various pirates and tribesmen with its vastly superior technology and training.” As a result, U. S. exports multiplied more than sixteen-fold between 1789 and 1860. This “empire of the seas,” as Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward called it, was not the overseas empire of Britain, and so could be maintained at vastly smaller cost.

Americans rolled back that empire after the Civil War, preferring to have their manufactures and farm produce shipped under foreign flags. The second half of the century saw a small and futile action intended to open Korea to American trade and nearly twenty expeditions in Central and South America, usually as a response to a revolution that threatened U.S. diplomats and merchants. The year 1885 saw a more serious conflict, when President Cleveland sent troops to Panama in order to defend the Panama Railroad from a local strongman. In general, by the 1880s, the U.S. navy was “a joke” compared to the Europeans, ranking twelfth in the world in number of ships—behind the likes of Turkey (the ‘Sick Man of Europe’) and Sweden. But in 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, “a work that would define the age.” Mahan urged his fellow countrymen to build a real navy, one that could match the European powers. Theodore Roosevelt built his career in national politics on that, and he had no shortage of allies in Congress. “The result was the first major peacetime arms buildup in the nation’s history, a buildup that gave America a navy capable of sinking the Spanish fleet in 1898.” And, given the steam-powered ships’ need for fuel, America needed to acquire not an overseas empire but secure overseas coaling stations. Many attempts to purchase land for that purpose failed, but the mid-1890s Hawaii had been taken, after American residents overthrew the native ruler, and by 1899 the United States had secured a portion of Samoa in an agreement reached with Britain and Germany. 

Boot marks America’s ascendency to “great power” status by its response to the 1900 Boxer Uprising in China. The so-called Boxers (called that in recognition of their knowledge of martial arts), more properly called the I-ho ch’üan or “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” detested the incursions of modernizing Western influences, which included Christian missionaries. They made the mistake of threatening foreign embassies, attracting the military attention of Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan. For their part, the invading forces behaved badly, looting Beijing extensively and, in some cases raping and murdering Chinese women. The Germans were especially ruthless, having been ordered by Kaiser Wilhelm II to act “just as the Huns a thousand years ago” had done. By 1912, the monarchic regime collapsed and China became a republic. America had had cooperated in an important overseas land operation with other major powers for the first time. 

Simultaneously, America fought against guerrillas in the Philippines, where the people were no more delighted with American rule than they had been under the rule of Spain. Americans didn’t actually want to rule the country, preferring to establish a naval base at Manila as a counterpart to the British base at Hong Kong. A base at Manila would deter German and Japanese ambitions there. This policy was opposed by a distinguished group of American anti-imperialists which included former president Cleveland, frequent presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor union leader Samuel Gompers, the philosopher William James, the social worker Jane Addams, and Mark Twain. In the war itself, the disorganized and poorly-armed Filipinos were no match for American troops, but disease and heat exhaustion often overmatched the Americans. If Napoleon’s army had foundered against Russia’s ‘General Winter,’ Americans faced ‘General Tropics.’ Nonetheless, Americans rallied behind the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket and the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the Insular Cases, holding that the United States need not grant citizenship to conquered peoples reassured those who feared economic competition from low-wage workers. Colonial governor William Howard Taft and General Arthur McArthur oversaw the construction of schools, vaccination programs, sanitation, and worked to stand Filipinos up for eventual self-government by establishing courts with Filipino judges, and introducing municipal elections. Along with these policies of “attraction,” McArthur did not neglect to pursue military action, called “chastisement,” against the insurgents, some of them harsh—notably, the concentration camps in southern Luzon, where 11,000 Filipinos died of disease and malnutrition. By July 1902, President Roosevelt could declare victory, although the Muslim Moros on the islands of Mindanao and Jolo held out and indeed continue to menace foreigners and non-Muslim Filipinos alike, to this day. In 1907, Filipinos established the first national legislature in Asia; in 1935, the Philippines achieved full control of its domestic policies, and in 1946 it was granted full independence. “Among the institutions bequeathed to the Filipinos by the Americans were public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state. Unlike the Dutch in the East Indies, the British in Malaya, or the French in Indochina, the Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation; Congress was so concerned about protecting the Filipinos that it barred large landholdings by American individuals or corporations.” Pacification at the turn of the century had come at the expense of more than 4,200 Americans and 16,000 Filipinos killed, along with 200,000 civilian dead, “victims of disease and famine and the cruelties of both sides.” But the policy of attraction and chastisement worked, the Philippines eventually achieved independence, and America retained its naval base at Manila Bay. One key element of strategy, forgotten by the time America intervened in the war against the Vietnamese Communists, was the practice of placing army garrisons in the countryside, where they could live among the people, reduce civilian assistance to the guerrillas, and become fully familiar with the lay of the land. Boot observes that “the army’s success may be ascribed in some degree to the invaluable experience its top commanders had gained in fighting Indians” in the American West—the “finest irregular warriors in the world.” Twenty-six of the thirty American generals who sought in the Philippines from 1898 to 1902 had previous fought in the Indian Wars. And finally, the U. S. Navy blockaded the Philippines, preventing the insurgents from receiving foreign assistance and from moving men and supplies easily along the extensive coastline. And, it might be added, there was no equivalent of North Vietnam, backed by the equivalent of the Soviet Union.

In the years between the Spanish-American War and World War One, the United States established a true Pax Americana in the New World. “No longer would U.S. sailors and marines land for a few days at a tie to quell a riot” that threatened American lives and property; “now they would stay longer to manage the internal politics of nations.” In Cuba, the American military occupation was brief, with the stipulation that Americans would enjoy long-term leases on naval bases and cede to Americans the right “to intervene at any time to protect life, liberty, and property.” “Havana went along because it had no choice” in becoming an American protectorate. In Panama, the United States formally recognized the Republic of Panama, which regime it had helped Panamanian revolutionaries to install; in return, the new regime granted America sovereignty over the Panama Canal, then under construction, and lands surrounding it. The Canal Zone was potentially vulnerable to foreign attack, but only potentially, since “by 1906 the U.S. Navy was big enough to ensure that no other power would contest control of its own backyard”—second only to Britain, which by now was itself a commercial republic moving into alignment with America against Wilhelmine Germany. Such power was indeed necessary, as German naval officers, commanding a fleet as big as America’s had war plans for “seizing either Puerto Rico or Cuba as a staging area for an attack on the East Coast of the United States.” And of course, during the world war German submarines attacked American shipping in the Atlantic and schemed to ally with Mexico. When the Panamanian tyrant José Santos Zelaya allied with Germany and Japan, hoping to get support for the construction of a rival Central American canal, and schemed to bring the five Central American republics under his rule (he succeeded in overthrowing the government of Honduras), the United States pressured him out of the country in 1909, having found a friendlier replacement. 

During and after the First World War, Haiti became a problem for Washington. Between 1843 and 1915, the island had seen 102 civil wars, coups d’état, and other revolts. Haiti was ruled by a small, educated minority of mulattos; Catholic and French-speaking, “they regarded themselves as a race apart from, and superior to, the Creole-speaking, voodoo-practicing, darker-skinned Haitian masses.” If this ruling class split, one side would select a presidential candidate, give him a payroll supplied by resident German merchants (who controlled 80% of foreign trade), who would then watch as their man recruited soldiers of fortune and bandits, who would march to the capital and seize control, driving the sitting president into exile. Everyone profited: the merchants would be repaid, with interest; the soldiers would be paid for their trouble, in part with the loot they seized on the way to Port-au-Prince; the exiled president would “tak[e] a portion of the treasury with him,” easing the indignity of his ouster. That is, coups served more or less the same function as elections do in less tumultuous regimes. None of this worried Americans.

What made the revolution of July 1915 different was the sitting president’s refusal to leave quietly, as per custom, the subsequent bloodletting (200 members of the mulatto elite were arrested, most of them murdered by the police chief), and the concern that Germany might intervene and establish a naval base from which they could prosecute their war aims and interfere with ship traffic to and from the Panama Canal. The Wilson Administration’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, wrote that the Marines were ordered to seize control of the island “to terminate the appalling conditions of anarchy, savagery, and oppression which had been prevalent in Haiti for decades” and “to forestall any attempt by a foreign power to obtain a foothold on the territory of an American nation.” The policy had nothing to do with ‘Dollar Diplomacy,’ as Leftist writers often allege, because the minor U.S. business interests in Haiti were never threatened. No general rebellion followed the American occupation because American rule was better for Haitians than mulatto rule had been. Boot notes that Napoleon had failed in his attempt to quell the Haitian revolt of 1802 because he “had been trying to reimpose slavery and had fought a campaign of extermination, whereas, by Haitian standards at least, U.S. tactics were restrained and U.S. rule quite mild” and also because the French had not understood how to counter yellow fever, which “decimated” their troops. The Marines withdrew nine years later, with an elected government in place; the Roosevelt Administration ended U.S. political control ten years after that. The occupation had succeeded: it prevented German military occupation, and U.S. administrators oversaw the construction of 1,000 miles of roads, 210 major bridges, nine major airfields, 82 miles of irrigation canals, a substantial telephone network and a network of medical care. Americans did not succeed in “plant[ing] constitutional government” there, finding that “it would not take root.” FDR nonetheless listened to hand-wringing complaints about American ‘imperialism” and began his “Good Neighbor” policy of refusing to intervene, which meant that Haiti was misruled by tyrants for the next thirty years. “The only thing more unsavory than U.S. intervention, it turned out, was U.S. nonintervention.” In 1994, the Clinton Administration ended the FDR policy by sending in the Marines to reinstall a duly elected Haitian president who had been ousted by a coup that that had imposed a tyranny. Since then, Haiti has seen constitutional government.

Also during the First World War, the Wilson Administration undertook an invasion of Mexico. The wealthy Francisco Madero had organized revolutionary forces against the tyrant Porfirio Diaz in 1910; a Durango bandit, whose nom de guerre was Pancho Villa, was recruited to lead his forces. Three years later, Madero was in turn overthrown, replaced by General Victoriano Huerta; U.S. President William Howard Taft backed Huerta but his successor, Woodrow Wilson, did not, deeming it “a government of butchers.” Huerta fled to Spain in 1914. Boot identifies three major forces who rebelled against Huerta: “dispossessed peasants in southern Mexico led by Emiliano Zapata”; middle- and upper-class “progressives,” moderates who wanted to end oligarchic rule and to establish a constitutional republic; and Villa’s forces in northern Mexico, which consisted of “poor farmers, miners, cowboys, and Indians” who wanted land reform. Pancho allied with a “new leader of the revolution, Venustiano Carranza, governor of a northern state, Coahuila and founder of the Constitutionalist Party. Villa defeated the Huerta forces in the state of Chihuahua and ran it himself, expropriating big landowners and giving the proceeds to his followers. He left middle-class property owners unmolested. After Huerta departed, “the revolutionaries fell out among themselves setting the stage for the greatest bloodletting of the entire civil war, with Zapata and Villa allying against Carranza. Villa’s side was crushed. During the struggle, Wilson had ordered an American military intervention on the Constitutionalist side, occupying Veracruz. Wilson, who wanted stability in the country, embargoed arms shipments to the anti-Carrancista forces and “extended de facto recognition to the Carranza government” in October 1915. In response, Villa ordered a series of cross-border raids, most of them in Texas. This provoked Wilson to launch the Punitive Expedition in northern Mexico, with strict orders to the soldiers to refrain from looting; officers paid Mexicans for provisions, much to the amazement of the Mexicans. The Americans failed to capture Villa, succeeding only in temporarily scattering his forces. Eventually, it was the Constitutionalist forces that defeated him, in 1920; he was assassinated by government operatives in 1923. In ten years of civil war, some one million Mexicans had died. General John Pershing’s expeditionary force had gain military experience that proved valuable when the United States fought in the First World War, but while the Veracruz seizure had helped the Constitutionalists, the later Punitive Expedition had accomplished nothing lasting.

In the aftermath of the Great War, Wilson joined with allies Britain and France to intervene against the newly formed Soviet Union. Wilson had been buoyed by reports of the March 1917 Russian Revolution against the czarist regime (Russia has “always been in fact democratic at heart,” he exulted, without evidence), then dismayed by the Bolshevik Revolution of November. The Allies were incensed with the separate peace the Bolsheviks signed with Germany, ceding the Baltics, Ukraine, and southern Russia to Germany, enabling the enemy to “transfer a million soldiers to throw against their exhausted amies on the Western Front.” This prompted the British to intervene, sending a small group of Royal Marines to the port city of Murmansk. Wilson hesitated to comply with the British request for reinforcements but finally agreed in order to protect the Czechoslovak Legion, some 70,000 defectors from Austria-Hungary who had volunteered to fight with the Allies when the czarist regime was still in power. Now that the Soviets had taken Russia out of the war, the legionnaires intended to get over to the Western Front; they couldn’t use any of the blockaded western ports, so they began to march across Siberia to Vladivostok on the Pacific, from which port they would sail for France. The Bolsheviks initially approved this mission but, fearing an alliance between the legionnaires and the pro-czarist elements in the Russian army, demanded that they disarm. When the Czechs refused to do so, fighting broke out and “the Allies, including the U.S., felt a moral responsibility to safeguard the legion.” 

The American forces were led by Major General William S. Graves, who “interpreted his vague orders to mean that his men should remain neutral in the Russian Civil War” and “refused to engage in an offensive against the Bolsheviks, or event to confiscate weapons from suspected Communists.” Disgusted by atrocities committed by the anti-Communist “Whites,” he evidently knew nothing of worse atrocities committed by the “Reds.” Meanwhile, another segment of the U.S. Army did fight the Communists, although its efforts were soon curtailed by the characteristically brutal Russian winter. At the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, President Wilson and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George agreed to withdraw the troops, as “they did not think foreigners could suppress a revolution, even though Britain and American had successfully suppressed revolutions from India to the Philippines.” They assumed, without much warrant, that the Bolsheviks must be enjoying the support of the Russian people. “It did not occur to them that the Communists’ success might be due, as it largely was, to purely military factors—the Reds had better and more unified leadership, more materiel and men, and greater willingness to brutalize the population into acquiescence than the Whites did,” and that, moreover, “although many of the White leaders were hardly democrats, the Reds were imposing upon the Russian people a regime that would make Ivan the Terrible’s look almost benign by comparison.” Despite Winston Churchill’s vehement protestations to the contrary, Lloyd George imagined that “Bolsheviks would not wish to maintain an army, as their creed was fundamentally anti-militarist.” In the United States, the Senate nearly passed a resolution to recall the troops; the Wilson Administration finally gave in, in the early weeks of 1920. Boot estimates that with two or three divisions (i.e., 24,000 to 36,000 troops), the Allies would have tipped the scales against the Bolsheviks, likely saving the millions of lives lost to Communist in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century.

A few years later, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations fought a small war closer to home. Nicaragua was still occupied by a 100-man contingent of Marines. In 1924, a coalition government of Liberal and Conservative party members was elected, only to be overthrown by the Conservative Emiliano Chamorro. The United States didn’t recognize the new regime, and civil war broke out in May 1926. Mexico backed the rebels, while the United States successfully supported the election of Adolfo Diaz, that November. As a U.S.-brokered peace treaty between the new government and the Liberal Party rebels was not accepted by one Liberal commander: Augusto Sandinò, an anti-American nationalist backed by Mexico and the Soviet Union. Sandinò demanded a new election; Washington demurred. Although he accepted Communist support, he was not himself a Communist; he knew what he wanted—American withdrawal from Nicaragua and from Latin America generally—but “he lacked a well-thought-out political agenda” beyond that. The war ended when newly-elected President Roosevelt withdrew American troops in 1933; Sandinò was arrested and executed and the Sandinistas crushed in the following year. Although Communists and their dupes ever after charged the Roosevelt Administration with complicity in these actions, Boot reports that “the evidence does not support this contention.” The coup organized by a former war minister, Anastasio Somoza, who established a tyranny, found his opportunity only after the Marines left. “Dictatorship was indigenous; democracy was a foreign transplant that did not take, in part because America would not stick around long enough to cultivate it.”

Prior to the Second World War, the Marines issued The Small Wars Manual, summarizing lessons learned in such conflicts. The Manual defined the American understanding of small wars as “operations undertaken under executive authority”—that it, without a declaration of war by Congress [1]—wherein “military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.” The army is better adapted to fighting big wars, the Marines for small wars. Big wars aim at “the defeat and destruction of the hostile forces,” but American military forces in small wars aim “to establish and maintain law and order by supporting or replacing the civil government in countries or areas in which the interests of the United States have been placed in jeopardy.” For that reason, “hatred of the enemy,” encouraged during the Great War and soon to be revived during World War II, should be eschewed; “sympathy and kindness should be the keynote to our relationship with the mass of the population,” since the enemy is a much smaller group: either revolutionary insurgents or a bad regime. When undertaking such a war, the military must understand that “in small wars no defined battle front exists and the theater of operations may be the whole length and breadth of the land,” in which soldiers will face enemies who “will suddenly become innocent peasant workers when it suits their fancy and convenience.” They will know the countryside better than Americans do. “It will be difficult and hazardous to wage war successfully under such circumstances”; consequently, the war may be long and the outcome unclear. Perhaps in recognition of these difficulties, in the 1950s President Eisenhower downplayed the use of small wars in countering Communist military threats, preferring to follow a policy of escalation, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons, “an area,” Boot remarks, “in which the U.S. then had a preponderance of power.”

But this policy of escalation simply did not fit all military circumstances, as American strategists failed to see when they planned the war in Vietnam. From 1959 to 1963, American forces helped to defend non-Communist South Vietnam from the Communist regime in the north. These forces were called “advisers,” a term left over from American policy in the aftermath of previous small wars, when the Marines trained and reinforced police forces, emphasizing “internal defense.” “In Vietnam, by contrast, U.S. advisers organized a miniature version of their own armed forces complete with heavy armor, artillery, air force, navy, marines, rangers” in preparation for an invasion from the north, as had been seen in Korea. But instead of fighting such a conventional war, the North Vietnamese supported a guerrilla war. “American advisers did not prepare the South Vietnamese soldiers for this challenge.” Moreover, unlike Korea, the South Vietnamese military was not under the command of American officers. And again unlike Korea, the Johnson Administration refused to attack targets in North Vietnam, notably the capital city of Hanoi, the major harbor of Haiphong, supply routes from China, and the Red River dikes; “U.S. warplanes in the Korean War had destroyed North Korea’s dike system, with devastating results.” The Communists “rightly” regarded the frequent pauses in the limited bombing campaign as “a sign of the Johnson administration’s weakness and irresolution.” Johnson wanted no escalation of the war because he feared Chinese intervention (again, as in Korea), preferring to invest in his domestic ‘War on Poverty.’ And so, the problem was that Americans stuck themselves in between a big-war strategy and a small-war strategy. “Thus the really hard, vital work of keeping the Vietcong out of the South’s population centers was left for the most part to the ill-equipped, ill-trained South Vietnamese militia, who did not even have access to modern rifles.”

No better strategy could have been conceived to hand the advantage to the enemy. Rather than meet American military strength, North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap took up Chairman Mao’s strategy of a “people’s war”; propagandize the peasants in order to establish “a protective belt of sympathizers willing to supply food, recruits, and information”; fight “a protracted guerrilla struggle” aiming in part to kill not just the foreigners but as many pro-American, anti-Communist Vietnamese as possible; and finally, having weakened the enemy, form conventional armies “that, in conjunction with a general popular uprising, will finish off the enemy” and change the regime into a ‘people’s republic.’ The Vietcong—the South Vietnamese Communist guerrillas—needed only minimal supplies from the North, simply taking supplies and manpower from the peasants, whether the peasants were collaborators or not. Although North Vietnamese troops were infiltrating South Vietnam in the mid-1960s, they did not become the preponderant force there until 1968, and even then, they engaged in guerrilla-style “hit-and-run tactics.” 

One Marine commander, Major General Victor H. Krulak, advocated a strategy based on the small-war lessons he had learned from his commanding officers as a young Marine in the 1930s. What he called a “spreading inkblot” strategy would have “expand[ed] American control slowly from the seacoast by pacifying one hamlet after another, as the U.S. had done in the Philippines six decades earlier.” Since eighty percent of South Vietnamese lived in ten percent of the country, the aim would have been to prevent the Vietcong from infiltrating the population centers by providing security for the villagers. There was no point in attempting to search for enemy forces in the jungles, where they could hide successfully, “but if the U.S. could cut them off from the civilian population, they would wither away,” separated from their sources of supply and recruitment. Krulak’s recommendation did not prevail, and while “U.S. soldiers never lost a battle…neither did they manage to pin down enough of the enemy so that a victory meant something.” They were reacting to enemy attacks, attacks launched when the enemy chose to attack. And the American soldiers had no training in counterinsurgency; once ‘in country,’ they learned soon enough, but in the conscript army of that time they were quickly rotated out and replaced by new and inexperienced men. Meanwhile, the famous “hearts and minds” campaign by a variety of nonmilitary American agencies lacked a serious military component. The military side of American operations—called “search-and-destroy”—and the civilian side—called “pacification”—were disjunct. The main exception to this policy was the Combined Action Program, in which Marine rifle squads were paired with South Vietnam Popular Forces militia (“about 30 men from the local community”) who successfully took and held villages, with much lower casualties than the search-and-destroy missions. But at its peak, fewer than 2,500 Marines participated in the program.

In terms of politics, General William Westmoreland did not understand the character of the Communist regime. Both the Soviet Union and Communist China had proved themselves capable of absorbing enormous losses, both in war and in peacetime ‘purges.’ Similarly, “North Vietnam was ruled by a dictatorship impervious to the pressure of popular opinion,” its leaders “tolerat[ing] staggering causalities with equanimity”: 1.1. million dead, 300,000 missing from a population of 20 million. That is, the Vietnamese civil war saw many more times the number of casualties than the Union did in the American civil war. And in Vietnam, American casualties of 58,000—comparable, Boot observes, to the annual number of traffic deaths, at that time—turned Americans against the war. By 1968, North Vietnam’s New Year offensive, violating a truce arranged for the holiday, resulted in 50,000 Communist dead against 2,000 Americans, was reported as a serious American setback in the American news media. President Johnson quickly announced that he would not seek re-election.

At this, the Army generals finally changed toward a pacification strategy, Operation Phoenix, which was highly effective. On the civilian side, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu ordained land reform, giving farmers legal title to the fields they worked—a powerful incentive against Communist propaganda and a reason to defend local territories against would-be expropriators. After one last failed offensive in March 1972, the Communists came to the bargaining table with the Nixon administration. After the agreement, South Vietnam couldn’t defend itself any more than West Germany could have done after the Second World War or South Korea could have done after that war. In the latter two cases, however, American troops stayed in place. In 1975, Congress cut aid to South Vietnam. The North took that as a signal to strike, this time successfully. 

The lessons American politicians learned from the Vietnam War were, first, to replace conscripts with professional soldiers and, second, to prefer “sanitized, high-tech warfare” to the commitment of ground troops. This tends to miss the point: while Americans of course want no casualties of any kind, their main concern is victory—that soldiers “not die ‘in vain.'” The later interventions in Lebanon and Somalia confirm this. As to regime change, “the American track record of imposing liberal, democratic regimes by force is mixed”: successful in the Philippines, Japan, Germany, and Italy, not so in Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, or (later) Afghanistan. Boot does not overlook the costs of non-intervention and short-term intervention, notably in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He hopes that the United Nations might sanction international efforts to restore governance in failed states—typically, a wan hope. This notwithstanding, “American should not be afraid to fight ‘the savage wars of peace’ if necessary to enlarge the ’empire of liberty.’ It has done it before.”

Note

1. “Declarations of war—voted against Britain in 1812, Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, the Central Powers in 1917, the Axis in 1941—were the exception, not the norm” throughout American history.

The translator defies theosis as “personal communication with God ‘face to face.'” Such communication can only come with godliness, perfection, righteousness, since no merely human being can look upon the Lord and live. A human being can attain such spiritual elevation through membership in the Christian Church, the New Israel, the spiritual Israel, a Church in which “all humanity” can and should find welcome. “The Orthodox Church has retained this original message of Christ unchanged.” Against the sola Scriptura claim of Protestantism, the Orthodox Church maintains that “Christ’s teachings could not be arrived at from the Holy Bible alone; we would simply project our modern concepts onto the early Church” if we struggled to understand Scripture without the interpretive guidance of the early Fathers of the Church as faithfully transmitted from those centuries to our own. “Theosis stems from this tradition in which the early Church, Traditional Christianity, and Orthodoxy are identical.” The early Church Synods, notably “the seven Oecumenical Synods, the Synod of S. Photios of 867 and the Palamite Synods of the fourteenth century,” expressed doctrines already “fully present within the Church from the day of Pentecost” and, crucially, determined which books now recognized by Christians as the New Testament. Thus, “the dual task of Orthodox Theology is to define and also to protect from human distortion the teachings of Jesus Christ,” teaching not merely ‘academic,’ a matter of intellectual apprehension, but of whole-souled “living faith,” a way of life. The translator denies that Western Christianity fully believes and practices original Christianity because “over one thousand years separate it from this tradition”—the centuries since the Great Schism.

Theosis is central to Orthodox Christian doctrine; it is the telos, the purpose, of human life. “Theosis is the Pearl of Great Price alluded to by Christ” and it “can become a present reality for those who are willing to tread the path, and so it is not exclusively an after-death experience.” The Apostle Paul expresses this experience in saying “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” victory over death.

In his book, Theosis, George Kapsanis, Archimandrite of the Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorious at Mount Athos, provides a succinct explanation of this overarching purpose that God has set down for His human creatures. Archon means ruler; mandra means enclosure: an archimandrite rules a large monastery or group of monasteries; the human ruler thus writes of the ruling purpose of human life. Archimandrite George lists seven purposes in writing his book: to identify “the highest and ultimate purpose of our life; that for which we were created”; to uphold is conviction that “the only truly Orthodox form of pastoral guidance is that which is intended to lead to Theosis,” to “quench the depth of the psyche’s thirst for the Absolute, the Triune God” [1]; to prompt readers to “overflow with gratitude toward our Maker and Creator for His great gift to us, Theosis by Grace”; to have us “realize the irreplaceability of our Holy Church as the only community of Theosis on earth”; to reveal “the magnificence and truth of our Orthodox Faith…as the only faith that teaches and provides Theosis to its members”; and finally, to console our psyches, “for regardless of the degree to which they have been poisoned and darkened by sin, they yearn for the light of Christ’s face.”

Theosis is the purpose for which we were “placed on earth.” In the words of St Gregory the Theologian, a human being is an animal “in the process of Theosis.” Man is the “only one which can become a god” because he is the only animal created “in His image.” God’s image means “the gifts which God gave only to man in order to complete him as an icon of God,” namely, nous, conscience, and “individual sovereignty” (“freedom, creativity, eros, and the yearning for the absolute and for God”); self-awareness—in sum “everything that makes man a person.” The Archimandrite defines nous as “man’s highest faculty,” both the “eye” and the “energy” of the psyche, both what enables the psyche to perceive God’s teachings and commands (it is “cognitive, visionary, and intuitive,” capable of “perceiv[ing] God and the spiritual principles that underlie creation”) and to act in obedience to them. Man’s “fall,” resulting from his first sinful act, fragmented his psyche, causing the nous to “identify itself with the mind, the imagination, the senses, or even the body,” preventing man from achieving “a personal union with his Creator.” Philosophies and “psychological systems” thus fail to “correspond to man’s great yearning for something very great and true in his life.” 

What is this psyche, which yearns for God while no longer knowing how to reach him? The Archimandrite calls it “the most important and least understood of all Biblical words.” Orthodox Christians define it as “a pure unalloyed essence which animates the body and gives it life; it is our immaterial nature, created yet eternal, comprising our cognitive, conative, and affective aspects, including both the conscious and the unconscious.” This implies that “psychic health precedes salvation”; theosis requires continual and victorious spiritual warfare, not mere conversion and baptism. Psyche encompasses “the meanings of five English words: ‘soul,’ ‘life,’ ‘breath,’ ‘psyche’ (“as in modern psychology”), and ‘mind.'” In the West, soul, life, and breath have become estranged from psyche and mind, as in such locutions as the ‘mind/body problem’ in philosophy. “This dislocation is indicative of a deep spiritual malady in Western man” or, more precisely, in Western man following Greek antiquity. The Archimandrite asserts, implausibly, that the ancient Greek philosophers were “very pious and god-fearing people,” that the “Tradition of the Greeks” is a tradition “of piety and respect for God.” In making this claim, he refers to the Greek “yearning for the unknown God,” the temple noted by the Apostle Paul; one may rather suspect that Paul has alertly turned a Greek inscription to his evangelical purposes. The Archimandrite concurrently demotes the Old Testament, admitting that one “find[s] many jut and virtuous people” there, but no “full union with God.” This could only become possible and could only be achieved “with the incarnation of the Divine Logos” described in the New Testament in the mediating Person of Jesus. 

By logos, ancient Greek philosophers meant a variety of things, including order, reason, and knowledge. The Archimandrite transforms these nouns into related verbs: think, reckon, speak, perhaps to make them consonant with a Creator-God, a God of action as well as of words. The Apostle John “completes the philosophical truths of the Ancient Greeks by connecting them to the Hebrew Tradition of his day,” in the striking first sentence of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God”—Jesus Christ. “It is in the Logos that creation finds its reason, cause, and purpose.” While “the human race could have been taught to become morally better by the philosophers, by the righteous men and teachers, or by the prophets,” moral virtue does not suffice for salvation. That is especially true since Adam and Eve “desired to become gods not through humility, obedience, or love but through their own power, their own willfulness—egotistically and autonomously.” This led to knowledge of Good and Evil, to the foundation of moral thought, but not to God. On the contrary, the first humans separated themselves from God, suffering not only physical death but “spiritual death.” There was now “a need for a new root for humanity,” for “a new man, who will be healthy and able to redirect the freedom of man towards God.” Jesus met that need as the embodied Logos. “The God-Man Christ, the Son and Logos of God the Father, has two perfect natures: divine and human,” joined, in the words of the Fourth Holy Ecumenical Synod at Chalcedon, “without change, without confusion, without separation, and without division.” “This definition forms the whole theological armory of our Orthodox Church against Christological heresies of all kinds throughout all ages.” With Jesus, “human nature is irrevocably unified with the divine nature because Christ is eternally God-Man”; “human nature is now enthroned in the bosom of the Holy Trinity,” where nothing can “cut human nature off from God.” Individual human beings can “unite again with God” if the repent of the sins that separate them from Him. Sin is “estrangement from Life,” from the Creator-God. Repentance is a “change of nous aiming at “clearing the nous and the heart from sin.” Because sin is so stubborn, now engrained in our nature, repentance and redirection must be continual. The prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” is no one-time-spoken thing. As Lord, as supreme ruler or King of Kings, Jesus can grant mercy not only because He is omnipotent but because He sacrificed Himself for human beings, taking on their sins and dying on their account for us. 

Jesus enables theosis without being the only person enabling it. He could not be fully human without being born of a woman, “the new Eve, the Panagia” or All-Holy One, “who put right the wrong done by the old Eve by becoming the Theotokos or God-birthgiver,” a person “necessary and irreplaceable” to human salvation. Jesus “would not have been able to incarnate if there had not been such a pure, all-holy, immaculate psyche as the Theotokos, who would offer her freedom, her will, all of herself totally to God so as to draw Him towards herself and towards us.” In an Orthodox Christian Church, the picture of the Theotokos is placed in the apse of the altar “to show that God comes to earth and to men through her” as “the bridge by which God descended” and the one “who conducts those of earth to Heaven.” Similarly, although not so exalted, the depictions of Christian saints placed around Jesus the Pantocrator, the All-Ruler, show congregants “the results of God’s incarnation,” namely, “deified men.” The Church is “the place of man’s theosis,” the “body of Christ,” a union not with the divine essence—God’s essence (ousia) is His own, alone, as the one God, “inaccessible and unknowable to us,” an eternal mystery—but “with the deified human nature of Christ.” What we can know, what Christians mean when they say the ‘know God,” are “His energies,” the energies of a Person with whom we can “achieve intimate and personal communion.”

As members of Christ’s body, His Church, through baptism, through being ‘born again,’ “we are not followers of Christ in the way that one might perhaps follow of philosopher or teacher.” This is much more than being “followers of a code of morality,” although it is also that. As a Christian, your spiritual condition determines whether you are a living or a dead member of Christ’s body; “even as dead members, we still do not cease to be members of Christ’s body.” To revive, one needs to do what one did in becoming a member: to repent. “We could not be deified if Christ did not make us members of His body; we could not be saved if the Holy Mysteries of the Church did not exist.” And “if man did not have the image of God in himself, he would not be able to seek its prototype.” This makes the Church different from other organizations. True, like them it has a regime, a ruling order—a Ruler, a set of ruling institutions, a way of life, a telos or purpose. But no other order can bring us to theosis. “Only within the Church can man become a god, and nowhere else.” Of course, as a regime consisting of human beings not yet fully cleansed of sin, “it is possible for scandals to happen in the bosom of the Church.” “We are becoming gods, but not yet.” Scandal is evil but does not excuse any Christian from remaining a member of the Church. God being both essence and energy, and the Church being the living, ‘energetic’ Body of Christ, it is there that human beings can partake of eternal life, preliminarily. If, per impossibile, a human being could see God’s essence, he would die, just as he would die if he touched a bare electric wire, “but if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated”; “let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God.” We will never become gods in essence, only through Christ’s energies in His Church. Pantheistic religions claim the opposite, that God pervades the world not as its Creator, essentially separate from the beings created by Him, but as immanent in all things. And complementarily, if God had only essence and not energies, “He would remain a self-sufficient God, closed within himself and unable to communicate with his creatures.” “God comes out of Himself and seeks to unite” with His human creatures via His uncreated energies; his grace is among those uncreated energies. By those energies he has created and preserved the cosmos, illuminates, sanctifies, and finally deifies man in the limited way described. Because God “has the divine energies, and unites with us by these energies, we are able to commune with Him and to unite with His Grace without becoming identical with God, as would happen if we united with His essence.” “This is the mystery of our Orthodox faith and life.” The Archimandrite insists that the “Western heretics” reject the distinction between God’s essence and His energies and thus “cannot speak about man’s Theosis.” That this is not the case may be seen in the writings of (for example) Pascal. But again, a reader might not come to the Archimandrite when seeking understanding of the teachings of the ‘Western’ churches.

And so, “a Christian is not a Christian simply because he is able to talk about God. He is a Christian because he is able to have experience of God.” This requires desire, struggle, preparation, which make us “worthy, capable, and receptive enough to accept and guard this great gift from God, since God does not wish to do anything to us without our freedom.” The Archimandrite lists three qualities that Christians must cooperate with God in order to enhance their spirituality, to bring them farther along the path to theosis. The first is humility. “Without humility, how will you acknowledge that the purpose of your life is outside yourself, that it is in God?” For some reason, he claims that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are man-centered, not God-centered, a charge that might correctly be leveled at Aristotle, who considers eudaimonia or happiness of a well-ordered psyche in a well-ordered polis as the purpose of human life. For Christians, however, God must be central because only His grace enables us to continue on the right path, the right regime, the way of life of the Kingdom of God.

The second needed quality is asceticism. “You cannot receive the Holy Spirit if you do not give the blood of your heart in the struggle to cleanse yourself from the passions,” to repent fully, “acquir[ing] the virtues” by giving up your passions. What, then, is the “heart”? It is not, or not simply, “an emotional center,” much less a physical organ of the body. It is “a receptacle for all good and evil,” man’s “psychosomatic center, the deepest and most profound part of our being,” our “inner man,” closely related to but distinct from the nous and the psyche. The heart motivates the man, serving as the battleground of the spiritual warfare between God and Satan, angels and demons. The psyche, in closely related contrast, consists of reasoning powers, the passions, and the appetites—rather as in Plato’s logos, thumos, and epithumia. To walk the path towards theosis, we must will to cleanse our reason by watchfulness, “the continuous guarding of the nous from evil thoughts, cleanse our passionate part by love, cleanse the appetitive part by “self-control,” by moderation.

The third and final needed quality is the willingness to partake of Christ’s “Holy Mysteries,” which are “Holy Baptism, Chrismation, Holy Confession, and the Divine Eucharist.” All of these are necessary because “the passions cover Divine Grace as ashes bury a spark,” and the Mysteries brush the ashes away. So does prayer. The Jesus Prayer, for example, “helps us to concentrate our nous more easily,” enabling the Christian to get a taste of “the sweetness of communion with God,” who is “not an idea, something that we think about, that we discuss or read about” only “but a Person with Whom we come into living and personal communion.” In walking along the way of life of the Christian regime, with the Person who is Christ, we “receive experience” from Him, rather than from those we might otherwise walk with—typically, the wrong crowd. The religions of the Far East—Hinduism, Buddhism, and the like, with their practices of meditation and yoga—can undoubtedly lead the nous away from “the various considerations of the material world,” but they do not lead us to “a dialogue with God.” Without that dialogue, the soul remains trapped in its anthropocentrism, even as it imagines itself to be freed from it.

“Experiences of theosis are proportioned to the purity of man.” This can be achieved gradually, by stages. After tears of repentance for sins, the nous is illuminated by God, now “see[ing] things, the world, and man with another grace.” Tears of love for God result in “theoria,” “in the course of which [stage] man, having already been cleansed from the passions, is illumined by the Holy Spirit,” resulting in theosis, “the vision of the uncreated light of God.” “Those who are very advanced in Theosis see this light, very few in each generation”; such persons are depicted iconographically by halos. “The Grace of Theosis preserves the bodies of the Saints incorruptible, and these are the holy relics which exude myrrh and work miracles,” relics and also icons, graves, and the Churches of the Saints which Orthodox Christians venerated (but do not worship) because they “have something of the Grace of God which the Saint had in his psyche because of his union with God.” 

Such experiences obviously must never be confused with demonic or merely psychological ones, by which “many people have been deluded.” Orthodox Christians should consult their Spiritual Father, who “will discern whether these experiences are genuine or not, and…give appropriate direction to the psyche who is confessing.” Indeed, “our obedience to the Spiritual Father is one of the most basic points of our spiritual path,” the path along which “we acquire an ecclesiastical spirit of discipleship.” “Within the Church we are not isolated members but a unity, a brotherhood, a fraternal community—not only among ourselves, but also with the Saints of God, those who are living on earth today and those who have passed away.” And of course “the head of this body is Christ Himself.”

“Our holy God molded us for Theosis, so if we are not deified, our whole life is a failure.” Causes of such failure include attachment to “the basic cares of life,” including too much time “learning, studying, reading,” working, and socializing, with no time to “pray, to go to Church, or to confess and take Holy Communion.” Such activities “have real and substantial value when undertaken with the Grace of God,” aiming at His glory. “Only when we continue to desire Theosis as well” do “all these find their real meaning in an eternal perspective” and prove “of benefit to us.” Moralism is another snare. “Guidance that only aims for moral improvement is anthropocentric,” making it seem “as if it is our own morality that saves us, and not the Grace of God.” But even an atheist can be moral. Speaking of which, some are blocked from theosis by adopting false doctrines such as anthropocentric humanism, “a socio-philosophical system which is separated from and made independent of God,” leading “contemporary man to a civilization based on selfishness.” Not egocentricity, not ‘class consciousness’ or ‘race-consciousness’ or ‘gender-consciousness,’ not nationalism or even humanitarianism but only ‘theocentrism’ can bring human persons to theosis. It “brings great joy into our life when we know what a great destiny we have, and what blessedness awaits us.” More, “as long as we are closed within ourselves—within our ego—we are individuals but not persons.” “That is to say that when our ego encounters the Thou of God, and the ‘you’ of our brother, ten we begin to find our lost self.” The Divine Liturgy within the Orthodox Christian Church teaches human beings “to overcome the narrow, atomistic interest in which the devil, our sins, and our passions compel us, and instead learn to open up to a communion of sacrifice and love in Christ.” The Archimandrite deplores “the tolerance of the state,” earthly regimes, wherein demi-citizens “squander the precious time of their lives, as well as the powers which God gave them for the purpose of achieving Theosis, in hunting for pleasure and carnal worship.” Archimandrite George is no enthusiast of Church-State separation, although it must be said that Church Establishment carries its own dangers, as contemporary Russia has so tellingly demonstrated.

Note

1. Oddly, the Archimandrite claims that “Western Christianity” in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, “aimed at a moral perfection for man which does not depend on God’s Grace.” He is mistaken, but one does not read his book to gain knowledge of Western Christianity.

In contemporary life, men have pushed Christianity “to the margins of collective life,” largely “by commanding that we no longer think about it.” Yet we continue to do so, as obedience to such a command “does not suit the thinking animal,” even if he is only a weak, “thinking reed.” Jesus himself was an obscure figure in the eyes of Roman and Jewish historians—or, perhaps more accurately, they deliberately obscured him: since Jesus existed and “his religion made a great stir,” Pascal considers that they must have “concealed it on purpose,” unless their histories were altered (#746). Or perhaps they ignored Him because He was not the militant, political Messiah they would have made more of, as political historians. As Manent writes, “the only thing that was splendid in their eyes is what pertains directly or indirectly to force, because such is the human order, the order of force, the order of the flesh,” while Jesus’ splendor manifested itself, in Pascal’s words, only to the “eyes of the heart” (#308). Jesus avoided ‘carnal’ splendor so as better to concentrate men’s attention on the things of the spirit. Things of the spirit not only subordinate human opinion, they subordinate human nature in the sense that the moral virtues, discernible by human reason (as in Aristotle’s eminently sensible ‘mean between two extremes’) do not “affect what theology calls the ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity—which can always be greater, or whose measure is to be ‘without measure,'” beyond means and extremes. Nor does reason commend humility, neither a theological nor a natural virtue, but nonetheless stands as “the Christian virtue par excellence, precisely in that it is the specific virtue by which the Christian imitates Christ.” (And not only Christianity; Moses is described as the most anav, the most humble man, of his time—in Christian terms, a ‘type’ or ‘figure,’ a prefiguration, of Christ.) Christ’s glory, after death, “has been of use to us, to enable us to recognize him and he had none of it for himself” (#499).

Jesus is undoubtedly the most anav man of His time, of any time. Citing Pascal’s fragment, “The Mystery of Jesus,” Manent observes that at Gethsemane, in his “agony,” Jesus complains, for the only time in His life, “his person…turned entirely to the Father.” He wishes He could be exempted not from a physically excruciating death but from the even more crushing weight of taking on all the sins of human beings. “To see in the fear of death the wellspring of Jesus’s distress and torment in the garden of olives is to give a psychological interpretation, a human interpretation, of a trial whose meaning resides entirely in the divine mission of Jesus, in his highest activity, and not in the passivity of his human nature. It is to banalize, it is to humanize, the ‘cup’ and the ‘hour,’ which belong to him exclusively.” “This punishment is inflicted by no human, but an almighty hand, and only he that is almighty can bear it” (#919). “Jesus is in a garden, not of delight, like the first Adam, who there fell and took with him all mankind, but of agony, where he saved himself and all mankind” (#919).

This agony should not be confused with His “passion,” his suffering on the Cross, when, “far from being reduced to the final impotence of a dying person, he is capable of exercising his all-powerful goodness,” promising salvation to the believing thief and commending His spirit into His Father’s hands. Jesus died “not by natural necessity but by his own will,” having suffered the natural pain of crucifixion but “retain[ing] entire mastery over his death itself.” By giving up his human nature to the designs of men inspired by Satan and more, by allowing Satan a victory, however temporarily, and by “verify[ing] with his Father that the design of God for human beings, that the ‘divine philanthropy,’ includes or requires this ‘laissez-faire’ to sinners,” Jesus “pardons sins” by “being ‘made sin’ in order to be delivered into the hands of sinners, and thus to become a ‘ransom for many,'” as the Gospel writers and the Apostle Paul testify. “By delivering himself into the hands of sinners, he gives license to human liberty to oppose itself to redemption.” At the same time, the Ecclesia, the Assembly, the Church Jesus founds receives the ceremony of the eucharistic sacrifice, the picture of His pardoning sacrifice.  “The sacrifice of Christ allows the Christian to do what was impossible for the disciples in the garden,” who fell asleep: “to keep watch and pray with Jesus.” As a result, “the Christian lives neither in time nor in eternity; he lives in this tension and suspense when the infirmity of the human will is constantly overcome by the grace of Christ.”

Would it not take “a very narrow reason, or a quite ungenerous nature, to simply dismiss this personage as a fiction or a myth, or even a mixture of reality and legend—in short as a creation of this god always at hand which is ‘the human mind'”? As Pascal has it, “Jesus said great things so simply that he seems not to have thought about them, and yet so clearly that it is obvious what he thought about them. Such clarity together with such simplicity is wonderful.” (#309). If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom according to the Bible, wonder is the beginning of wisdom according to philosophy. Pascal invites us to wonder at the Son, not only to fear the wrath of the Father. For “all the splendor of greatness lacks luster for those engaged in pursuits of the mind,” whose greatness “is not visible to kings, rich men, captains, who are all great in a carnal sense.” At the same time, wondering at Jesus does not bring true wisdom as “the greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if it does not come from God, is not visible to carnal or intellectual people…. Jesus without wealth or any outward show of knowledge [1] has his own order of holiness. He made no discoveries; he did not reign, but he was humble, patient, thrice holy to God, terrible to devils, and without sin,” great only “in the eyes of the heart, which perceive wisdom!” (#308). The eyes of the rightly-ordered heart are the eyes of agape. “The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural.” Naturally self-centered, we do not love God or neighbor except when granted to power to do so by divine grace. And so, “the style of the Gospels is remarkable in so many ways; among others for never putting in any invective against the executioners and enemies of Christ”—not “against Judas, Pilate or any of the Jews” (#812).

Understand this about Pascal, Manent urges: “He rejected the temptation to install the mind as sovereign spectator of the natural and human world, exposing the passional roots under whose rule” we attempt to investigate, to comprehend, and finally even to rule nature. “Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” the “greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought” (#199). This means that it cannot be fully comprehended. Not only God but even His creation should humble us, since “such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight”; we are “limited in every respect.” Limitation is “our true state,” the human condition (#199). Pascal exempts geometry from this stricture, while stipulating that while it does clearly define some things it does not define everything. Qua geometry, a geometer cannot know God; he cannot know man, the being who practices geometry; one who wields geometry cannot really conquer nature. For certainty, for go to Euclid. For all the other “conditions of existence,” if we stay on the human plane, go to Montaigne, to skepticism, to Pyrrhonism, or Socratic zeteticism. “The temptation of the ‘proud’ philosopher is to seek a path, a ‘method,’ to apply the geometric order to the comprehension of the human world,” as Descartes and Hobbes essay to do. This and other “abstract sciences are not proper to man,” not a way toward understanding man (#687). “However,” Manent comments, for Pascal “there is indeed a third possibility, a third path, what I have called the Christian proposition.”

“Christianity is not a chapter in a dictionary of religions, one religion among the religions of the world; it places itself directly on the plane of universality that is that of the philosophers as well as the geometers,” while “bring[ing] entirely new elements of orientation concerning our ‘true good’ as well as our ‘true state.'” “Modern reason—philosophy or science—as it took form and force in the seventeenth century, proposes to advance methodically from certainty to certainty, from evidence to evidence, unfolding or deploying before us a fabric of continuous and homogeneous knowledge,” whereas Pascal “invites to negotiate a journey in a broken world whose heterogeneity cannot be overcome by our natural capacity for knowledge.” No ‘leap of faith,’ for him; “he proposes to us a journey of reason that leads us before a choice of the heart, of the knowing heart.” The knowledge Pascal has in mind isn’t so much knowledge of the Bible or of Church doctrine. In this sense, he is neither Protestant nor (typically) Catholic. Nor is this a knowledge of nature, an ‘argument from design,’ or an argument from human nature. He does not propose a civil religion, like the Romans, like Mohammad. [2] He argues instead from the human condition, which is “divided between greatness and misery.” Perhaps most troubling to us, especially to ‘us democrats,’ the human condition encompasses persons that God Himself has blinded to His works, deafened to His Word. 

That is because, since Eden, human beings are no longer good. They are in a condition of misery, on account of that. “The experience by which one enters into Christianity is that of an impotence of the will to make effective the capacity for good that is in it.” Nothing human beings can do eradicates our self-centeredness. [3] Self-centered but not self-knowing. “Among the most difficult questions to answer is first this one: What does he, what does she, truly will? And also, What do I truly will?” To know ourselves, we need to admit into our precious ‘selves’ the only Being who is all-knowing, yet unknown to ourselves. Divine grace does not force our will to do its bidding; we can reject it, even if it gets our attention forcefully, as it did when God knocked the future apostle, Paul, off his horse. “Grace and liberty can have no meaning unless liberty can refuse grace, or refuse itself to grace.” Desiring God, wishing for God—neither of those suffice. One must will to discover God, will to ally oneself to Him. (Did Nietzsche understand this? Is that why he rejects God by exercising a will not to God but to power?) Those who do not seek Him receive no signs of Him. The Christian’s will “is too weak, or too fragile, not to ask for aid and confirmation by the divine will. To intimately link his own will with the will of God and to pray for that is not to renounce his own will by passively delivering it to a foreign and infinitely superior will; it is to confirm and strengthen his own will at the same time that one rectifies it.” Only then will it know “truly and completely…the good it wants.”

The matter of salvation implies an answer to the question of ‘Salvation from what?’ Christians are saved from damnation, a teaching that proves a stumbling block for many: Why should the failure to ‘believe in God’ warrant an eternity in Hell? Pascal does not reject such questions out of hand. “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason” (#170). Manent suggests that for the Christian soul as understood by Pascal, Hell is not “a scandal or even, properly speaking, an obstacle, but rather…an element of orientation,” “the counterpart logically and spiritually necessary to complete the practical framework in which human choice is inscribed.” God “did not want to damn any human being in particular,” but neither did He want “to save absolutely all human beings.” In His Son, the Father offered salvation to mankind. That means there is “a predestination to salvation, but not to damnation.” This offer was not tendered to each human being separately. “One cannot enter into the understanding of the history of salvation except by seeing that its subject is mankind taken as a whole and in the succession of its states.” The first “state” or condition of mankind was Eden, and there the offer of salvation, the warning against damnation, was indeed necessarily tendered to individuals, for the simple reason that there, mankind consisted of only two persons. After Adam and Eve made the wrong choice, mankind has “live[d] under the regime of concupiscence,” and God deals with us on those terms, unreturned as we are to the condition of free will. “God no longer wants to entrust perseverance in justice to the free will of human beings.” What He does do is to choose us, taking human form and thereby “rejoin[ing] us in our slavery” and offering us “a sort of servitude” or slavery in His justice. Pascal explains, “God’s will has been to redeem men and open the way of salvation to those who seek it, but men have shown themselves so unworthy that it is right for God to refuse to some, for their hardness of heart, what he grants to others by a mercy they have not earned.” In this adventure, “there is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” #149).

Putting this in ‘American’ terms, the terms of the Declaration of Independence of human equality in the possession of unalienable natural rights, there is a difference in emphasis. “In the Christian perspective”—a perspective shared by many but not all of the Founders—the unity of the human race “does not rest solely on sharing the same nature, but even more on participating in the same adventure, that of the covenant with God, Creator, and Redeemer.” In Pascal’s view as expressed by Manent, “this humano-divine adventure presupposes and produces a human unity that is much closer than that caused by the social and political nature of man, a solidarity between human creatures that is incomprehensible to natural reason because rooted in their eventful relations with the Most High.” In this way, “the most profound determinants of the human condition escape individual choices: involuntary heirs of sin, human beings receive the promise of a filial adoption that they can neither conceive nor will by their own powers.” We are very much inclined to object that we did not, as individuals, eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that we, as individuals, deserve no divine condemnation, or at least no eternal punishment. But “our sentiment of injustice comes from a valid, but narrow, idea of justice that would reside entirely in the individual responsibility of the agent,” ignoring “the closeness of the bond that attaches each of us to all other human beings,” our condition of “being the object of the same divine purpose in which each is destined to inscribe himself consciously and willingly.” The “true human history” is “the history of salvation,” the “ever-closer covenant between God and human beings,” God’s ongoing effort” to “overcome the human reluctance to accept his benevolent purpose,” which Manent considers to be His offer of adoption into His family as “Sons of God.” Yes, God is omnipotent, “but it is his all-goodness, not his omnipotence, that is the raison d’être of his design and action.” In the sinner, “bad will does not escape from the power of God, but it flees from his goodness.” In Pascal’s words, “the man who knows what his master wants will be more heavily beaten because of what his knowledge enables him to do” (#538). Christ “made his offer as a man redeeming all those wishing to come to him. If some die on the way, that is their misfortune; for his part, he offered them redemption.” (#911).

The philosophers have mismeasured the human condition by “inspir[ing] impulses of pure greatness” and “impulses of pure abasement”; neither of these is “the state of man” Rather, “there must be impulses of abasement prompted not by nature but by penitence, not as a lasting state but as a stage towards greatness. There must be impulses of greatness, prompted not by merit but by grace, and after the state of abasement has been passed” (#398). [4] “No religion except our own has taught that man is born sinful, no philosophical sect has said so, so none has told the truth” (#421). Among the religions, only Christianity “teach[es] how to cure pride and concupiscence,” teaches us “our true good, our duties, the weaknesses which lead us astray, the cause of these weaknesses, the treatment that can cure them, and the means of obtaining such treatment.” Only the God of the Bible teaches that “it is I who have made you and I alone can teach you what you are.” (#149). While “philosophers and all the religions and sects in the world have taken natural reason for their guide, Christians alone have been obliged to take their rules from outside themselves and to acquaint themselves with those which Christ left for us with those of old, to be handed down again to the faithful” #769).Your faith in Me is the opposite of blindness.

Manent concludes with a set of reflections on the Pensées as a whole. He begins with the Christian regime, the Christian way of life: “For Pascal, the Christian life is a life—a distinctive life, with its own and exclusive principles.” A democratic way of life inclines us to toward “an affective disposition quick to recognize and assert human similarity.” Christianity recognizes our shared humanity while insisting that our shared nature does not yield shared ways of life led by similar human types. “In the case of the Christian life—it is particularly important to emphasize this today—the end at which it aims, the criteria that guide it, the motives and sentiment that move it, are absolutely distinct and even exclusive to it.” The Christian regime thus differs from all the other regimes, challenging them without intending violently to change them. “The Christian actively participates in the society of which he is a member and respects its rules, but he draws from elsewhere than this society the deepest motives of his conduct.”

Christianity does not discover God by means of reason but of revelation. This doesn’t make Christians irrational, persons who engage in a sacrifizio d’intellectio; rather, it means they understand “the limits of reason as an instrument of knowledge.” “There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason” (#182), the denial of its capacity fully to understand God or even to provide irrefutable proof of His existence. Nor do Christians rightly “interfere in the physical science based on reason and sense experience,” any more than scientists have reason to interfere with Christianity. Pascal identifies “two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason” (183). That both Christians and scientists do get in the others’ way is a fact, but not a necessary fact. It is, however, a danger. Since “reason is the instrument par excellence of man, therefore also the instrument of his self-love,” “reason does not stop trying to gain the upper hand by reducing the highest, most decisive, contents of religion to its measure.” Manent adds, astringently, that “theologians are particularly prone to this temptation.” “Our reason and our will are thick as thieves in us: as soon as one lets them take the initiative, everything is lost! Self-love the ‘I’ that prefers itself to everything gains the upper hand and will stop at nothing to keep it. One must therefore begin with God; one must really attach oneself to God.”

For example, the mystery of original sin will remain humanly unsolved, “the mystery furthest from our knowledge,” since “nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has made guilty those who, being so far removed from this source, seem incapable of participating in it” (#131). We are “slaves or prisoners of a fault that we did not commit.” How can “a child incapable of will” be eternally damned “for a sin in which he seems to have so little part that it was committed six thousand years before he existed?” (#131). “We cannot conceive Adam’s state of glory, or the nature of his sin, or the way it has been transmitted to us. These are things which took place in a state of nature quite different from our own and which pass our present understanding.” (#431). What Pascal says we can take from this teaching is not an understanding of how it could possibly be just but of how much it explains about us. “All that is important for us to know” in this life “is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God but redeemed by Christ” (#560). “The Christians’ God is a God who makes the soul aware that he is its sole good: that in him alone can it find peace; that only in loving him can it find joy: and who at the same time fills it with loathing for the obstacles which hold it back and prevent it from loving God with all its might” (#460). As Manent observes, the depth of our sickness, our sin—which we cannot understand, only experience—finds its remedy only in the height of God’s healing grace. “God heals an injustice in me of which I am ignorant, or of whose depth I am unaware, by a remedy that is beyond all justice or goodness that I can conceive.” Sin can only be cured by God by “rectif[ying] the very direction of the sinner’s being,” by “caus[ing] it to participate in the divine goodness itself.” Both our sin and our salvation stand beyond “the rules of human justice.” “Reason is entirely incapable of understanding what ‘Adam’ mean, just as it is entirely incapable of understanding what ‘Jesus Christ’ means.” As Pascal has it, “the whole of faith consists in Jesus Christ and Adam and the whole of morality is concupiscence and grace” (#226). Faith, not reason. That is, one can only begin to understand our “human condition”—as Pascal calls it, borrowing from Montaigne, who sees it without understanding it—if we first accept the noetic premises of Christianity. If we only accept the noetic premises of sense perception or of some other ‘self-evident’ natural truth, we will remain perplexed without a reliable guide.

Christianity always goes against the human grain. From age to age, it goes against some new dimension of that grain. The modern dimension of the human grain consists of, among several streaks, egalitarianism—Tocqueville’s ‘democracy.’ Neither Manent nor Pascal identifies Christianity’s origin in Christianity, as Tocqueville does. “Contrary to a widespread opinion, the lane of equality that we presuppose does not result from the ‘influence’ of Christianity, or from its ‘secularization,’ but from the work of the modern state and of modern democracy, which presuppose the prior rejection of the principes of Christianity, or in any case refuse it any role in the formation of the ‘common.’ It is to the work of the modern state and modern democracy that we owe this new being, the human being who is compassionate toward his fellow human being, the kind of human being that all of us have, more or less, become.” Compassion is indeed a passion, a sentiment, but for Christians “the love of neighbor is not a sentiment but a virtue, this virtue is the object of a command, and it is a command because the neighbor is not naturally lovable” and neither am I. Nor is either of us naturally loving in the Christian, agapic rather than erotic, way. “Pity for the unfortunate does not run counter to concupiscence,” Pascal acutely notices; “on the contrary, we are very glad to show such evidence of friendship and thus win a reputation for sympathy without giving anything in return.” And how can a human being possibly love not only his neighbor but his enemy, “someone who is hateful”? Only by “the double mediation of Adam and of Christ,” the recognition of our common sickness, sin, and of the only cure for that sickness. Contra Machiavelli and his epigoni, “this does not prevent the Christian from vigorously fighting this enemy when the common good demands…but it rues out excluding him from the possibility of salvation, excluding him from mankind as it is defined and understood by Christianity.”

Pascal shares with Orthodox Christianity the conviction that “the religious life of the soul is an activity that obeys rigorous rules and demands constant vigilance, because this activity must imperatively be continuous.” To be sure, grace comes from God, but “its reception demands the action—the cooperation—of the human will.” Manent quotes a letter from Pascal to Gilberte, Pascal’s sister: “One must continually make new efforts to acquire this continual newness of spirit, because one cannot preserve the former grace except by the acquisition of a new grace,” primarily through prayer, whose purpose is “the condition of a constant charity,” a constant agape. That condition, as it were the divine condition correcting the human condition, brings joy to Christians here and now, a prelude to the music to be heard in the coming extension of the Kingdom of God. “We must work ceaselessly to preserve this joy that tempers our fear,” he wrote to a friend, “and to preserve this fear that preserves our joy.” 

Notes

1. Not quite so. As a child, He displayed his comprehensive knowledge of Scripture in the synagogue, to the astonishment of the learned rabbis.
2. “While the religion of Muhammad conquered its empire by gratifying some of the most powerful passions of human nature, especially virile nature, the Christian religion acquired its authority by declaring itself the irreconcilable enemy of these same passions”; “the word of Christ does not allow itself to be known, like the sword of Muhammad.”
3. For example: “It is untrue that we are worthy to be loved by others. It is unfair that we should want such a thing. If we were born reasonable and impartial, with a knowledge of ourselves, and others, we should not give our wills this bias However, we are born with it and so we are born unfair.” (#421).
4. See also fragment #149: “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions.”

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer translation. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

“Montaigne’s faults are great,” Pascal writes. “Lewd words” from a man so credulous as to believe the most implausible travelers’ tales yet so skeptical as to inspire “indifference regarding salvation,” with “his completely pagan views on death” whereby he thinks only of dying a death of cowardly ease” (#680). He regards each individual man as possessing a self or “master form” which can never be reformed. The convert to Christianity, the penitent, “claims,” as Manent characterizes the argument, “to be inwardly afflicted and to punish himself for not having attained a perfection he cannot attain,” but “he cannot sincerely desire” to attain it. Better simply to admit we are merely human and leave it at that. Rousseau replies that Montaigne’s candor is false and that he, Rousseau, offers the only sincere confession. Human beings are naturally good, corrupted by society. Pascal regards Montaigne as bound up in self-love; had he lived long enough to read Rousseau, he would have regarded him as equally so bound. “The bias towards self is the beginning of all disorder, in war, politics, economics, in man’s individual body”; and this is a bias, the product of a will that is “depraved” (#421). “While Pascal points everyone, and first of all himself, toward repentance, Rousseau directs his accusation against the gaze of others.” For Montaigne, man is made miserable by religion, particularly the Christian religion; for Rousseau, he is made miserable by his life in civil society under the gaze of other men.

Pascal admits that no one can escape the self. “We want to be loved, we want to be esteemed, we want to be the object of the attention of other human beings, and we cannot not want this.” We put on a show. In saying this, Pascal “does not accuse us.” “He simply wants to help us to become aware of the strangeness of a state that lies beneath all our actions or dispositions, good as well as bad, and that consists in a hatred of the truth about ourselves,” assiduous about exactly how much of this despicable truth we reveal to the world. “What is also strange” is that even “philosophers, historians, rhetoricians, and poets of Greece and Rome,” otherwise so morally perceptive, “did not discern clearly, how to articulate this fundamental characteristic of the human condition.” Pascal emphasizes the condition of human beings more than their nature cause human nature has been corrupted: “Man does not act according to the reason which constitutes his nature” (#491). They understood vice but they did not understand sin. They could describe the ‘parts’ of the soul, the actions of ensouled human bodies; they could not conceive of self-centeredness in contrast with God-centeredness. “No religion except our own has taught that man is born sinful, no philosophical sect has said so, so none has told the truth” (#421). Yet self-love “is absolutely universal”; as a description of human beings, it has what our contemporaries call impressive ‘explanatory power.’ We do not know the origin of original sin; Pascal does not offer an explanation of this master explanation, as Rousseau does. Famously, “the heart has its reason of which reason knows nothing” (#423). “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason,” and it is God who tells us that we are sinful (#423). Knowing the origin of our sin, the reason Eve was beguiled by the Serpent, the reason Adam consumed her proffered, fatal snack, both disobeying God’s command, would “not help us to escape” its consequences. “All that it is important for us to know is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God but redeemed by Christ.” (#431). As an eminent mathematician, Pascal scarcely intends to tell his readers to abandon reason but rather to exercise it within the Christian framework. “Submission and use of reason: that is what makes true Christianity” (#163). And famously, “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed” (#200). [1]

For Rousseau, by contrast, the folly of self-love “comes from a series of accidents and circumstances, from a history that degraded the love of self, a disposition that in itself has nothing evil, into self-love.” In anticipation, of Rousseau’s stance, Pascal exclaims, “Would to God…that we never needed [reason] and knew everything by instinct and feeling!” (#110). What history has caused, Rousseau imagines, human beings can correct. Self-love “must be seen as a superficial modality of our being, because it is something that has happened to love of self and that therefore does not belong essentially to our being.” Love of self is amoral, in and of itself; “it does not pertain to the will,” to moral choice. It is a mere passion, “a passion that is innocent as long as it does not motivate an unjust action toward other human beings, an unjust action that would call for the intervention of the will.” We don’t hate each other, by nature. We are indifferent to one another, except when the equally innocent passion of sexual desire drives us to mate. But for Pascal, for Christianity, “the human will is flexible between good and evil,” free to choose, but “at the same time” a “slave of a radically unjust disposition from which it cannot be healed or delivered except by grace.” It is the heart, the will, that perceives God. The one who rejects God “can oppose reason to faith at his ease, because it is by the heart, not reason, that God is perceived, but this appeal to reason is hardly relevant or conclusive, because the love of self that he has not rejected does not come from reason” either, “but from the heart,” and therefore cannot be “especially rational.” In Rousseau’s case, “in making the love of self the sole primitive passion of man, indifferent to good and evil, anterior to the will and to reason,” he “postulates a moral or spiritual quantity that is as impossible to measure as to regulate.” The link between natural love of self and political love of country, of one’s civil society, leads to ‘totalizing’ the civil society so constituted, to giving it no limits. While “for Rousseau the center of gravity is found in the individual who identifies himself imaginatively with the whole,” for Pascal “the center of gravity is in the body animated by the spirit of the body, which makes the members live.” That spirit is the breath of God, breathed into clay fashioned in the form of a human body. Far from indifferent, that life-giving spirit was good, until Man and Woman marred it, gulled by God’s Enemy. It now can only be reoriented by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, an intervention only made possible by the intervention of the Son, who took on the sins of Man and Woman—past, present, and future—in the supreme act of graciousness. Pascal aims to “dispel the illusion of which the love of self is the author, but also the result, the illusion of only depending on oneself, when in reality, because of a lack of strength and of justice, one has renounced seeking the body of which one is a member,” the body of Christ. “In order to control the love we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for we are members of the whole) and see how each member ought to love itself” (#368). 

Rousseau “persuaded us that human reality and truth were found elsewhere than in the desires and choices of our will, a conviction that rendered the Christian proposition increasingly inaccessible to us.” Christian dogma, by contrast, “is proposed to the faith of the believer, not as an idea that it would be good to entertain in his mind or cherish in his heart, but as an imperative and urgent proposition”—objective, not subjective—that “the Christian is obliged in conscience to adhere to under penalty of excluding himself from the communion of believers.” The communion of believers has a regime of its own, with its King. “The way in which one defines the person of Jesus Christ is determinative for the meaning and content of the Christian life.” That is, the character of the ruler, rightly understood, the character of his ruling offices, the Church, the purpose of his rule, human salvation from otherwise irresistible sin, all generate a way of life, a set of actions in consonance with faithful thoughts. “Communication with God was broken through our fault and cannot be restored except by God himself.” 

And so, in response to Montaigne and (in advance) to Rousseau, Pascal finds a misery-making contradiction in “the nature of self-love and of this human self.” “It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.” To our fullness of faults, we attach the “still greater evil” of unwillingness “to recognize them,” our “deliberate self-delusion.” Indeed, “a prince can be the laughingstock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.” Man is “nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others,” unwilling “to be told the truth” about himself or to confess the truth even to one man, the confessor-priest the Church has provided. (#978). The result is indeed a sort of analogue to Hobbes’s war of all against all: “open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or the skeptics.” Scholars are not exempt; the academic is “the nastiest kind of man I know” (#432). The skeptics are right to say that “truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry.” But that is because “it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.” At the same time, “you cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Nature confounds the sceptics and Platonists, and reason confounds the dogmatists.” You are “a paradox to yourself.” Therefore, “Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature!” (#131). Instead, “listen to God,” who tells you that “man in the state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity,” while “in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and has become like the beasts. These two propositions are equally firm and certain.” If you choose to return to God, good, because if you reject God’s grace you deserve to be “treated like the beasts of the field.” (#131). “It is quite certain that there is no good without the knowledge of God; that the closer one comes, the happier one is, and that ultimate happiness is to know him with certainty; that the further away one does, the more unhappy one is.” (#432).

Reason, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “makes distinctions” and “brings together things or ideas that initially seemed quite distant.” “This double capacity feeds tendencies in the mind that can crystallize in doctrinal tendencies”; biologists who seek to classify organisms recognize that some of them are ‘splitters,’ some ‘lumpers.’ Some philosophers incline to analyze, some to synthesize. In egalitarian modernity, we want to ‘celebrate diversity’ while insisting that humankind is one, and not only with itself but with the animals, too, and even the cosmos. Pascal observes that our moralists, including our moral philosophers, encourage “impulses of pure greatness” along with “impulses of pure abasement” (#398). “It is Pascal’s conclusion that philosophy has not succeeded, and cannot succeed, in mastering the polarity characteristic of the human phenomenon,” which is “stronger than the reason of the strongest philosopher, who cannot do otherwise than allow himself to be drawn toward one pole or the other.” For example, while the Stoic Epictetus adjured his disciples to contemplate the memento mori, take on the duties of entertaining no base thoughts and desiring nothing to excess. This is well thought, but he went on to presume that by so doing human beings can perfect themselves. Lax Montaigne, a modern Epicurean, an Epicurean with a Machiavellian streak, denies that reason has the power to perfect human nature, but then falls back to commending complacency, the life of comfortable peace of mind. And there can be no synthesis of the two, as a Hegel might suppose: “each of the two cannot correct the error of the other except by ruining at the same time his part of the truth.” Philosophy “only revolves in a ‘circle.'” “Darting from one pole to the other in search of a median point, the philosopher remains incapable of giving an account of the phenomenon that prompts him to think.” His incapacity derives not from the incapacity of reason to rule the passions (with the assistance of spiritedness, Plato’s Socrates would stipulate) but because reason, as part of human nature, has itself been wounded, mortally wounded, by sin. “There must be impulses of abasement prompted not by nature but by penitence, not as a lasting state but as a stage towards greatness. There must be impulses of greatness, prompted not by merit but by grace, and after the stage of abasement has been passed.” (#398). Only God can reconcile human greatness and human misery, leading men from their misery back to their original greatness, ultimately by transforming them by His power, in accordance with His wisdom, both far beyond theirs. The only real synthesis of human greatness and human misery is “the union of wo natures in Christ” (#733). 

If I remain on the level of philosophy, taking the side of either Epictetus or Montaigne, of “a certain pride or a certain sloth,” I will become an ironist, one who looks down upon the boor benighted souls trapped in their human-all-too-human conventions. [1] And if I attempt to synthesize these opposites, “there comes a moment when, while sloth dissuades [me] from going further, pride persuades [me] that [I] have arrived at the point of repose and perspective where the human problem finds its resolution”—rather in imitation of Hegel. Pascal instead urges me indeed “to think constantly about death and what perhaps follows after it.” To this, there is a philosophic reply that differs from those of Epictetus and Montaigne, the reply of Socrates in the Phaedo. To fear death is to claim to know what one does not know, whereas I can know justice and do it. It would therefore be wrong for Socrates to evade capital punishment by a city whose laws have otherwise nurtured him and indeed allowed him to philosophize for so long. Manent suggests that Pascal would object on the grounds that God’s Bible, His revelation, has given us the way to know the truth about death. “The philosophy of the ancients does not seem to have seriously contemplated the possibility of a personal immortality,” a life after death that could be very good or very bad. “Christianity in an extraordinary way inflamed the concern for what comes after death,” Christ’s resurrection having “banished the Greeks’ Hades as well as the Sheol of the Jews.” Christianity holds out the possibility of “the divinization of the whole person by his participation in the divine life.” For his part, Pascal “wants to awaken a sleeper whom a power greater-than-human keeps asleep.” 

“All our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery…. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.” (#200). The heavens and the earth God created “are not conscious of the happiness of their existence”; God “wanted to create beings who would realize it and compose a body of thinking members.” Reasoned recognition of the happiness of existence, its order, requires not only intelligence but “the good will to fall in with that of the universal soul.” As the only creatures into whom God breathed life, animated with some part of his own spirit, human’s “delight” and “their duty consists in consenting to the guidance of the whole soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love themselves” (#360). After the entry of sin into those souls, Christ’s redeeming mission stipulated that Christianity, “which alone has reason” rightly directed, “does not admit as its true children those who believe without inspiration.” We “must open our mind to the proofs, confirm ourselves in it through habit, while offering ourselves through humiliations to inspiration, which alone produce the real and salutary effect.” (#808). None of these three steps may be omitted. “Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton,” the machine of the body, which then “leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (#821). We must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us, for it is too much trouble to have the proofs always present before us. By itself, “reason can be bent in any direction” (#820). We must acquire an easier belief, which is that of habit.” This is what “incline[s] my heart.” (#821). Reason, habit, humiliation: these constitute the way of life of the Church. Accordingly, “the history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth” (#776). 

And so, Pascal replies to the philosophers, “Let them at least learn what this religion is which they are attacking it before attacking it.” God “has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him,” if they do so “with all their heart.” “In order really to attack the truth they would have to protest that they had made every effort to seek it everywhere, even in what the Church offers by way of instruction.” They do not, and “such negligence in intolerable.” It is, after all, “our chief interest and chief duty…to seek enlightenment on this subject, on which all our conduct depends,” moreover “a matter where they themselves their eternity, their all are at stake.” (#427). But of course we prefer to distract ourselves. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (#136). We want to take our minds off what we think of when in solitude. “Gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular” not because “they really bring happiness” but because “the agitation” they afford us “takes our mind off” ourselves, our wretchedness. And men have “another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement” (#136). This is where Jesus comes in. “The truth had to appear so that man should stop living inside himself,” as the Stoics commended (#600). Truth and the happiness that accords with living within the truth, “is neither outside nor inside us; it is in God, both outside and inside us” (#407). If we know our nature in its sinfulness, if we attain natural self-knowledge, we will hate ourselves. But “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit” and will love himself because he is among the “members of Christ.” “We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members,” just as the members of the physical body love it. In Christianity, “all are one.” “One is in the other like the three persons” of the Trinity. (#372).

But why Christ, not simply God the Father? Because there is “a long way…between loving God and knowing him” (#377). One may witness a miracle, but one cannot know God through the miracle. “True conversion consists in self-annihilation before the universal being whom we have so often vexed and who is perfectly entitled to destroy us at any moment in recognizing that we can do nothing without him and that we have deserved nothing but his disfavor. It consists in knowing that there is an irreconcilable opposition between God and us, and that without a mediator there can be no exchange.” (#378). “God and man have reciprocal duties” (#840). In Aristotelian terms, this means that their relationship is political, a relationship of ruling and being ruled in turn, a covenantal relationship. Among the human duties is loving “him alone and not transitory creatures, since “becom[ing] attached to creatures…prevents us from serving God” (#618). 

Such single-minded and single-hearted attachment is not for everyone. Although “the Christian proposition” is “obviously addressed to every human being,” not all “will have ears to hear.” Christianity not only commands humility: to some extent, it presupposes some degree of it. “Such a person does not know if God exists, but senses that, if he exists, communication with him has been broken” and that he lacks the capacity to reestablish it. “He measures that, from man to God, neither reason nor nature suffices to pave the way.” That is, “the truth about God, or in the relation to God, is inseparable from the truth about self, or in the relation to self.” As Pascal states it, “I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek truth with groans” (#405).

The Torah itself teaches this. More than once, God and His prophets describe the Israelites as a stiff-necked people, stubbornly refusing to listen to Word, to obey it. And in the eyes of Jews who accepted the Gospel, to say nothing of the Gentiles who did, the fact that most Jews “did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah for whom they waited,” relations declined, despite the fact that “Jews and Christians have the same God” and it “was in the Jewish people” that “a purely spiritual religion whose content was identical to what Christians proposed” first arose. “For Pascal, Judaism is already Christianity in its entirety”; “it is by regarding itself in the mirror of Judaism that Christianity acquires the most vivid and clearest awareness of what it is.” Christianity “recognizes itself ” in Judaism. “True Jews and true Christians have the same religion,” Pascal insists (#453); they “have always awaited a Messiah who would make them love God and by this love overcome their enemies” (#287). 

How so? “It is a matter of learning to read the Jewish scriptures,” of breaking the “cipher” discernible in them. A cipher is an image or a turn of phrase which “has two meanings.” “When we come upon an important letter whose meaning is clear, but where we are told that the meaning is veiled and obscure, that it is hidden or that seeing we shall not see and hearing we shall not hear, what else are we to think but that this is a cipher with a double meaning?” (#260). “The Jewish religion…was formed on the pattern of the Messianic truth, and the Messianic truth was recognized by the Jewish religion, which prefigured it” (#826). To prove this, “we need only see whether the prophecies of the one are fulfilled in the other” (#274). And so they are. “A good portrait can only be made by reconciling all our contradictory features, and it is not enough to follow through a series of mutually compatible qualities without reconciling their opposites; to understand an author’s meaning all contradictory passages must be reconciled”—a point Pascal intends to apply not only to the Bible but to his Pensées. (#257). A careful examination of the ‘Old’ Testament shows that Israel is a “figure” of the Church—a figure being “a portrait” in which “we see the thing represented” but, unlike ordinary portraits, it “precede[s] the thing painted in time.” In Jewish law, for example, there are two meanings of circumcision: the physical or “carnal” one and the spiritual one, the “circumcision of the heart.” God planned it that way. “To strengthen the hope of his chosen people in every age he showed them an image of all this, never leaving them without assurances of his power and will for their salvation, for in the creation of man Adam was witness to this and received the promise of a savior who should be born of woman” (#392). And “how highly then should we esteem those who break the cipher for us and teach us to understand the hidden meaning, especially when the principles they derive from it are completely natural and clear? That is what Jesus and the apostles did.” (#260). And so, for example, with the Gospels we now understand that Moses was the preeminent Israelite prophet and lawgiver, but he was also a ‘figure,’ a prefiguration, a ‘type’ of Christ.

A carnal reading of the Old Testament may be seen in Machiavelli, for whom Moses was just another great ‘founder’ of a human political order, along with Romulus, “a political leader who had to make himself obeyed and who was the target of the envy of his rivals as well as of the impatience of those he led.” And indeed, Moses was the founder of a regime for a set of human beings, and he did indeed face vexing opposition in doing so. Yet the story of Israel as related in the Bible features “certain episodes [that] seem so savage, so cruel—with a cruelty of which Machiavelli himself would not have been able to find the purpose—that we are, as it were, forced to seek another meaning.” For example, God commands the Israelites to kill or enslave all the other nations living in Canaan, including the women and children. “One is, as it were, dumbfounded to read” that God not only issued such a command but that he “reproached the Hebrews not for their cruelty but, on the contrary, for a propensity to come to terms with these nations that they ought to have completely annihilated,” without even carrying off the spoils of war. “One cannot understand the conduct of the Hebrews” in such instances “by invoking the customs of the period nor by incriminating an ‘intolerance’ or a ‘cruelty’ that would be proper to ‘monotheism.'” Neither historical relativism nor humanitarian shivers will do. Rather, “it is commanded to the Hebrews to keep nothing for themselves, even, or especially, in the circumstances where their cupidity—human cupidity—is incandescent, in the enemy city that the custom of war handed over to murder and pillage.” The Israelites are told to abstain from such material benefits and even from national glory “for the sake of God,” who rightly demands all the glory for Himself, inasmuch as He alone enabled the Israelites’ conquest. “God’s action, by which he forms his people, implies a wrenching separation from the human order.” His “demands…are indeed exorbitant and inadmissible, in truth incomprehensible, if one takes them literally, but their import and their meaning change entirely if one understands that the purely spiritual command they contain, in truth their only command, is to retain nothing for oneself and give all to God”; “the treatment commanded for the accursed cities can be said to be a ‘figure’ of charity,” of the agapic love that is the opposite of erotic, acquisitive love. For agapic love, the real enemy is the passions, not the Canaanites or the Babylonians.

It is in discerning the spiritual truth of the Old Testament “cipher” that human reason and memory come in. But they can only come in if “the inner disposition” of the readers mirrors that of the authors of the Book, the disposition of humility. “When one must establish with exactness the meaning and import of the decisive words of the sacred text—that is, choose between the possible meanings—it is not reason aided by memory, but the will, according to its direction, that alone can disguise.” Notice that Moses does not say that Israelites must circumcise their mind; they must circumcise their hearts—a “test of their way of thinking” (#279). Manent is careful, as indeed he must be, to deny that this means that the directions of the will create “the meaning that it acknowledges as the true sense of the text.” Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’ is not what he has in mind. Machiavelli and his followers interpret the Bible according to the object of their love, the mastery of Fortune and of nature. Genuine Jews and Christians interpret the Bible in terms of the object of their decidedly un-erotic love, their love of God. “Each man finds” in God’s promises to His people “what lies in the depths of his own heart, either temporal or spiritual blessings, God or creatures” (#503). Manent remarks that “not so very long ago, we experienced an illustration of this truth, when so many people believed they recognized the object of their hope—the ‘classless society’—in a reality” called ‘real socialism’ “that ought to have repulsed them.” 

And so it was with Jewish people in Jesus’ time. Those who were animated by erotic and “carnal” loves rejected Jesus. How could the Messiah not be a great conqueror? How could His coming be so “poor and ignominious”? Yet “those who rejected and crucified Christ”—in the latter claim, Pascal is inexact—were “the same who hand down the books which bear witness to him and say he will be rejected and a cause of scandal,” giving proof of Jesus’ real stature to those spiritual Jews, those “righteous Jews who accepted him.” (#502). “The Jews reject him, but not all of them: the holy ones accept him and not the carnal ones, and far from telling against his glory this is the crowning touch to it,” as it demonstrates the spiritual character of Christianity as consistent with the spiritual character of Judaism (#593). As with the Jews, so with the rest of us. “The will of man is divided between two principles: cupidity and charity” (#502). “The sole object of Scripture is charity” and “the kingdom of God was not in the flesh but the spirit” (#270). It is up to each one of us to choose. In so choosing, Pascal hastens to add, we are not choosing only “a God who is the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements,” the god of “the heathen and Epicureans.” Nor are we choosing only “a God who extends his providence over the life and property of men so as to grant a happy span of hears to those who worship him,” as carnal Jews suppose. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those who he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him” (#449). That God, the God of the Bible from beginning to end, cannot be chosen by human powers alone. Human beings cannot “devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator,” as they will either fail to know Him, becoming atheists, or know Him only dimly, becoming deists (#449). “If the world existed in order to teach man about God, his divinity would shine out on every hand in a way that could not be gainsaid: but as it only exists through Christ, for Christ, and to teach men about their corruption and redemption, everything in it blazes with proofs of these two truths” (#449). The capacity to choose is God-given; the right choice is given by God’s grace. Human reason alone “cannot incline [us] towards one [religion] or another,” or indeed toward belief or unbelief in any religion (#454).

Manent observes that for Pascal “the Christian faith necessarily does without proof.” “‘Faith is a gift of God’; it is God himself who puts it in the heart.” “Do not imagine that we describe it as a gift of reason,” Pascal warns: “Other religions” may “offer nothing but reason as a way to faith…yet it does not lead there” (#588). The proofs (he lists twelve of them in fragment #482) come after that, “solely to satisfy reason in the strict sense of the term—that it is to say, to grant it enough, not to prove in a domain where proofs cannot be conclusive, but to show and even to demonstrate that Christians do not say or do anything that is not accompanied by a process of reason.” Since God is superior to His creatures to begin with, and even more superior to His ‘fallen’ or corrupted creatures, Christians’ lack of rational proof of the divinity of Christ actually “show[s] that they are not without sense” (#418). It is rather, Manent writes, “the person of self-love, the person who intends or claims to use reason, simply disdains to examine it, because it is not ‘rational,'” who exhibits an irrational incapacity to understand the limits of human reasoning, the human need not only for logos but also for the Logos. And just as Jews need Christ, so do Christians need Judaism. “As impressive as the actions and words of Christ are in themselves for every attentive reader, these action and words are first aimed at the Jewish people, at the ‘lost sheep of Israel’; they prolong and recapitulate the drama of the chosen people of God, who in its greatness and its misery, ‘acts for’ all of mankind: the Jewish people is separated from the nations only in order to make known to them the common Father.” 

Notes

1. This point applies both to the senses, ‘below’ reason, and reason. “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they are; it is above, not against them” (#185). For its part, “reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go a far as to realize that.” And “if natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things?” (#188).

      2. For Pascal’s discussion of Epictetus and Stoicism, see fragments #11, 12, 13, 147.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer translation. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

Pascal’s famous “wager” comes to light because the rational proofs for the existence of God cannot reach very far towards the God of the Bible in answer to “the question contained in what, or whom, we call ‘God,'” a “Name [that] points toward something, or someone.” “Either we refuse it entry into the field of our awareness and attention, saying ‘no’ to the Name, or, more or less seriously, more or less sincerely, we open the door of the mind or the heart.” We cannot not choose. 

In so choosing, our human nature presents us with options. There is what the Bible calls “the flesh”—the world of kings and rich men (“let us today add; the celebrities“), the world of concupiscence (libido sentienti) and of curiosity, this last being the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the innate and not intellectual knowledge of Good and Evil. There is the option of the life of the mind, the world of scholars. And there is the option of the will, option of those who aim at justice, the choice of ‘men of good will’—very often animated by pride and by libido dominandi. Yet the will might also direct itself to the truth, as the “eyes of the heart” lead to wisdom not of the world but of the Holy Spirit.

These several “orders” of the human soul “are indifferent and invisible to each other. “As soon as we live or enter into one of these orders, we are subject to its law, to its specific manner of acting on our faculties, of irresistibly gaining the upper hand over them—over our eyes of flesh, our mind, or our heart,” constituting our “form of life,” our soul’s regime. Hence the title of Plato’s dialogue: Politeia, Regime, traditionally translated as Republic. All of these regimes promise “splendor, luster, empire, victory.” “All are dazzled by the palaces or pageants of the ‘great,'”; Archimedes “shines to the minds,” “triumphs convincingly over every human mind with sufficient abilities”; and “the order of Jesus” “transforms in secret those for whom the ‘eyes of the heart’ are open,” open someday win the greatest victory of all, to enter the most splendid Kingdom of all, the City of God.

In one sense, only one of these regimes is universal. “All human beings belong to and participate in the order of the flesh.” We all see; we all want to be seen. And even if we fail in being seen, our contemporaries commend ‘self-esteem’ to one another. Do it yourself! The Christian “order of charity is ordered in an opposite way, being “invisible” and entered not by one’s own powers but by the grace of Jesus Christ, by “going inside oneself, concentrating and collecting oneself in this invisible place of the heart that race alone attains and reveals.” The order of the flesh, with Machiavelli, desires to acquire. It acts, as Machiavelli remarks, according to nature, according to what human nature has become, visibly. “The wellspring of charity is entirely opposite, because charity extirpates the movement-of-taking at its root,” consisting in the heart’s purity and humility, which “leaves all the room for God’s will.” As for the order of the mind, it lives “between these two opposed orders.” “Reserved for a small number,” it rests not on the will, “either one’s own or God’s,” but “on the understanding, in whose exercise it finds its triumphs.” “Such is the Pascalian tripartition of the human world.” It is instructive to compare his tripartition with Plato’s. Plato divides the regimes of the soul and the regimes of the city into logos, the reasoning mind, epithumia, appetites, and thumos, translated “spiritedness.” Thumos is natural, having nothing to do with the Holy Spirit. It is the closest Plato comes to Pascal’s will, but it is not the will but rather a natural desire for victory, rule, glory. If allied with reason, thumos can assist reason in ruling the appetites; if allied with the appetites, it overthrows reason and runs to crime and even madness. Pascal sees in thumos the perpetual ally of the epithumia. For logos to rule, it must enlist the aid of the Logos, God, or more accurately, it must consent to the aid and indeed the rule of the Logos because it is the Logos Who enlists it, by His grace, not the reverse. As Manent puts it, “certain traits of the third Pascalian order are not absent from the Greek city, or, in any case, from Athens,” as seen in Socrates, “he of a nondescript, even repulsive appearance,” “penniless, without splendor, without rule, without triumph and, as such…invisible to the ‘eyes of the flesh,’ but for those who ‘see wisdom,’ or at least love and desire it, would they not say he was invested with a certain ‘magnificence’?” The regime of Socrates’ soul “separated him from the passionate or ‘carnal’ city.” “For the Greeks,” philosophy is “the only thing [that] is really situated outside of the city.”

For his part, however, “Pascal unsparingly dismisses this figure of the philosopher,” whose “splendor is vanity in the two senses of the term, because he wants ‘to win men’s esteem’ and because his secret does not harbor any truth,” his erotic intellectual quest for the ‘ideas’ of justice, truth, and all else undertaken ‘in vain.’ “Political philosophy as it was conceived by the Socratics, that critical dialectics that never tires of scrutinizing the opinions and speeches of the city, is dismissed by Pascal” because “the mind [that] emancipates itself and becomes an entirely separate order” from the city has no “criterion beyond its own clarity and fecundity,” resulting often enough in conceiving of truth as zeteticism about the things of the heavens, let alone the things of the Kingdom of Heaven. “The Pascalian tripartition…breaks with the civic synthesis” of the ancients “by emancipating and separating the mind”—this much, as philosophers do—but then “add[ing] a new order, the order of humility and charity, in such a way that human life can no longer be seen in a synoptic way, brought together in the same view,” within the rubric of nature, of the cosmic order or regime. The Creator-God is a holy, a separate Being, “ontologically and epistemologically separated from the other two lives and orders.” It too is comprehensive, but it is not homogenous, merely a variegated but integral ‘one,’ but radically heterogeneous, consisting of Creator and His Creation. 

Further, the Creator rules His Creation, commands it, makes just demands on it. Accordingly, Pascal “constantly exposes himself and exposes us to the force of the question that is the wellspring common to the three separate orders,” the “question ‘How should I live?'” If I live according to the ‘Flesh,’ I must pay “respect and obedience” to kings and oligarchs, “in short, to ‘force,’ because there is no real human order except by a certain arrange of force.” If I live according to the mind, I must pay respect to “established facts” and to “indemonstrable but evident principles” and to “demonstrated propositions—in short, to ‘geometry’.” If I live according to Christ, I must pay respect to “the order of wisdom or charity [that] provides access to the proposition and its power of illuminating the greatness and misery that define human life.” These separate orders or regimes nonetheless “encounter one another, jostle and mingle, struggle for preeminence, claim victory in the battlefield that is each human life,” not unlike rival countries ruled by regimes whose principles contradict one another do. But in the soul-struggle, “the order that is constantly on the offensive, that never stops or grows tired, is the order of the flesh.” The life of the flesh has received extraordinary enhancement in modernity from the life of the mind, as modern science aims at the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, and beyond relief, ever more extensive and exquisite physical pleasures. What, Manent asks, “should we say about the way in which these two unlimited desires”—the desire to know and the desire to acquire—were “tied together in the West to form a single passion, the vector of a unique project, a bond that should have remained eternally ruled out because, according to Pascal, the mind and the flesh are separated by an ‘infinite distance’?” 

Christianity teaches that “the will is capable of entering into the secret of charity”—of agape not eros—as soon as “it renounces itself.” “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (#234). Unfortunately, in Roman Catholic Christendom the alliance of mind and will forged by Aquinas led the Church to deny the further discoveries of the mind achieved by Galileo and others. This led to abuses of Church authority—the Inquisition, Jesuit maneuverings. “Pascal intervenes at this moment of extreme spiritual tension” among “the three orders of human life.” In this “drama,” the Church “pays for the power that it retains over consciences by renouncing proposing the Christian truth in its integrity and by refusing to grant their due to the truths of an unprecedented sort brought by the new physics”; additionally, as “the order of the mind and the order of the flesh encourage and stimulate one another, drawing humanity—in any case, Christendom—into a ‘progress’ that continually incites and disappoints the desire for a collective ‘order’ that satisfies all the needs of the body, or even for an entirely renewed human condition”—the results of the Second Coming without the Second Coming. But, as Pascal puts it with polite irony, “the ungodly who propose to follow reason must be singularly strong in reason.” Having addressed the challenge of Jesuit Machiavellianism in the Provincial Letters, Pascal turns to the challenge of modernity in the Pensées. 

Pascal acknowledges the truths discovered by modern science, with its combination of reasoning and physical experimentation. But those discoveries do not help us to understand how to live. And, being part of nature ourselves and given the vastness of nature as discovered by modern science, we will never really conquer it, although we will better understand our place in it as modern science progresses. Pascal, Manent observes, “is the only one, as it were, to take seriously geometry’s character as an order—that is, as a separate, and even infinitely distant order from the other orders.” The strength of geometry is its clarity; the limit of geometry it is that it does not, cannot, clarify everything.” On the contrary, and thankfully, “geometry causes humanity to encounter its limits, revealing to humans the weakness of their strength,” because geometry runs our minds up against infinity, showing the mind the limits of the mind.” As a result of our scientific inquiries, “we never arrive at the ultimate principles, but only at the ‘last that seems so to our reason.” So, for example, a physicist might postulate a ‘big bang’ as the origin of the cosmos, but if that explosion destroyed evidence of what caused it, we remain in the position of Socrates after he had studied the natural philosophy of his time: we will know that we do not know. “In accepting our ‘being’—that is, our ‘middling’, thus fluctuating condition—we reconcile ourselves to the contingent character of the human establishment and we understand that the communities in which we live cannot be founded on reason.” Pascal throws into question the ‘certainties’ Descartes had supposed himself to have based his geometry upon. “In radically detaching our knowledge from our being, Descartes had ruled out putting any limit to human desire,” Pascal sees that the limits of the human mind must limit the human desires Descartes has allied with the mind. “Whatever the new possibilities opened by the science of ‘figure’ and of ‘motion’…its developments will be without power or effect on the essentials of our condition” because “what we are is stronger than all our knowledge, our concrete and contingent being is stronger than all our abstracts sciences,” a truth we might not otherwise glimpse because “the smallness of our being hides infinity,” the vastness of the cosmos, “from our sight.” The “abstract sciences” “permit us to dispel countless errors about physical nature,” while having “nothing to say about what is proper to us.” If at least one proper study of mankind is man, modern science can explain him analytically, break him down into his elements, describe the relations of those physical elements among themselves; that is much, but it is not all. Modern science “multiplies indefinitely the types of knowledge that separate us from the knowledge of ourselves.” But “one must know oneself. Even if that does not help in finding truth, at least it helps in running one’s life, and nothing is more proper” (#72). [1]

In modernity, “experimental physics and the Christian religion form the two poles of human life insofar as it ‘knows what it is doing.'” The scientific experimenter “knows how to apply reason to experience”; the Christian can know “how to subject reason to faith” in “a domain of experience that has its own criteria.” Manent quotes a letter Pascal wrote to his sister, Gilberte, saying (along with the mystics of the early centuries of the Church, that “attention to ‘the interior movement of God’ cannot be effectively preserved except by ‘the continuation of the infusion of grace,’ so much so that ‘one must continually make new effort to acquire this constant newness of spirit, because one does not preserve the old grace except by the acquisition of a new grace'”—a conviction that Roman Catholic Pascal shares with Orthodox Christians. Admittedly, it is true that neither the regime of geometry nor the regime of Christianity knows (very much in the so-called ‘Biblical sense’) “the irregularities, lacunae, and disorders of the third order, the order of the flesh, the properly ‘human’ order”—the regime of postlapsarian humans, a regime that renders them “equally indifferent to human reason and to the grace of God.” “It is perhaps not superfluous to add that” this third order “is a factor that Europeans today refuse to consider soberly and impartially,” the factor of force. “Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions. Concupiscence causes voluntary, force involuntary actions.” (#97).

Hobbes is the preeminent philosopher of force. Hobbes took Descartes’ method into the human/political realm, elaborating an anti-Aristotelian, geometric political science, “the first rigorous science of obedience.” We only really know what we make. Let us then set about to making our regimes, founding them on “the most constant and powerful passion,” the “fear of violent death at the hands of others.” For Hobbes the political order can be, should be, “the methodical fabrication of the human world by man himself.” in the form of “the modern state—the great machine of rational obedience.”  But for Pascal, to a substantial extent “the components of human life are given.” Pascal agrees with Hobbes that men naturally hate each other and want to tyrannize one another. The human ‘self’ “has two characteristics. It is unjust in itself for making itself center of everything; it is a nuisance to others in that it tries to subjugate them, for each self is the enemy of all the others and would like to tyrannize them.” Well-designed political institutions may “take away the nuisance, but not the injustice.” (#597). Geometrical abstractions can only take us so far. 

With Hobbes and his more genial predecessor, Montaigne, Pascal fully recognizes the varieties of human life, the rule of custom as our “second nature that destroys the first” (#126). (“I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”) [2] But he interprets that diversity in a way unlike that of modern social sciences and the public opinion it has shaped. “For the moderns, this cultural diversity is the sign and expression of the power of humans over their condition, the sign and expression of the unlimited plasticity of their being—in short, of their freedom.” Not so, Pascal counters. Cultural diversity betrays our “servitude,” for “if people were actually free, they would have access to universal and stable criteria of justice, which would allow them to judge and order human things in full assurance.” Natural and divine laws exist; we violate them because we are ‘fallen.’ As far as “true justice” is concerned, “we no longer have any”—not since Eden (#86). Hobbes believes that human reason, in the form of his new and, he claims, first genuinely scientific political science, can provide access to natural laws while eschewing what he dismisses as mythological divine laws. On the contrary, Pascal rejoins, human reason cannot provide human beings with “adequate support.” Man “does not know” what justice is (#60). “Larceny, incest, infanticide, parricide, everything has at some time been accounted a virtuous action”; “it is by virtue of senatorial decrees and votes of the people that crimes are committed” (#60). And if we did have a sure knowledge of it, it would “be dangerous to tell the people that laws are not just, because they obey them only when they believe them to be just. “That is why they must be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, just as superiors must be obeyed because they are superior. That is how to forestall any sedition, if people can be made to understand that, and that is the proper definition of justice,” as least on ‘this earth’ (#66). When they wish to “dislodge established customs,” to revolutionize, to change a political regime, men ‘question authority,’ refute the prevailing customs, demand “a return to the basic and primitive laws of the state which unjust custom has abolished. There is no surer way to lose everything.” (#160).  This is why that “the wisest of legislators” commend that “men must be deceived for their own good”—the “noble lie” Socrates finds in the best founding, the others being less than noble (#160). “The truth about the usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable” because at least it makes men less irritating and dangerous to one another; “the greatest of evils is civil war” (#94). Pascal even pays a sort of tribute to the Hobbesian effort: It is “man’s greatness even in his concupiscence” to have “managed to produce such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity” (#118). Because, alas, “the name of right goes to the dictates of might” (#85); “it is necessary to follow the mighty” (#103). For example, “equality of possessions is no doubt right,” and it even finds shaky fulfillment in some monasteries, “but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not fortify justice they have justified force, so that right and might live together and peace reigns, the sovereign good” (#81).   “It is not the same thing with the Church, because there genuine justice exists without any violence,” at least insofar as Jesuitism does not prevail in its precincts (#85). “The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instill religion in our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instill it into hearts and minds with force and threat is to instill not religion but terror,” Manent adds. [3] Or, as Pascal has it (prefiguring an argument of the American Founders), “Multiplicity which is not reduced to union is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny” (#604).  

It would be far better to “combine right and might, and to that end make right into might or might into right.” Thus far, however, “unable to make right into might,” we have “made might into right.” (#103). Hobbes’s attempt to found political science on geometric abstraction must fail. “How can people who are morally undetermined by nature receive rules of justice, not to mention produce them?” The “regime of the modern state” that Hobbes propounds, following the Baconian science derived from Machiavellian ambition, “can be called just because in principle it produces a peace advantageous to all, but no one in this regime, governing or governed, can be called just.” Hobbes attempts a geometrical solution to the problem of the flesh, an attempt to conquer human nature. Because “natural hatred among men” is an “interior cause,” its “core” being “an intention of the human being as such,” it cannot truly be remediated by any political science. At best, human cooperation can occur when these other-hating human beings that they need to cooperate with one another in order to satisfy their concupiscent desires more fully—when they consent to rule and to be ruled within a commercial regime. Nonetheless, “Montesquieu himself,” the “most determined and subtle promoter” of that regime, “will not fail to point out that a certain moral degradation accompanies the exclusive reign of the commercial spirit.” But “anyone who does not hate the self-love within him and the instinct which leads him to make himself into a God must be really blind” (#617). 

Catholic tradition adapted Aristotelian political science to the European circumstance, “placing in a law oriented to the common good the principal instrument of the good life,” concurring with Aristotle’s judgment that politics is the architectonic art, that political science is the architectonic discipline, while “formulating the new exigencies that the concern for salvation added to the political and social obligations arising from our nature.” That proved too heavy a burden for political communities to bear, even with the Church as their guide. In the respublica christiana, “the law directly attacked concupiscence and claimed, if not to defeat it, at least to control it,” albeit with “little success.” Pascal eschewed the failed attempt to control concupiscence directly by civil law. There was no sense in “claim[ing] to act ‘as if’ the kingdom of charity had arrived.” “Despite the meritorious virtues of sincere Christians, despite even the heroic virtues of the saints, the kingdoms of the world will remain kingdoms of concupiscence until the day of judgment.” Justice is invisible, force visible. Concupiscent human beings incline to ‘think’ with their eyes, claiming as justice what is really nothing more than some arrangement of their desires. Concupiscence defeats the unworldly commands of the Church, as Machiavelli and Hobbes understand, but it also defeats their own systems. At best, in order “to render their victory sure and, for that purpose, to exit from the state of war,” strong men “must convert their military victory into a peaceful order,” a “new regime” that will be “accepted by all, including the defeated party” by including members of that party in its ‘power structure.’ Now, “the bonds securing men’s mutual respect are generally bonds of necessity, for there must be differences of degree, since all men want to be on top and all cannot be, but some can” (#828). “The masters, who do not want the war to go on, ordain that the power which is in their hands shall pass down by whatever means they like; some entrust it to popular suffrage, others to hereditary succession, etc. And that is where imagination begins to play its part,” the possibly and passably noble lie. “These bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination.” (#828). The one, the few, the many: whoever rules must invest itself with imagined majesty and authority, if not mystery. “The imagination, formed by the legislator…fixes the perspective on the human world.”

Despite all this, Pascal is no ‘perspectivist’ or ‘relativist.’ “He intends to preserve the universal validity of the moral code.” The pagans of antiquity built “disagreement over justice” into their regimes—Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’ in which neither the few who are rich nor the many who are poor can get anything done without the others’ consent being an excellent example. This “struggle of the parties does not know any truce” because the imagination of the partisans focuses not on the known, the self-interest of all the parties, but on “the city itself, which is the object of the citizens’ eros. In Pascal’s France, however, where the monarchic-aristocratic regime “has been established for a very long time,” it is “a question of preventing, rather than explicating, the dialectical debate, the conflict of opinions concerning justice.” Imagination and force combine to prevent faction: “The chancellor is a grave man, dressed in fine robes because his position is false; not so the king. He enjoys power, and has no use for imagination. Judges, doctors, etc., enjoy nothing but imagination.” (#87). “Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical,” the first out of piety, the second out of ideology (#21). But in this world, it is imagination “that decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good” (#44). In Pascal’s more measured view, “the world is a good judge of things, because it is in the state of natural ignorance where man really belongs. Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing and come lack the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself. Those who stand half-way have put their natural ignorance behind them without yet attaining the other; they have some smattering of adequate knowledge and pretend to understand everything. They upset the world and get everything wrong.” Crucially, the imagination is “quite visible,” thus obeyable by worldlings. “Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them, not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a still higher light,” the light that brings the Apostle Paul to adjure Christians to respect the one who does not bear the sword in vain, the light of Christ who tells Christians to pay their taxes in the coin that has the stamp of Caesar on it. 

Manent asks, “Does not modern democracy rest on the close alliance of the people and the half-clever?” It has not been a fatal alliance, in the long run, but it remains fragile, as one set of men can turn on the other. “Pascal perhaps invites us to put the half-clever back in their place.” It might be far more strenuous and bloodier to attempt to put the people in their place. And as for “the devout” and “the perfect Christian,” the devout has more zeal than knowledge, attempting to make the Christian light prevail in politics. The perfect Christian has the “knowledge” the devout lacks, or perhaps even more the prudence of the serpent that Jesus commends to His disciples. “One must obey in conscience—in conscience—the established order, while keeping in mind that this order—force and justice mixed together—is contingent and that, if it is not simply ‘just,’ it is not simply ‘unjust’ either.” That is, “there is a just way of comporting oneself in a world without justice, and of relating to it.” 

This makes the Christian proposition, as understood by Pascal, “incomparably more concrete and determinate than any human proposition, whose binding element, as we have emphasized, resides in the imagination.” The Christian proposition demands a choice: my self against all the other human ‘selves’ or the Person who is God, who is ‘for’ all human selves? Egocentricity or theocentricity? “As the clever knows that it is not possible to separate human justice from the force without which it is only an insubstantial ‘quality,’ the ‘perfect Christian’ knows that the good wheat and the chaff grow together and that it is at the very least imprudent, and probably impious, to give to social man the mandate to perform this discrimination reserved to divine justice.” As Pascal has it, “justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly.” (#45). 

Notes

1. “Unless we know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness, and unrighteousness, we are truly blind” (#595). It is also true than man is “made for thinking,” which means that our “whole duty is to think as [we] ought,” beginning with what we ought to think of ourselves” (#620). There being a “civil war in man between reason and passions” (#621), we find, upon self-examination, that “man is neither angel nor beast” and, moreover, “anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast” (#678). To win the civil war, to do that as a self-knowing man, “we must treat [the passions] like slaves, and give them food but prevent the soul feeding on it” (#603). Since this is humanly impossible, we need, first, to learn to “hate ourselves” and to love God, who is the only Person who can effectively strengthen our reason, our distinctively human nature, against the bestial passions (#220). “The true and only virtue is…to hate ourselves, for our concupiscence makes us hateful” (#564). However, “we cannot love what is outside us,” given our self-love, so “we must love a being who is within us but is not our own self” (#564).  That being is the God of the Bible. “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.” (#417). It is “the sign of the true religion…that it obliges men to love God,” a love expressed through prayer; “no other religion has asked God to make us love and follow him” (#214). “How then can we have anything but respect for a religion which knows man’s faults so well? What desire but that a religion which promises such desirable remedies should be true?” (#595). Thus, “I marvel at an original and august religion, wholly divine in its authority, its longevity, its perpetuity, its morality, its conduct, its doctrine, its effects. Thus I stretch out my arms to my Savior, who, after being foretold for four thousand years, came on earth to die and suffer for me at the time and in the circumstances foretold. By his grace I peaceably await death, in the hope of being eternally united to him, and meanwhile I live joyfully, whether in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me or in the afflictions he sends me for my own good and taught me how to endure by his example.” (#792).
2. “Montaigne is wrong. The only reason for following custom is that it is custom, not that it is reasonable or just, but the people follow it because they think it just. Otherwise they would not follow it any more….” (#525).
3. “It is false piety to preserve peace at the expense of truth,” just as “it is also false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity” (#949). Pride and sloth are “the twin causes of all vice”; “the Christian religion alone has been able to cure these twin vices, not by using one to expel the other according to worldly wisdom, but by expelling both through the simplicity of the Gospel” (#208). “States would perish if their laws were not stretched to meet necessity, but religion has never tolerated or practiced such a thing. So either compromises or miracles are needed.” (#280). “Two laws are enough to rule the whole Christian republic better than all political laws”: love God, love your neighbor (#376). For states, more laws are necessary, and Christians should obey them.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A.J. Krailsheimer translation. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Why Pascal?

If you want to be challenged by a writer, put your money on Blaise Pascal. Pierre Manent has, and the payout is substantial.

He writes primarily to his fellow Europeans, whom he describes as perplexed and doubtful: “Who are we?” Once understanding themselves as Christians, yet also pulled toward “the attraction of strength, the desire for glory, and the affirmation of human will and freedom,” Europeans now “do not know what to think or do with Christianity” and, perhaps, do not know what to do with power freedom, now a bit embarrassed by glory. When Europe was Christendom, “nowhere else but in Europe was human liberty exposed to such a breadth of possibilities, the human will to an alternative of such profundity.” But now? A choice between two mighty alternatives, both gone lukewarm? A condition of hesitation worthy only of the Last Man?

“Europe is not Christian, it does not want to be Christian.” It re-baptized itself in “a baptism of erasure” that rendered it “impermeable to its historical religion, and consequently incapable of conducting itself judiciously vis-à-vis the other religions that it agrees to receive, most often favorably, because they at least are not Christian”—in the dubious hope that it can somehow neutralize them, too, in its “condition of untroubled incomprehension of the religious question.” The problem is not only that it thereby leaves itself vulnerable to religious militants who refuse to tolerate toleration, but that Christianity (rather like the Holy Spirit) doesn’t go away. It is “the only religious that is entirely independent of every existing human association—people, city, empire.” It leaves itself room for adaptation to circumstances in a way that old and new civil religions do not. In this way, it resembles Aristotle’s prudential man while following Jesus’ command to be prudent as serpents while remaining (or, in light of stubborn old sin, aspiring to be) innocent as doves.

Christianity declared its independence with “a radically new word,” the Word of God, Logos, with “a radically new action,” the work of the Cross, and with “a radically new bond between word and action,” the Ecclesia, the Assembly of Christians; “there is no ‘Christianity’ without the Christian church,” “an unprecedented human association.” This radically new regime, this Kingdom of God, in but not of the many cities of Man, posited a new purpose for human beings as such: “to arrive at God.” To put it Greekly, theosis is not eudaimonia, although it encompasses and elevates eudaimonia.  It is not human or, like the incarnate God, not exclusively or even primarily human. This regime requires, as all regimes do, a purpose (salvation of the souls of individual persons), a Ruler and a set of vicegerents, a set of ruling offices, institutions, and a way of life (“My way” and no one else’s, as God told, first, the Israelites and then the nations). Such authority could not but inflect the thoughts and actions of “princes and peoples” in an extraordinary manner, making itself “an axial question of the political, moral, and spiritual history of Europe.” 

Christianity troubled Europe, as it had troubled Rome before. The European princes attempted to use it for their own purposes, as Machiavelli recommended, or to make a truce with it by separating their states from the Church. But “today, we no longer have separation, properly speaking, because the state has drawn to itself all authority,” since “the state cannot simultaneously be superior and really separate.” The modern state has elevated itself above all religions and, its partisans suppose, above “human passions and opinions,” being ‘impersonal’ in a way that no previous ruling body had been. At the same time, it makes itself into a sort of church, not only “the guardian of external order” but “the guardian of ‘values.'” Values are a matter of mere opinion, ‘relative’ to one another, but in practice they must ultimately be relative to the purposes of the state. “The neutral state went in search of each member of society in the intimacy of his will, in order that he agree to obey it before giving his faith and eventually his obedience to the church; in this way the first act of the human will was for the state and not for God.” Such a priority, consent to the sovereign state, cannot but conflict with the authority of God and cannot consistently uphold any purpose, even a ‘secular’ purpose, inasmuch as a “church of separated wills,” consenting to nothing more than hanging out together, finally can neither govern itself nor sustain itself against those whose purposes are firmer.

Machiavellianism didn’t take hold politically until the middle of the seventeenth century. That, Manent remarks, is when Pascal thought and wrote, rethinking the Christian regime or, as Manent more politely puts it, the Christian proposition, “the connected series of Christian doctrines or mysteries” offered to human beings for their consent and accompanied by a “specific form of life.” “I sought the aid and assurance of Pascal to rediscover the exact terms, and to grasp the gravity and urgency, of the Christian question—that of the Christian faith, of the possibility of the Christian faith.” The middle of the seventeenth century saw horrendous civil wars fought over the Christian faith, along with the sovereign state’s answer to those wars. Pascal thus confronted challenges to Christianity from within and from without. Now that the modern state is so sure of itself, while the demi-citizens of modern European states are so perplexed, Manent poses Christianity as a question, a question that it may also provide an answer to perplexity. Are you sure that all values are relative?

Modern Atheism

In a way, Christianity lends itself to atheism. Human beings tend to believe what they want to believe. God tells them things they don’t want to believe: love your enemies, don’t fornicate. His religion “find[s] support in none of the wellsprings of human nature.” As a result, in Pascal’s words, “men despise religion”; “they hate it and are afraid it may be true” (#12). Why, Manent asks, did the Roman Empire, so intent on ruling the world, “associat[e] itself with the religious proposition the least suited to the motives of the commanding and conquering animal”? It may have needed to. Christians had grown to numerous either to persecute or to ignore; they had to be ‘let in.’ As Pascal writes “What is wonderful, incomparable and wholly divine is that this religion which has always survived has always been under attack,” continuing “without bending and bowing to the will of tyrants ” (#281). And again: “The only religion which is against nature, against common sense, and against our pleasures is the only one that has always existed” since the Garden of Eden and before (#284). Such a phenomenon had to be accommodated, somehow, and it was.

True, both sides saw “the distinction between God and Caesar,” but the Church was itself “a great legal or juridical fact, an immense teaching and commanding association, which cannot convey the gospel message if it does not have the strength to make its absolute independence respected.” Manent locates the crucial break in that association not so much in the Great Schism but in the Reformation, the schism within the Western Church. It was the Reformation that “open[ed] an unprecedented career to the state” by “giving rise to separate churches,” each seeking state protection. With this, “the state became the principle of order par excellence, not only of external order but also of a certain internal order,” its “peace and justice” acquiring “a spiritual quality that until then had eluded the profane powers” of Christendom.” This “spiritual quality…was different from the civic sacredness of paganism” because it “brought the members of society together in an unprecedented sentiment of unity and strength,” consent to state sovereignty often confirmed by what would come to be called nationalism, the valorization of the new cult of national culture. At the heart of those exercising the sovereignty of the state was the decidedly anti-Christian, Machiavellian passion, libido dominandi —the sort of thing that got Satan in trouble with God, much to Adam’s eventual disadvantage. Pascal’s critique of the Jesuits in the Provincial Letters centers on the Jesuits’ fall into Machiavellianism, their surreptitious departure from the principles of their founder, Ignatius of Loyola. The Jesuits have become far too eager “to keep on good terms with all the world,” as Pascal puts it. They would rule souls at the cost of departing from Christianity. But under modern conditions of Machiavellian statism, coming as it does after a way of life governed by doctrines, does not bring back paganism but the manipulation of rival doctrines, eventually called ‘ideologies,’ convenient deceptions, not-so-noble lies, at the service of libido dominandi. [1] 

Against this, Pascal sought to reestablish Christian doctrine, and especially the doctrine of grace “in its clarity and authority and to bring to light the way in which the Christian religion presents itself to the acting person and the way the acting human being relates to the Christian religion.” The way to grace is repentance, animated by humility—the opposite of the natural human propensity to make ruling an ‘end in itself,’ really a means to satisfying human pride in opposition to God. Once human pride establishes itself as the purpose of human life, human life imagines itself to progress by successive conquests—conquests of other men, of fortune, of nature. “We therefore run endlessly toward a horizon that constantly recedes,” a supposed ‘progress’ that actually goes in circles because it has no limit. The Jesuits “contribute to the encouragement and acceleration of a transfer of moral and spiritual allegiance from the church to the state.” 

Manent raises a doubt about Pascal’s preferred Christian sect, the Jansenists. The Jansenists wanted “a sort of ‘direct government’ by God over his church.” God demurred, preferring to allow human beings to choose Him or not. It is to the question of that choice that Pascal addresses himself in the fragments of a book that have come down to us as the Pensées. There is an “atheist in every human being,” including Pascal; in the Pensées, he addresses him. With serpentine prudence, as the editor of Pascal’s Oeuvres Complète observes, “he never began with a dispute, or by establishing the principles that he wished to articulate, but he wanted to know beforehand if they sought the truth with their whole hear; and he acted accordingly with them.” Manent takes up that challenge, engages in that dialogue.

The ‘Wager’

In pagan antiquity, there were three kinds of gods: those of the poets, conjured in imagination; those of the philosophers, who reasoned their way into several theologies; and those of the rulers, the civil religions of Rome and Israel. It is the latter civil religion that Pascal takes seriously. The “Holy One of Israel educate[s] his people by teaching to understand, by tirelessly attempting to make it understand, that he alone is the source of the salvation of the children of Israel.” He commands war against the Amalekites; victory only comes so long as Moses holds the rod of God aloft. “Politics and religion, which we love to separate, are here inseparably mixed,” Manent remarks; “in truth, they are indistinguishable,” and the Israelites’ many attempts to weaken or sever their Covenant with God only led to their punishment by God. God does so because he intends to use Israel to destroy His enemies. “In order to make himself known to the political animal, what is more appropriate than this direct government of Yahweh, with all the consequences for the soul and body of the children of Israel?” Yet the Israelites, like all humans, grew restive under the unnatural (because divine, holy, separate from Creation) divine yoke, demanding a king in order to be “like all the nations.” My way is not your way, My thoughts are not your thoughts. So much the worse for you, unless you align yourself with Me, with My regime, My “way.” 

If you do, you will accept the only really convincing proofs of the God of the Bible, particularly as He manifests Himself in the New Testament. Pascal tells us that “We know God only through Jesus Christ. Without this mediator all communication with God is broken off. Through Jesus we know God.” But how do we know Jesus is the Christ? “To prove Christ we have the prophecies” of the Old Testament” which are solid and palpable truths,” prophecies “fulfilled and proved by the event.” “Without Scripture, without original sin without the necessary mediator who was promised and came it is impossible to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound morality. But through and in Christ we can prove God’s existence, and teach both doctrine and morality. Therefore Jesus is the true God of men.” (#189). Yes, but to prove God’s existence this way, one must first open our souls to the revelations of Scripture. Proofs of the sort Thomas Aquinas and others offer, amalgamations of Scripture and reasoning, won’t do if Scripture is no authority. “Pascal seeks to free us from the hold of the ‘metaphysical proofs of God’ that presuppose that the same procedure of reason can simultaneously validate the ‘ascending ‘ movement of Greek philosophy and the ‘descending’ movement of Jewish and Christian revelation, in such a way that the God of philosophers can also be the God of Jews and Christians.” As Pascal writes, “the metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake,” losing “through pride” what they “gained by curiosity” (#190). Given his corrupt nature, “man does no act according to the reason which constitutes his nature” (#491). To proceed more effectively, Pascal intends to induce his readers, in Manent’s words, to “step outside their condition of atheism,” their “practical indifference to the possibility of God,” by “engaging the active faculties of our being, and first of all the one that is the principle of every movement of the soul, the will.” Reasoning, whether that of the classical or of the modern philosophers, has “captured the mind” for atheism, very much in accordance with (sinful) human nature. To recapture the mind for God, the will needs to be redirected, not (initially) the mind itself because the mind by itself does not aim in God’s direction but in the direction of human things or, at most, of the nature that encompasses human things. “The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect,” Pascal contends. “Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then,” and only then, “show that it is.” Show that it is “worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature,” better than reasoning can. Show that it is “attractive because it promises true good,” not the false or at best partial goods we perceive by reasoning (#12). [2]

Here the wager comes in. Pascal elaborates it in his fragment #418. “We do not know the existence or the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.” Or, as Orthodox Christians say, we cannot know God’s “essence”; to see it would overwhelm our finite capacities and indeed kill us. “We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is” according to the usual proofs. However, “it is quite possible to know that something exists without knowing its nature.” Reason, which requires the finitude of nature seen in its animating principle, the principle of non-contradiction first enunciated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, “cannot decide this question.” In acknowledging that they have no real rational, demonstrative proof of God’s existence, by admitting the “folly” of their faith, Christians “show that they are not without sense.” “Either God is or he is not”; “reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.” Very well then, if not atheism, then reason brings us to agnosticism, advising us that “the right thing is not to wager at all.” As Manent puts it, while the agnostic does not deny God’s existence, he “he does not will to go toward God.” 

“Yes, but you must wager,” Pascal rejoins. And here reason enters back in, not ‘pure’ or ‘metaphysical’ reason but ‘practical’ reason. “You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness.” Your reason “cannot be affronted” by either choice, “since you must necessarily choose,” exercise your will. Your happiness is another matter. If you wager that God exists and you are right, “you win everything.” If you wager that God exists and you are wrong, “you lose nothing,” shuffling off this mortal coil to an unavoidable oblivion. What is more (very much more!), you are not betting, say, your one life in the hope of getting two lives, or three. You are betting on “an eternity of life and happiness.” And so, “wherever there is infinity, and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning, there is no room for hesitation, you must give everything”; “you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing.”

And if you reply, “I am so made that I cannot believe,” then blame “your passions,” not reason. “Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions”—what the Bible calls spiritual warfare. “What harm will come to you from choosing this course? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend, “eschewing enjoyment of “noxious pleasures, glory and good living”—good according to your passions—but “will you not have others?” Thus, “you will gain even in this life,” although the greatest potential gain is in the ‘next’ life.

Manent writes, “One sees that Pascal takes into account the whole of the human soul with its two great faculties of reason and will and their two great objects, the true and the good.” Our reason alone can bring us to know God, but it “does retain the role of indicating to the will the terms of the choice, without being in the least able to determine the choice.” That choice is a “blind choice.” Once we fully see our blindness, “the more it becomes irresistibly evident that there is only one possible choice,” not on the basis of rational calculation, not on probabilities, for the infinite is by definition incalculable. Rather, “our capacity for choice, activated by our will for happiness…is irresistibly carried away by the disproportion between the terms of the alternative,” all or nothing. Manent does not “justify the wager for God” but responds “to the objections of calculating reason” by the very means of an analogy to wagering, which exercises calculating reasoning. “Because the interlocutor allowed himself to be troubled by the questions of calculating reason, Pascal,” one of the great mathematicians, “is going to teach him how to calculate.” By then introducing the incalulable, the infinite, making the equation radically un-‘equal,’ he “does not want to prove anything” but rather intends to “set us in motion,” to teach us not to confuse the probable with the possible. Winning the infinite reward may not be probable, but so long as it is possible it is the best bet. He does not attempt to prove anything “to calculating reason, but to make practical reason feel that the choice of the Infinite is a very natural way of proceeding.” He wants his readers “to remain open, or to open themselves, to the possibility of infinite life.” What is our finite, natural life, lived within the limits of “self-love,” in contrast with “a good that is infinite”? “Only the ‘heart,'” not reason, “has the breadth and flexibility to make the same being capable of making two absolutely opposed choices”: that “the choice of the Infinite imposes itself on us in a way that overturns the ordinary conditions of human choices” while at the same time “the choice of the Infinite ought to be as easy and natural as our most ordinary choices.” Limited reason needs to recognize its limitations, exercise itself within them; it “must be reasonable enough to recognize that it does not make the great decision of life.” [3] The heart “either gives, or hardens, itself as it chooses.” “By understanding that ‘our life’ is not that solid and sure thing on the basis of which we can decide the just and the reasonable, but rather the deceptive fruit of a choice of the heart, our heart, which is indeed great and capable of infinity, but which our vicious will attaches to this finite life, a movement of the will that immediately shuts us off from the possible Infinite.” Such an attachment is unreasonable, yet it can only be seen as unreasonable once the “heart” opens itself to Logos, to reason. [4]

Pascal’s Wager, Anselm’s Proof

Manent has observed that Pascal’s departs from the proofs confirming the validity of Christian revelation advanced by Aquinas, who “proceed[s] from ‘effects’ that the senses observe in nature, the ‘argument from design,’ or by Descartes, who proceeds “from ‘ideas.'” These proofs “leave us cold because they are too ‘remote from the reasonings of human beings,'” that is, “from the way human beings reason in the ordinary circumstances of life.” And they don’t prove the existence of what so many want to know: the existence of the God of the Bible. Wagering is closer to home. Yet he “seems to ignore a particularly famous argument in the history of philosophical and theological reflection, which is quite different from proofs by ideas or effects” and at the same bases itself on ground shared by everyone. Anselm takes up the condition “where we already find ourselves.” We all say ‘God,’ but we seldom reflect upon the implications of saying ‘God.’ In his Proslogicon, Anselm does so reflect. In saying ‘God,’ both believers and unbelievers think of “that than which no greater can be conceived”; a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind; if God exists as an idea (and He does) but does not exist in reality, then we can imagine something greater than God; that being impossible (by the definition of ‘God’), if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God exists in reality. He does, so he does.

Manent proposes a new understanding of Anselm’s argument, which is usually understood as a logical proof based upon the idea of ‘God.’ Manent proposes that Anselm does not start with an idea, “a thing that is thought, a cogitatum, but a cogitans, a person who thinks,” a person who seeks, who “strain[s] toward something of which one is ignorant and that one desires to know.” In this, he is much closer to Pascal than to Descartes. In “open[ing] up the immensity of what is to be thought, the one who thinks becomes aware of his inability to think it, experiencing simultaneously the greatness of the object of his desire”—the ‘essence’ of God, in Orthodox Christian terms—and “his own littleness.” If, as the Bible says, the fool has said in his heart that there is no God, “when he hears what Anselm says, when he hears the formula, grasps what he hears”; he then cannot “say that he does not grasp what he himself says when he pronounces his denial.” In “comprehending the definition of what he denies, [he] is obliged to understand that in reality he affirms it.” Put another way, “what he thinks in order to deny it is necessarily stronger than his denial.” Any fool might be right to deny an alleged ‘fact.’ But ‘God’ isn’t a fact, is not reducible “to the ordinary condition of things that [the human mind] understands.” A human being can understand Aristotle’s god, the ‘First Mover.’ But Aristotle simply never heard of the God of the Bible, and so did not have to confront the assertion of the Bible, to affirm or to question it. The fool who denies the existence of the Biblical God “considers himself greater than the greatest being and quite competent to decide that about God there is nothing to think and that one can think man without thinking God.” Caught you, you nihilist: you have already thought ‘God.’ But you have not understood the implication of so thinking. 

Pascal demurs. For him, “it is not a question of inciting the unbeliever to better understand, to really understand what the believer intends when he says ‘God,’ but of persuading him to change radically—to invert as it were—the direction of his being.” That is what the wager does; it “engages the unbeliever in a radical change of life,” a change in direction of the will necessary to any genuine change of mind—what Christians call a conversion. Whereas both Anselm and Pascal “endeavor by their argument to provoke in us an active and continuous relation to him who is designated by the word ‘God,'” Anselm addresses how we think whereas Pascal addresses how we choose. “God is not properly an object of the science or art of proving. If he exists, he is without any proportion to the machinery of any proof there might be.” It is God who proposes, reveals Himself, to man. Man’s rational eros, his desire to know, won’t get him to God, no matter how intelligent his efforts may be. For man, “it is a matter of responding to a proposition.” Pace Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, but “whoever desires to enter into the understanding of the Christian proposition,” which is the proposition of a God Who proposes, “must begin by accepting the condition in which it places human beings when it addresses them—the condition of one who listens.” Pascal elaborates, “those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate, and feel quite legitimately convinced, but to those who do not have it we can only give such faith through reasoning, until God gives it by moving their heart, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation” (#110).

Note

1. For a fuller discussion of the Provincial Letters and of Manent’s commentary on them, see “Pascal Against the Jesuits,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. “The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves, so that when there are no true objects for them, they necessarily become attached to false ones” (#661). “The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect by which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one it does not care to see,” leading the mind in the direction it “likes” (#539). That is, “all our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling” (#530). Indeed, “How absurd is reason, the sport of every wind!” (#44). Therefore, “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (#234).
3. See Richard Hooker: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, discussed on this website in a review titled, “Reason Within the Limits of Religion Alone,” under the category, “Bible Notes.”
4. “Faith is different from proof,” Pascal observes. “One is human and the other a gift from God…. This is the faith that God himself puts in our hearts.” (#7). 

Pierre Manent: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2025.

In the sixteenth century, Thomist Roman Catholicism found itself embroiled in controversy. Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority, including the issuance of indulgences, and his critique of Erasmus’ teaching on the freedom of the will had shaken Christendom. Luther had been a member of the Church’s Order of St. Augustine, and he inclined to prefer Augustinian emphasis on Scriptural interpretation to the regnant Thomism, centered in the Dominican Order, and well enunciated by Francisco de Vitoria, a school of interpretation which gave scope to rational deduction from Scripture as a supplement to Scripture itself. This valorization of human reason in turn gave credit to the doctrine of free will, as defended by Erasmus, who in turn inspired that humane Thomist and contemporary of Luther, Francisco Vitoria. Luther’s strict Augustinianism may be said to have inclined him to his famous doctrines of justification by faith alone and faith by divine grace alone, staples of the Protestant Reformation. 

A somewhat similar controversy arose within the Catholic Church itself. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus or ‘Jesuits’ in 1541. Although the Dominicans by no means eschewed evangelical work (Vitoria wrote extensively on the right treatment of the Indians in the New World, ‘discovered’ by Spanish explorers), they inclined to scholarly study in a communal setting. The Jesuits were activists, and this commended them to the Vatican, always alert to ways of extending its spiritual empire. Doctrinally, the two orders differed on the vexed question of free will and determinism. Thomists advocated proemotio physica, physical premotion, holding that God directly causes the motions of the human will, especially with respect to its consent to faithful adherence to Christian doctrine. Jesuits (as seen in the writings of Luis de Molina) advocated scientifia media, middle knowledge, holding that God has foreknowledge of what men will freely will in any given circumstance, then ordains the circumstance. Thomists charged the Jesuits with inclining toward the Pelagianism Augustine had opposed and the Church had condemned; Jesuits charged the neo-Thomists with inclining toward Lutheranism.

Cornelius Jansen (“Jansenius”) entered the controversy in the 1630s. He attacked de Molina’s views, weighing in on the Augustinian side of the question; his magnum opus, published posthumously, was titled Augustinus. But his insistence on the irresistibility of God’s race, his denial of free will regarding matters of salvation, did not prevent him, as the Bishop of Ypres, from yearning for Dutch liberty against Spanish or French domination. His 1635 polemic, the Mars Gallicus, inveighs against the ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu, a careful student of Machiavelli and organizer of the centralized Bourbon state, an institution very much in line with Machiavelli’s precepts. This made Jansenism suspect indeed in France; as evidence against their rivals, the Jesuits extracted five propositions from Augustinus and arranged to have it condemned by two popes.

By the 1650s, when Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters, the Jansenist side of the controversy had been carried on by Antoine Arnauld, who maintained that Jansen’s book contained none of the propositions that had been condemned. The first ten of Pascal’s letters, published pseudonymously, consist of letters written by “the Provincial,” now living in Paris, to a friend who still lives in the countryside; letters eleven to sixteen are addressed directly to the Jesuits and the final three letters are addressed to François Annat, a Jesuit who had written against Jansenism. Like many young men, Pascal delighted in satirizing his elders and betters; unlike most of them, he was exceptionally good at it.

“We were entirely mistaken,” when we were living in the provinces, viewing academia from afar, the Provincial writes to his friend. “It was only yesterday that I was undeceived. Until that time I had labored under the impression that the disputes in the Sorbonne” amongst the theology professors “were vastly important and deeply affected the interests of religion.” No, and no.

Two questions are debated. The first is a question of fact. Was Arnauld correct when he asserted that Jansenius’ book had none of the propositions condemned by “the late pope”? To that, the Provincial replies that one can read the book for himself—a wise strategy, regarding most books. Not one of his accusers has found any of the alleged propositions, and “the truth is that the world has become skeptical of late”—consider Descartes—and “will not believe things till it sees them.” 

And then there is the question of right doctrine. In this instance, “it is of as little consequence” as the question of fact. Is God’s grace “efficacious of itself,” determining the will of the person upon whom it is bestowed? Or is it “given to all men”? Both sides agree that the righteous have the power to obey God’s commands, but to what extent does God grant them all the power needed to obey them? A series of comical dialogues ensues, wherein the Provincial goes from one party in the dispute to another and another, asking each what he means by the term “proximate” power, that is, the direct, intimate power God exercises on the human soul. One of them tells him, if a man “calls that power proximate power, he will be a Thomist, and therefore a Catholic, if not, he will be a Jansenist and, therefore, a heretic.” That is, it is only a matter of how they use the word. Under the pope’s edict, both sides have agreed use the word “without saying what it signifies.” Ah, “I was thus let into the whole secret of their plot,” which is “nothing better than pure chicanery,” since whichever definition a disputant holds, he can “claim the victory.” Only semi-disabused, he is reduced to begging: “I entreat you, for the last time, what is necessary to be believed in order to be a good Catholic.” Why, go along with the game, my boy: “‘You must say,” they all vociferated simultaneously, “that all the righteous have the proximate power, abstracting from it all sense” intended by the parties involved. But (he persists) is “proximate” a “Scripture word”? No. Then why use it? Because if you don’t use it, you will be like the heretical Arnaud, “for we are the majority.” The majority of theologians thus trumps the Word of God. “Upon hearing this solid argument, I took my leave of them.” The argument’s solidity is a matter of Church politics, a conflict upon which the pope, the monarch, has imposed a limit, rather as a Bourbon monarch might.

On a more strictly theological, as distinguished from majoritarian, note, several points “remain undisputed and uncondemned by either party”: “grace is not given to all men”; “all the righteous have always the power of obeying the divine commandments”; all the righteous nevertheless require, “in order to obey them, and even to pray, an efficacious grace, which invincibly determines their will”; and finally, “this efficacious grace is not always granted to all the righteous,” depending as it does “on the pure mercy of God” and not on human virtue, however impressive. Since “nothing runs any risk but that word without sense,” proximate, “happy the people who are ignorant of its existence!”

In Letter II, the Provincial considers another debatable term, “sufficient grace.” The definitions here really do differ, with the ‘activist’ Jesuits maintaining that “there is a grace given generally to all men, subject in such a way to free will that the will renders it efficacious or inefficacious at its pleasure, without any additional aid from God”; this “suffices of itself for action,” which is what their mission largely consists of. The Jansenists deny that “any grace is actually sufficient which is not also efficacious; that is, that all those kinds of grace which do not determine the will to act effectively are insufficient for action.” For their part, a third faction, the “New Thomists”—Dominicans who follow the teachings of Vitoria and Francisco Suarez—hold that the Jesuits are right to say that God gives all men sufficient grace to act but that no one can act without also receiving God’s “efficacious” grace, “which really determines his will to the action, and which God does not grant to all men.” Applying Ockham’s razor to this doctrinal beard, the Provincial exclaims, “this grace is sufficient without being sufficient,” rewarded by his interlocutor with a hearty, “Exactly so.” Again, human politics determines the thing. The Jesuits, who are indeed “politic,” will not dispute the powerful Dominicans. Indeed, a friend tells him, “The world is content with wors; few think of searching into the nature of things,” and when the Dominicans (also known as the “Jacobins”) leave matters with the Jesuits’ ploy, they are “the greatest dupes.” [1] “I acknowledged that they were a shrewd class of people, these Jesuits.”

What now? the Provincial asks. Deny sufficient grace and I am a Jansenist; admit it, I am a heretic, say the New Thomists; but then I contradict myself. “What must I do, thus reduced to the inevitable necessity of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist?” His friend the Dominican monk patiently explains the politics. The Dominican-Jesuit coalition, although depending upon the deception of the most Dominicans by the Jesuits, nonetheless outnumbers the Jansenists, and “by this coalition they make up a majority.” The “stronger party” wins. To the Provincial’s counter-parable, whereby a severely wounded man consults three physicians without receiving the diagnosis he desperately needs, the monk explains, “You are an independent and private man; I am a monk and in a community”—community being the Dominican vocation. “Can you not estimate the difference between the two cases? We depend on superiors; they depend on others. They have promised our votes—what would you have to become of me?” The young, ardent, Provincial exclaims, “Had I any influence in France, I should have it proclaimed, by sound of trumpet: ‘BE IT KNOWN TO ALL MEN, that when the Jacobins SAY that sufficient grace is given to all, they MEAN that all have not the grace which actually suffices!” Not for salvation, at any rate. What “we have here” is rather “a politics sufficiency somewhat similar to proximate power.” 

In this exchange, Pascal brings out an ancient theme of political philosophy. The inquirer after truth can go ahead and inquire, but his inquiries must be tempered by his understanding that he lives in a political community upon which he depends, however modest he may have made his material desires. If you offend the moral sensibilities of those devoted to the gods of the city, you may end up with a cup of hemlock in your hand. At the same time, the political character of the community, its necessity to have rulers and those who are ruled (by majorities, if the regime is a democracy, or by the majority of the minority, if it is not), provides an excellent window into the nature the philosopher seeks, insofar as man is a political animal. Pascal’s Provincial responds on behalf of another regime, a regime not of this world, the regime ruled by a majority of One. That regime is captive and stranger in the earthly city, and that the Church or ecclesia, that assembly of God or rightly ruling Body of Christ, is seldom pure. It encompasses a lot of ‘of the earth, earthiness,’ very much to the dismay of young, ardent, and sincere Christians. Pascal’s satire, his making known to all men what the regnant Dominicans are doing (some of them somewhat guiltily), amounts to an attempt to purge the Church without departing from it, as Luther and the other Reformers did.

And underlying all of these tensions is the enemy the New Thomists addressed, from Vitoria onward: Machiavellianism, later its follow-on Spinozism, with its redefinition of what ‘politic’ means. For the new, decidedly anti-Thomistic philosophers, Aristotelian prudence, not entirely unlike the prudence invoked by Jesus, the practical wisdom exercised by rulers and citizens who intend to bring such measure of justice as is possible in this world, must be replaced by a sort of canniness—can-do-it-edness—that aims not at aligning itself with natural or divine justice but in conquering fortune and indeed nature itself. It will be Pascal’s argument that the Jesuits have gone over to the Machiavellian side, and to imply that the Dominicans’ better ally would be the Jansenists. But in this, they would run up against Cardinal Richelieu’s equally Machiavellian successor, Cardinal Mazarin.

The third Letter contains the Provincial’s report on Arnauld’s book, which he has indeed now read for himself. Arnauld argues that the example of Peter the Apostle shows that “without God we can do nothing,” even if we are righteous, as Peter surely. Peter disowned Jesus just before His crucifixion because God had temporarily withdrawn His grace from him, not because Peter lacked virtue. The Provincial notes that “in vain did people attempt to discover how it could possibly be that M. Arnauld’s expression differed from those of the [Church] fathers as much as the truth from error and faith from heresy”; Arnauld committed “an imperceptible heresy” which the Jesuits themselves, those masters of hairsplitting distinctions, cannot define. True enough, his informant at the Sorbonne tells him: in time, the “invalidity” of the Jesuits’ condemnation “will be made apparent,” but for now, “it will tell as effectually on the minds of most people as if it had been the most righteous sentence in the world.” “Effectual” truth: a theme of Machiavelli. “Mark how much advantage this gives to the enemies of the Jansenists.” In the “exquisite” words of the Jesuit apologist Pierre Le Moine, “This proposition would be orthodox in the mouth of any other—it is only as coming from M. Arnauld that the Sorbonne has condemned it!” This, the Provincial observes, is a heresy of “an entirely new species,” inasmuch as Arnauld’s “sentiments” are not heretical; “it is only his person.” “The grace of St. Augustine will never be the true grace, so long as he continues to defend it.” The Provincial judges such disputes as between theologians, not theology.

He decides to interview a Jesuit, “wanting to complete my knowledge of mankind.” In Letter IV, he recounts that he began by asking the definition of still another theological term, “actual grace.” According to the Jesuit, actual grace is “an inspiration of God, whereby He makes us to know His will and excites within us a desire to perform it.” In every circumstance in which a man is tempted to sin, he can only be said to sin if God had provided him with grace adequate to keep him from sinning. That is, “an action cannot be imputed as a sin unless God bestow on us, before committing it, the knowledge of the evil that is in the action, and an inspiration inciting us to avoid it.” This prompts an ironic exclamation from the Provincial: “I see more people, beyond all comparison, justified by this ignorance and forgetfulness of God, than by grace and the sacraments!” He is reminded of “that sufficiency which suffices not” that he had described in Letter II. “What a blessing this will be to some persons of my acquaintance,” the ones who “never think of God at all” because “their vices have got the better of their reason”; “their life is spent in a perpetual round of all sorts of pleasures, in the course of which they have not been interrupted by the slightest remorse”—excesses that, according to M. le Moine and his Jesuit colleagues, “secure their salvation.” Indeed, such men have “cheated the devil, purely by virtue of their devotion to his service!” Centuries later, Hugh Hefner invented the ‘playboy philosophy,’; le Moine invented the playboy theology. Unfortunately, as a Jansenist friend who accompanied him to the interview points out, Jesus on the Cross pardoned criminals, strongly suggesting that they had need of it. Rather, we should “join with St. Augustine and the ancient fathers in saying that it is impossible not to sin, when we do not know righteousness.” Having given up on Scriptural proofs, the Jesuit next cites Aristotle, who considers involuntary actions not to be blameworthy. Again displaying his pesky habit of referring to original texts, the Provincial shows him the beginning of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics (“You should read him for yourself”), in which the Philosopher explains that a voluntary action is one in which knows “the circumstances of the action,” what theologians call “ignorance of the fact.” That is hardly the same as “ignorance of the good or evil in an action.” Aristotle goes on to say, “All wicked men are ignorant of what they ought to do, and what they ought to avoid; and it is this very ignorance which makes them wicked and vicious.” Showing no mercy, the Provincial expresses his astonishment that on can find “a Pagan philosopher” who “had more enlightened views than your doctors.” He adds, for his readers, that “the Jesuit seemed to be confounded more with the passage from Aristotle…than that from St. Augustine.” The cornered man happily receives an invitation from a pair of aristocratic ladies to escape his cross-examiner. 

Afterwards, as recounted in Letter V, his Jansenist friend begins to explain Jesuit policy in greater depth. They do not intend either to corrupt or to reform moeurs. Their ambition is rather to extend their influence as widely as possible. Since few people can be persuaded to act according to the Gospel commands, Jesuits seek “to keep in good terms with all the world,” supporting casuists who “match this diversity.” That is, they are duplicitous, reserving a few theologians for the righteous few, multitudes of “lax casuists” for “the multitudes that prefer laxity.” Like smart marketers, they “suit the supply to the demand.” In the Indies and China, “where the doctrine of a crucified God is accounted foolishness,” they “preach only a glorious and not a suffering Christ” and moreover permit converts to continue practicing their customary idolatry. That is, “they conceal their carnal and worldly policy under the garb of divine and Christian prudence,” recognizable to readers of Machiavelli as princely calculation. They are not thoroughly Machiavellian, according to the Jansenist, but rather practice an “entirely Pagan” morality; “nature is quite competent to its observance.” They are Machiavellians of the sort perceived by readers who see only his praise of the Romans, deployed to undercut Christianity. The Provincial seeks out still another Jesuit, to see if he conforms to his friend’s low opinion.

Which he does. Citing Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, author of the 1627 treatise Summum casuum concientia, and Étienne Baunay, friend of the cynical aphorist La Rochefoucauld and the source of the distorted interpretation of Aristotle cited earlier, the Jesuit accounts it sinful to allow oneself to become “the common talk of the world or subjecting themselves to personal inconvenience.” The Provincial ripostes, “I am glad to hear it, father, and now that we are not obliged to avoid the occasions of sin, nothing more remains but to say that we may deliberately court them.” At this, the Jesuit introduces him to the doctrine of “probable opinions,” the “very A, B, C of our whole moral philosophy.” A probable opinion is one “founded upon reasons of some consideration,” enough to render one’s “own opinion probable and safe.” Thus, one need “only to follow the opinion which suits him best,” selecting a favored theologian here, a historical example there. This, the Provincial notices, gives us “liberty of conscience with a witness,” an “uncommonly comfortable” and indeed Ovidian stance, following the poet’s adjuration, “If pressed by one god, we will be delivered by another.” A reader might be reminded of Montaigne, and indeed the Jesuit speaks very much like what latterly has been called moral relativism: “The Fathers were good enough for the morality of their own times; but they lived too far back for that of the present age, which is no longer regulated by them, but by the modern casuists.” Whereas the New Thomists attempt to counter Machiavelli and his followers, the Jesuits prefer to accommodate them. And they evangelize on their behalf. “We are anxious that others besides the Jesuits would render their opinions probable, to prevent people from ascribing them all to us.” The Jesuit assures him that Holy Scripture, the popes, and Church councils all agree with these claims, although he does not recommend reading Scripture, the writings of the popes, or the edicts of the Church councils themselves. In the words of Pierre Manent, the Society of Jesus “install[s] itself in the interface between the church and the ‘world.'” This rather liberal, not to say lax approach to absolution undermines repentance, which is “both the beginning and the foundation of the Christian life.” [2]

But how to reconcile the contradictions one finds in the many sources of “probable opinions”? Simple: the art of interpretation. If Pope Gregory XIV rules that assassins are not entitled to sanctuary in the churches, well, define the word “assassins” to mean those who kill for money; “such as kill without taking any regard for the deed, but merely to oblige their friends, do not come under the category of assassins.” Such equivocations have “utility,” he remarks, as does “the nicest possible application of probability”—thinking that even if a pope makes a well-defined ruling, it is only probable that he is right. Another person’s opinion may also be probable. Go with the one you want. The Provincial observes that this means “one may may choose any side one pleases, even though he does not believe it to be the right side, and all with such a safe conscience, that the confessor who should refuse him absolution on the faith of the casuists would be in a state of damnation.” One casuist “may make new rules at his discretion.” Not exactly, the Jesuit hastens to reply, since the contrary opinion will be “sanctioned by the tacit approval of the Church,” and so “when time has thus matured an opinion, it thenceforth becomes completely probable and safe.” Admittedly, it would have been better “to establish no other maxims than those of the Gospel in all their strictness,” but what can we do? “Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption nowadays that, enable to make them come to us, we must go to them, otherwise they would cut us off altogether.” “The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion,” he piously intones, “is never to repulse anyone, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.” And so does the Jesuit anticipate American Episcopalianism. What is more, he continues, “a multitude of masses brings such a revenue of glory to God” (and perhaps such a revenue to the priests who organize them?) that it would be positively un-evangelical to exclude anyone from them.

To the Provincial’s ironic suggestion that Jesuits really should propound this doctrine to judges, as this would bring them “to acquit all criminals who act on probable opinion,” on the grounds that otherwise “those you render innocent in theory may be whipped or hanged in practice”—a decided discouragement to potential disciples—the Jesuit accommodatingly allows that “the matter deserves consideration.” One begins to suspect that Jesuits seldom read the Book of Jeremiah or, if they do, subject it to rigorous ‘interpretation.’

Jesuits do propound their doctrines to the aristocrats. “The ruling passion of persons in that rank of life is ‘the point of honor,'” the Jesuit remarks, a code that “is perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite at variance with Christian piety.” They would be “excluded from our confessionals” altogether “had not our fathers relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to accommodate themselves to the weakness of humanity.” To do this, Jesuits have devised “the grand method of directing the intention,” whereby consists of having a man “propos[e] to himself, as the end of his actions, some allowable object.” This “correct[s] the viciousness of the means by the goodness of the end.” The point d’honneur exemplifies this, redirecting the intention of violent acts way from vengeance. “By permitting the action,” Jesuits “gratify the world; and by purifying the intention, they give satisfaction to the Gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely to our doctors.” No doubt, and the method works just as well in justifying the aristocratic practice of dueling. The Provincial recalls to his reader that the French king has outlawed it, “but the good father was in such an excellent key for talking that it would have been cruel to have interrupted him,” contenting himself with exclaiming that Jesuits have turned killing a man in a duel “a most pious assassination”—perhaps thinking of Machiavelli’s commendation of “pious cruelty.” Yes, the Jesuit agrees, since “otherwise the honor of the innocent would be constantly exposed to the malice of the insolent.” Admittedly, “were we to kill all the defamers, we would very shortly depopulate the country,” and this would be “hurtful to the State.” Still, even monks are “permitted to kill, for the purpose of defending not only their lives but their property, and that of their community.” Does this mean Jesuits are entitled to kill Jansenists, the Provincial want to know. No, because “it is not in the power of the Jansenists to injure our reputation”; the Jansenists can no more obscure the glory of the Society than an owl can eclipse that of the sun.” [3]

Similar relaxed teachings apply to judges, who may take bribes if no law forbids it, and lenders, for whom usury is allowed on the grounds that they are simply securing a part of the profit anticipated by the person to whom they lend money. Theft, adultery, and sorcery are similarly ‘justified.’ The Provincial is so uncharitable as to call the arguments in favor of such violations of Scriptural commands as “sophism,” but a mere wet blanket cannot extinguish the fire of Jesuit zealotry, and his instructive interlocutor continues on to “an account of the comforts and indulgences which our fathers allow, with the view of rendering salvation easy and devotion agreeable” to “genteel saints and well-bred devotees,” who differ from the more austere types only because their body chemistry inclines them to such latitudinarian moeurs. Our fathers uphold piety but “have disencumbered it of its toils and troubles,” enabling ambitieux “to learn that they may maintain genuine devotion along with an inordinate love of greatness.” After all, “God, who is infinitely just, has given even to frogs a certain complacency in their own croaking.”

Not only “vanity, ambition, and avarice” find their place in Christendom but so does envy. This can be done by recurring again to “defin[ing] things properly,” that is, in accordance with “our doctrine of equivocations,” the practice of using “ambiguous terms, leading people to understand them in another sense from that in which we understand them ourselves.” And if we cannot think of an effective way of equivocating, “the doctrine of mental reservations” comes to the rescue. According to the Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez, one may say that he hasn’t done something that he did, so long as he “mean[s] within himself that he did not do so on a certain day, or before he was born.” But, but, “Is that not a lie, and perjury to boot?” Not at all, young fellow, for “it is the intention that determines the quality of the action,” and if mute reservation disturbs you, then simply voice the truth inaudibly—a practice that the Provincial describes as “telling the truth in a low key, and a falsehood in a loud one.” Concluding the examples, Jesuit ingenuity has even found a way to get around the Scriptural denunciation of women’s immodest attire. “These passages of Scripture have the force of precepts only in regard to the women of that period,” who needed to “exhibit, by their modest demeanor, an example of edification to the Pagans.” It was not Montesquieu who first formulated cultural and historical relativism.

The Provincial concludes his series of ten letters to his friend in the provinces with an account of the “palliatives which [the Jesuits] have applied to confession,” which numbers among the cleverest of the policies they have designed in their evangelical mission to “attract all and repel none.” While “a great many things, formerly”—i.e., back in superannuated Biblical times—regarded as “forbidden, are innocent and allowable,” some things remain illicit; for these, “there is no remedy but confession.” There too, Jesuits have eased widened the strait gait by “relieving people from troublesome scruples of conscience by showing them that what they believed to be sinful was indeed quite innocent.” To the Provincial’s ingenuous thought that a “genuine penitent” should intend “to discover the whole state of his conscience to his confessor,” the Jesuit explains that a priest may absolve a sinner of his sins by asking him “if he does not detest the sin in his heart”; “if he answers that he does, [the] priest is bound to believe it.” Does this not impose “a great hardship” on the priest, “by thus obliging them to believe the very reverse of what they see”? No, because the priests are merely obliged to absolve as if “they believed that their penitents would be true to their engagements”—the doctrine of equivocation applied to actions rather than to words. The Provincial notes that this must “draw people to your confessionals,” and the Jesuit happily reports that it does, indeed.

The “most important of all” Jesuit doctrines concerns the love of God. For salvation, Jesuits offer diverse teachings on when and how one must love God. At the point of death, say some; upon receiving baptism, say others; or “on festival days,” still others maintain. This Jesuit prefers the teaching of Hurtado de Mendoza, who “insists that we are obliged to love God once a year,” and that “we ought to regard it as a great favor that we are not bound to do it oftener.” Still others put the time limit as five years or more. “We are commanded, not so much to love Him, as not to hate Him.” Finally exasperated at this defense of the lukewarm, the Provincial spits it out of his mouth, denouncing all these doctrines and walking out.

Having concluding and publishing his correspondence with his friend, the Provincial addresses his next six letters to the Jesuits themselves—open letters in response to Jesuits’ replies to the first ten. They have not appreciated his irony; you stand guilty, they say, “of turning sacred things into ridicule.” To this defense, which amounts to claiming sanctity for practices the Provincial has exposed as very dubiously holy, he effectively says, very well, you want me to get serious, I shall. Accordingly, his tone shifts from satire to ‘J’accuse.’ Justifying his satire, he admits that “while the saints have ever cherished toward the truth the twofold sentiment of love and fear…they have, at the same time, entertained towards error the twofold feeling of hatred and contempt, and their zeal has been at once employed to repel, by force of reasoning, the malice of the wicked, and to chastise, by the aid of ridicule, their extravagance and folly.” As Augustine writes, “The wise laugh at the foolish because they are wise, not after their own wisdom, but after that divine wisdom which shall laugh at the death of the wicked.” Nothing deflates vanity like laughter, and Truth “has a right to laugh, because she is cheerful and to make sport of her enemies, because she is sure of the victory.” Even Tertullian, no habitual jokester, thinks that to treat errors seriously “would be to sanction them.” Therefore, direct prayers for your enemy’s salvation to God, direct your accusations to the men guilty of error. And, by the way, “What is more common in your writings than calumny?”

Proceeding then to Jesuitical errors, the Provincial first considers their inclination to cozy up to the rich by telling them that they can more or less ignore the obligation to offer alms to the poor. Augustine teaches that one should keep what is necessary for doing “the work of God,” which the Provincial defines as sustaining one’s nature, giving the superfluity to those who need it, since “if we seek after vanities, we will never have enough.” Nor is there any excuse for simony, the sale of holy offices and the like. These are only specific instances of the Jesuits’ general disregard of divine and human law, and “you only scruple to approve of them in practice from bodily fear of the civil magistrate.” You seek to evade such punishment by the abuse of language—the aforementioned practice of equivocation and also with jargon, the “peculiar dialect of the Jesuitical school.” Crucially, your teachings contradict the orders of St. Ignatius himself, the founder of the Society of Jesus; the Provincial evidently has read his Spiritual Exercises, in another example of his practice of consulting the original texts. “It will astonish many to see how far you have degenerated from the original spirit of your institution,” as enunciated by Ignatius of Loyola. Instead, “you have forgotten the law of God and quenched the light of nature,” thereby deserving “to be remanded to the simplest principles of religion and common sense.” If you eventually incur the wrath of human rulers, you have no defense, “as it is God who has put” the power of the sword “into their hands,” while “requir[ing] them to exercise it in the same manner as He does Himself,” terrorizing the evil, not the good.

True, human rulers lack the perfect wisdom and justice of God, which is why they must “delegate their power” to magistrates who will judge the accused dispassionately. “Even Heathens” have taken such precautions, as seen in Rome’s Twelve Tables. “What, fathers! Has Jesus Christ come to destroy the law, and not to fulfill it?” Criminals always find ways to excuse themselves to themselves; Churchmen should not lend them additional excuses. Political rebels behave the same way. “The spirit of the Church is diametrically opposite to these seditious maxims, opening the door to insurrections to which the mob is naturally prone enough already.” Both criminals and insurrectionists kill first, ask questions later—if at all. And so do proud aristocrats, with their point d’honneur, killing “for the sake of avoiding a blow on the cheek, or a slander, or an offensive word.” Jesuits, “whom do you wish to be taken for? for the children of the Gospel, or for the enemies of the Gospel?” Are you with Him or are you against Him?

“The grand secret of your policy” is your deployment of calumny. “It is your deliberate intention to tell lies,” to “knowingly and purposely…load your opponents with crimes of which you know them to be innocent, because you believe that you may do so without falling from a state of grace.” It is, one of your brothers said in a talk at Louvain in 1645, “but a venial sin to calumniate and forge false accusations to ruin the credit of those who speak evil of us.” Because Jesuits have acquired credit in the world, they escape human punishment for defamation and, “on the strength of their self-assumed authority in matters of conscience, they have invented maxims for enabling them to do it without any fear of the justice of God.” Principle among these maxims is the claim that “to attack your Society and to be a heretic are, in your language, convertible terms.” The Provincial does not hesitate to call this “despotism.” But “if you have got no common sense, I am not able to furnish you with it.” 

The Provincial addresses his final three letters to an individual Jesuit, Father François Annat, who had written “a volley of pamphlets” against the Jansenists, including the Provincial, who wastes no irony on him. “You are ruining Christian morality by divorcing it from the love of God and dispensing with its obligation.” Annat has charged that God’s commandments cannot be acted upon by mere humans, who have no free will. On the contrary, “our salvation is attached to the faith which has been revealed to us,” and revelation commands us to refrain from injuring others but rather to love them—neither being impracticable. While “God guides the Church by the aid of His unerring Spirit,” in “matters of fact He leaves her to the direction of reason and the senses, which are the natural judges in such matters.” If the Churchmen stray from reason, it is no heresy to oppose them. Even if they are Jesuits. “The sole purpose of my writing is to discover your designs, and, by discovering to frustrate them.” So, for example, you have persuaded the pope to condemn five propositions you have falsely ascribed to Jansenius, but since the senses and reason can find those propositions nowhere in his book, a Catholic may rightly assent to the pope’s condemnation while noticing your deception. 

As to the matter of free will and predestination, the Provincial cites Augustine. God “makes the soul do what He wills, and in the manner He wills it to be done, while, at the same time, the infallibility of the divine operation does not in any way destroy the natural liberty of man, in consequence of the secret and wonderful ways by which God operates this change,” transforming “the heart of man” and thereby surmounting “the desires of the flesh,” which otherwise would enslave him. “Finding his chiefest joy in the God who charms him, his soul is drawn towards Him infallibly, but of its own accord, by a motion perfectly free, spontaneous, love-propelled.” He still could forsake God, but “how could he choose such a course, seeing that the will always inclines to that which is most agreeable to it,” and that will no longer no longer finds fleshly pleasures so agreeable. That is how divine grace works in the human soul. Contra John Calvin, human souls do “have merits which are truly and properly ours”—ours, because God gave them to us. Quoting Augustine, the Provincial writes, “Our actions are ours in respect of the free will which produces them; but they are also of God, in respect of His grace which enables our free will to produce them.” Both Augustine and the Church Council maintain that “we have always the power of withholding our consent if we choose.” [4]

The senses, reason, and faith each have “their separate objects and their own degrees of certainty.” God “employs the intervention of the senses,” especially hearing, “to give entrance to the faith”: “Hear, O Israel.” “So far from faith destroying the certainty of the senses, to call in question the faithful report of the senses would lead to the destruction of faith.” Reason detects contradictions in what he hear, inasmuch as one obviously cannot have knowledge of nature if we hold conflicting opinions of it. If, however, we consider “a supernatural truth, we must judge of it neither by the senses nor by reason, but by Scripture and the decisions of the Church.” Senses perceive facts; reason understands nature; faith concurs with “Scripture and the decisions of the Church.” And even with Scripture, reasoning has its place. As both Augustine and Aquinas teach, “when we meet with a passage even in the Scripture, the literal meaning of which, at first sight appears contrary to what the senses of reason are certainly persuaded of, we must not attempt to reject their testimony in this case, and yield them up to the authority of that apparent sense of the Scripture, but we must interpret the Scripture, and seek out therein another sense agreeable to that sensible truth.” If we discover a meaning in Scripture “which reason plainly teaches to be false, we must not persist in maintaining that this is the natural sense but search out another with which reason will agree.” And so, for example, when we read in the Book of Genesis that the moon is one of the two great lights, greater than the stars, this cannot mean that the moon is really bigger and brighter than the stars but rather that it means that it appears bigger and (sometimes) brighter in our eyes. 

The Provincial ends with a personal testimony respecting the Christian integrity of the Jansenists, defamed by the Jesuits. They are humble before God and His Church, loving, zealous to learn and obey true doctrine, examples of genuine “Christian piety.” They do not smuggle Machiavelli into the Church.

Note

1. Later readers are likely to be confused by another word-puzzle: why “Jacobins,” and what could they possibly have to do with the later guillotining Jacobins, who were no friends of Dominicans, Jansenists, or Jesuits? The answer is that the headquarters of the Dominicans in Paris was the rue de St. Jacques; the Dominicans were therefore sometimes called ‘Jacobins.’ The later Jacobins rented a room for their meetings from the Dominicans (albeit on another street), so their political enemies called them Jacobins in derision—an especially derogatory term during the Revolution, when most of the revolutionary factions were firm advocates of the unreligious, decidedly un-Dominican ‘Enlightenment.’
2. Manent, p.5.
3. As Manent remarks, the ‘directed’ intention “is not a real intention, but an arbitrary interpretation” of one’s action. Such a mental operation “ruins the coherence and gravity of the human act. By separating honor from God’s law, His command, one is directed away from the command to an idea—indeed to an “arbitrary idea” (14). Connecting this to later tergiversations of political-philosophic thought, Manent writes: “The consistency and integrity of practical life will increasingly be obscured by the multiplication of ‘ideas’ to which we will be encouraged to direct our attention and our intention, the rise of these ‘ideologies’ undermining the elementary rules of the practical life of human beings, even the command not to kill,” a command that tyrants came not only to ignore but to justify their killings on the basis of certain ideas, including ‘race science’ and ‘class enemies.’ The problem, Manent argues, resides not only in tyrants but in such philosophic friends of liberty as John Locke, who classed murder as an “arbitrary idea” (“an expression that he himself employed”) on the grounds that idea of killing does not have any more relationship with the idea of man than with the idea of sheep.” Having “decomposed” murder into its different elements, he observes that the ideas of these elements do not contain any natural and necessary relationship among themselves.” Here, Manent refers to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Having distinguished what he calls “simple ideas” or sense impressions from “complex ideas” or combinations of such impressions, Locke calls the latter matters of the human capacity to understand—the topic of his book. Such ideas as sacrilege and adultery are “creatures of the understanding”; the mind “combines several scattered independent ideas” or sense impressions “into one complex one,” a combination with no connection in nature itself, in physical objects and actions. The mind does this because it finds such combining convenient. They are not done “without reason,” as the mind pursues its own ends. To be fair, Locke does proceed to offer rules by which the understanding can be accurate—arbitrary in the sense that it willingly combines sense perceptions but ‘true to the facts.’ He would thereby deny the validity of ‘ideologies’ not based on accurate sense perceptions or drawing false, illogical conclusions from accurate sense perceptions. The underlying attack on Christianity in Locke is not so much his endorsement of “arbitrary ideas” but his claim that human understanding can only occur if based on perceptions of matter. Locke’s materialism obviously leaves no room in human understanding for the teachings of the Holy Spirit and the commands of God. 
4. On this point, see also Manent, p.7.

Brague argues that certain “premodern ideas” have been “made to run amuck” by modern philosophy. If God is rational and He created the material universe, then human beings, themselves rational creatures of God, should be able to understand that universe. But if modern thought denies the existence of God, then it “severs the link between the reason supposedly present in the things and the reason that governs or at least should govern our doings.” This leads ‘we moderns’ to a sharp dualism, one that can find no natural support for morality in nature, and ultimately in human nature; morality becomes a matter of convention or of will, with no rational content. Similarly, removing God removes divine providence; it too becomes “‘secularized’ and warped,” redefined as ‘History,’ the validation of whatever happens to happen. Removing God additionally removes divine grace; we are left without any real criterion for mercy or forgiveness. And if so, why bother to repent of one’s wrongful acts, except under social pressure?

Put simply, “the modern worldview can’t furnish us with a rational explanation of why it is good that there should be human beings” to enjoy such things as “health, knowledge, freedom, peace, plenty.” “The culture that flatters itself with the sovereignty of sober reason can’t find reasons for its own continuation.” 

The worldview in question conceives of human thought and activity as a project. “What the etymology of the word suggests” is throwing, “a motion in which the mobile body (missile) loses contact with the mover and forges ahead”—the “very phenomenon that ancient physics failed to account for.” Newtonian physics and, in mathematics, the calculus (the geometry of moving points along a curve) are two manifestations of this philosophic shift, seen in Machiavellian conquest of Fortune and Baconian conquest of nature—conquest being a movement aimed at rule. A project also “implies a new interpretation of the three dimensions of time: (1) toward the past it implies the idea of a new beginning, of a beginning from scratch, so that whatever came before will be forgotten; (2) toward the present, the idea of a self-determination of the acting subject; (3) toward the future, the idea of an environment that will yield further opportunities for action and that pledges that that further action will be rewarded with achievement,” that is, with “progress.” This contrasts with Biblical providence, whose subject is “a personal and loving God who cares for His creatures” and can do so rightly, being not only loving but supremely wise or prudent. Jesus tells his disciples to imitate him, innocent as doves and prudent as serpents. Providence and prudence (in Latin, the two words have the same root) form a bond between human beings and a Person who is ‘above’ them, who enters them, when He so chooses, from ‘outside’ them. Many of the non-Biblical ‘ancient’ philosophies conceive of theoretical and practical wisdom operating in the same way, albeit with nature rather than God acting as the impersonal but still supportive surrounding home of man. Thus, “Providence and project are the two poles that could roughly define the difference between the premodern and the modern outlook.”

In Biblical religion and premodern (pre-Machiavellian) philosophy, it is the task that concerns human activity and prudential-practical reasoning. In undertaking a task, “I am entrusted to do something by an origin on which I have no hold, and which I don’t always even know and must look for”; therefore, “I must ask myself whether I am equal to my task, agreeing thereby to be dispossessed of what was, all the same, irrevocably entrusted to me”; further, “I am the only one responsible for what I am asked to fulfill, and I can’t possibly off-load it onto another who could pledge for the success of my action.” So, while “we inherited from the book of Genesis the idea of the domination of nature,” in Genesis this is a task assigned by God, with limits assigned by Him in His wisdom and justice.

A second “basic idea of modernity” is experiment. One’s projects test the limits of progress. In the Bible, by contrast, there is the trial or test, judged not by man but by God. The experiment not only seeks to extend the limits of human rule over nature outside man, it “conceives of man as being not a fully achieved being but a sketch of sorts”; “mankind as a whole is an experiment of life.” Human nature itself may be surpassed, as Zarathustra’s Overman replaces Man, and most especially the ignoble Last Man. This suggests that man might be “a failed attempt” of the life forces, an experiment gone wrong, an evolutionary botch who deserves to die, either by blunder or by suicide. And indeed, if mankind “can determine itself, by itself and only by itself,” then “why should it choose to be rather than not to be,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks himself, early on in the modern project? Indeed, self-destruction is the easier path, a path that weapons of mass destruction, human-produced biological catastrophe, and low birthrates might bulldoze and pave.

And so, “modernity can’t answer the question about the legitimacy of mankind unless it gives up its own project,” which has caused us to be “at a loss about how to explain that mankind as a whole has to be.” To be sure, modernity produces more goods, for more people, than premodern action guided by premodern thought could do. That is a good thing, in and of itself. But “the modern project is unable to tell us why it is good that there are people to enjoy those goods.” Put more bluntly, “atheism has failed, hence it is doomed to disappear in the long run”; “the majority of our contemporaries are unwilling to face either this fact or its consequences.”

Modern atheism has achieved some remarkable successes. Modern physical science gives us “a very accurate and fruitful description of reality” without any need for bringing in God to explain things. “In order to orient ourselves in the material world” and even “in social organization” animated by religious toleration, “we need no religion.” If not atheism in the sense of denying the existence of God (which would be unscientific) then agnosticism or ‘bracketing’ God when doing scientific work or getting along with one another, is quite feasible. The question is, can it be sustained by the human beings who have founded modernity?

Brague doubts it. “If we admit that there is on this earth a being, known as Homo sapiens, that is able to give an account of the universe that surrounds him and to live peacefully with his fellow human beings, in both cases without having to look up toward any transcendent reality—would it be good that such a being should exist and keep existing?” Science does not and cannot answer that question.

Modern atheism is intended to liberate man from God and, to the extent possible, from nature. “Man was to decide his own destiny; he had to give his own law to himself, which we somehow loosely call ‘autonomy.'” As Marx put it, “the root of man is man himself”—man is quite literally ‘radical.’ But this “humanism”—a word redefined to register this autonomy—cannot “pass judgment on man’s value or lack of it as such.” As Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar already sees, the principles of atheism “do not cause the death of people, but they prevent them from being born,” given the narcissism implied by ‘self-creation.’ It is true that some atheist ideologies additionally killed a lot of people outright, as well, with all the fanaticism the early modern atheists attributed to religiosity, but Brague doesn’t need that argument. It is enough for him to look at the peaceful liberal societies of today and observe that “man is no longer convinced that he has the right to conquer and exploit the earth,” that “man is no longer convinced of his superiority over against the other living beings,” and that “man is not even sure that he distinguishes himself from other living beings by radically different features.” Here, Tocqueville supplements Brague nicely, as each of those contemporary doubts expresses what Tocqueville calls “democracy” or civil-social egalitarianism. Atheism lends itself to egalitarianism, claiming or at least not affirming that there is a being superior to man, unless it is the whole of nature, whose superiority consists in its greater mass. In the supreme democracy of the cosmos, nature has man outvoted.

Modern science is expert as discovering causes of things, explanations of “what is the case already.” It cannot discover the ground of things, “what we can bring about in the future” and why it would be good if we brought it about. “If the project of Enlightenment is to be successful, man needs a ground for man to go on existing, and to exist in the full meaning of ‘man,’ as a rational and free being, not only as a biped without feathers.” For this, there are any number of religions that offer us a serviceable god or set of gods, but “Christianity distinguishes itself” from its predecessors by imposing no laws on human beings “other than the ones that natural, unaided reason either discovered or could have discovered”—prohibitions against murder, incest, theft, and so on. “It leaves the content of the moral rules untouched and adds a further dimension only where morality can’t save us,” as in the ‘theological virtues’ of faith in God, hope in his willingness and power to deliver us from evil, and charity or agapic love towards one another. “God gives the creatures whatever is necessary for them to reach their own good by their own exertions,” revealing Himself “only when such a disclosure is necessary for a creature to do that.” Brague here quotes Irenaeus: “The life of man is the vision of God.”

Premodern philosophers, a-theistic regarding the God of the Bible, nonetheless discovered standards for human action beyond the simple assertion of the will. Aristotle finds in the “Idea of the Good” remarked in some of Plato’s dialogues—which is indeed a standard ‘above’ and beyond human beings themselves, to be “useless for ethics,” except perhaps in the discouragement of utopian ambitions. For Aristotle, it is the prakton agathon, the good that can be practiced, which makes sense for real persons in the real world. He distinguishes between life and living well, both for individuals and for political communities. Life’s opposite is death, whereas the opposite of living well is living badly, living in a way that contradicts the nature of human beings as such. The fact of the existence of an Aristotle, but even of the not-so-bright interlocutors of Socrates (one of whom is described as making a serious effort to think, albeit fruitless) shows that human nature isn’t the same as a dog’s nature, or a stone’s. To be a good human being in this philosophic sense is not to obey a higher Being but to activate one’s nature. This a-theistic good can decline into Machiavellianism, to the claim that to be practical morality must concentrate simply upon acquisition for the sake of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement, and that is why Brague prefers the Christian God to the sober humanism of the ancient philosophers.

“What if the Good is a condition of life, and an absolutely necessary one into the bargain?” God creates all beings other than Himself, then judges them to be good. “If every being, as such, is good, then the presence of the Good is necessary wherever there is something, that is, everywhere.” The human freedom, the exercise of free will, that modern philosophy so often posits is indeed necessary if morality is to be possible; one must choose, as Existentialists say. Choosing requires a subject who chooses. This subject is “a rational being” and its actions have purpose, inasmuch as its actions are not simply movements but movements toward something or someone. “The proud self-image of modern thought puts freedom in the center of the human,” as seen in Hegel, who in his Philosophy of History writes, “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” As human beings, although we cannot create ourselves, we can “choose ourselves”; we cannot choose whether we are born as humans and as ourselves, as individuals each in his own body with its own unique genetic code. The point “on which freedom as the condition of action and the radical unfreedom of birth meet, or even clash against each other” is generation, the “free decision” of human beings to procreate, to perpetuate existing human pairs in other related but never identical individuals. Such a choice, if it is indeed a choice and not the result of some accident, benign or malign, can only assume that an additional human being is a good thing. While Aristotle observes that human beings generate only other human beings, with “the help of the sun,” Brague takes this biological or causative explanation and gives it a ground as “a metaphor for the necessity of the Good for the survival of man.”

“How,” then, “can we articulate to each other the physical world and what singles out man, that is, the moral dimension and the sensitivity to values?” “We badly need” a “philosophy of nature” to counter the modern philosophy of history that seeks domination of nature for purposes that that philosophy is powerless to justify. Modern science can trace what Aristotle identifies as the efficient, material, and formal causes in nature; it cannot identify ‘final’ causes or purposes but instead reduces human intentions to a concatenation of the first three. “Final causes have no place in the study of the physical world”; in that, the moderns are correct, seeing that “scientists are perfectly right to do without them” as anthropomorphist. Yet that leaves anthropos himself only partially understood and human beings as “strangers in the cosmos,” a cosmos in which we are manifestly not strangers but members. Conceiving ourselves as strangers, we begin to think that we really should be somewhere else, justly self-exiled. But to where? If man is captive and stranger in the earthly city, he might find a home in the City of God—except that modern science rejects the Kingdom of God as a myth. 

“My claim is that what we need in order to meet the challenges of our time is something like the medieval outlook,” the experience of the world not as nature “but as creation,” sustaining St. Bernard’s distinction between a creature “in general” and a “creature of God.” A creature of God is designed purposefully, by God as Logos, as speech and reason. In the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, God creates beings “that have a stable nature of their own.” This understanding of creation contradicts the claim of (for example) the Muslim thinker al-Aš‘arī, who contended that there are no stable natures, that all beings are created, sustained, and held together (when they are) by the inexplicable will of God. As it happens, “the idea of stable nature set into being by the creative being was at least a necessary, if not a sufficient condition of natural science,” ancient and modern. Aquinas maintains that “studying nature gives us an inkling of God’s attributes, his wisdom and power.” Such a “sober view of nature prevents us from yielding to the temptation to lower the level of our own being” as creatures made in the image of God, which lowering is precisely what Machiavelli and his philosophic progeny have proposed.

Modernity posits the malleability of things and persons—the malleability of Fortune (Machiavelli), of nature (Bacon), and finally of human nature itself (Hegel, Marx). What Aristotle identifies as the specifically democratic definition of freedom, “doing as one wants,” pervades modern thought on morality and (therefore) on politics. Brague finds this view simpliste. He identifies eight kinds of freedom, each fitting the various dimensions of nature, including human nature. There is the freedom of energy released from matter in fire or in nuclear fission; “matter is bound energy,” as Einstein formulated. For the material elements themselves, freedom is “the removal of an obstacle that thwarts a spontaneous tendency,” as when an object falls to the ground without interference from any other object that would ‘break its fall.’ For plants, freedom is growth unimpeded by lack of water or sunlight. For what Aristotle calls the parts of animals, and especially internal organs, freedom is “release,” the emission of the chemicals inside them. For animals considered not as parts but as wholes, freedom is escape, deliverance, as from a trap or a jail. For rational beings, freedom is choice, which implies reasoning, not mere autonomic movement. For slaves, freedom is a “legal act” releasing them from bondage to others, and for social and political beings freedom is liberty ensured by their citizenship, their share in rule within a community. 

All of these freedoms might be seen by persons who reason. “The basic new idea introduce by the Bible is the idea of a radical new beginning,” as seen in Genesis (God’s creation of the cosmos), of a people (Exodus), and of the choice between good and evil. And when human beings choose evil, they are not only free to change their minds, to repent, but they are offered God’s forgiveness, “a new beginning in moral life,” which men may offer to one another, as well. It is “faith in creation” that ‘makes freedom understandable as freedom for the good” because the God of the Bible is benevolent, not “the bogey imagined by ancient or modern Gnosticism.” “Conversely, the experience of freedom makes faith in creation a meaningful choice,” since we can ascribe this experience either to “inanimate matter”—and if so, it must be illusory, finally a determined thing—or to God’s own free choice to endow us with freedom as creatures in His image. The latter choice has two consequences: creation becomes “less opaque and unintelligible,” a matter of “find[ing] in ourselves an equivalent of the creative act whose presence we suppose” in God; it also enables us to “become the dialogue partners of a rational Being,” as seen, among other places, in the Book of Job. And because that rational Being is more rational than we are, wiser, He can guide us to right choices without compelling us, then graciously strengthening us if, in our weakness, we turn to him for aid. Brague contends that “there is no concept of freedom of the will in pre-Christian antiquity.” The Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Arabic words translated as freedom or liberty “all designate the social status of whoever is not a slave, and nothing more.” In Christianity, “freedom is the unfolding of what we really and essentially are, in the core of our being”; it is what “enables us to reach the Good,” although not fully in this life. It might be added that in Aristotle and in some of the other ancient philosophers, human beings can also “unfold” or grow into what they really and essentially are—in this life, but seldom if ever completely and never eternally. Natures are limited by their ends but also by their finitude in time, even if nature as a whole may be eternal.

Reason is not the only distinctive characteristic of human beings. Man wants to know, as Aristotle observes, but he also wants to take in beauty. “Beauty is lovable, but the love of beauty is of a special kind; it doesn’t aim at getting its object, but keeps the distance that enables enjoying by contemplation.” Brague cites C. S. Lewis, who remarked that “man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals,” as it were, neither having nor desiring leisure. This helps to explain the task medieval monks set for themselves, preserving the writings of pagan culture, especially Latin culture. To be sure, having jettisoned the bulk of Jewish law, Christians sought help from the Roman jurists and the more sober Greek philosophers, but why else would monks preserve “the historians, or the bawdy Catullus, or the lewd Ovid, let alone Lucretius the Epicurean atheist,” if not for the beauty of their literary style? This lent an additional freedom to Christendom. “Christianity never claimed to produce a full-fledged culture,” instead leaving “huge chunks of human experience…entrusted to hu man intelligence,” “unaided by a special revelation.” Judaism and Islam ordain dietary laws and dress codes, but “there is no Christian cuisine” or “Christian fashion.” Christianity retains the Jewish command to love God and neighbor, but this is the sum of God’s law, not a determination of its details.

Modernity pushes moral freedom into the domain of licentiousness. Human beings are now said to have ‘values.’ Values, a term borrowed from economics, registering demand, appetites, has colonized moral thought. Whereas virtues “are grounded in the nature of things,” the nature of human beings, “bringing out what most decidedly expresses what kind of beings we are,” value morality “rejects the grounding of the good on God’s will and wisdom” while rejecting its grounding “on any natural properties of beings.” Ultimately, values are generated by the will to power, as Nietzsche asserts. Nietzsche intended the values he lauded to counteract modernity’s nihilism, but unlike God’s will, human wills waver, covering that underlying nihilism slightly. “We need to come back to the two premodern notions,” virtues and commandments, bringing them into coordination. We will not need to “construct” such a coordinated system: “It already existed in the Middle Ages in three religions.” 

From the ancient philosophers, the men of the Middle Ages took the idea of virtues “as the flourishing of the human as such, regardless of the diversity of cultures and religions,” an idea that “implies acknowledging something like a human nature,” something within each person. As for the divine commandments, they are scarcely the expressions of “the whims of a tyrant, foisted upon a fold of slaves,” as the moderns incline to claim. “All the Biblical commandments stem from a first basic and utterly simple commandment, namely ‘Be!’ ‘Be what you are!'” “Deuteronomy summarizes all the commandments to be observed under the heading of ‘choose life.'” 

Not only a child’s biological but also his moral life typically begins in a family, “the first place in which people are taught virtues and commanded to obey a benevolent being,” “introducing them into the sphere of what transcends the biological level”—morality and also language, literature, religion, art.  The modern state and its commercial markets “can’t help trying to break the family and to recast it according to their own needs,” as “the family doesn’t fit into the inner logic that pushes the state and the market forward.” Indeed, the word ‘society’ initially referred to companies, trading enterprises; its transfer to human groups signifies the commercialization of those groups in modernity. Those ruling modern states prefer dealing with individuals, who are weaker, more easily governed, than families; the modern market inclines to treat persons as commodities and/or consumers. “The family is a space inside of which people are accepted for what they are, and not for what they do,” a space that states and markets dislike. At the same time, states and markets need persons who have been ‘well brought up.’ Hence the push for public education, whereby the state takes over familial and ‘churchy’ functions. And, as Brague notices, Christianity challenges the family, too: “The Bible is not that sweet on the family,” as Jesus “has harsh words against people who prefer their family to the kingdom of heaven.” The family “is a very good thing, but it is not the Good.” 

With their valorization of heredity, traditional aristocracies especially prized the family, and for centuries resisted modern state-building monarchs while looking down on commoners engaged ‘in trade.’ Admittedly, such “aristocratic societies belong to the past.” Still, “their view of life should be kept as a precious treasure if we want to avoid the dire diagnosis of Edmund Burke that ‘people will not look forward to posterity, who never look back to their ancestors.'” Aristocrats did something democrats seldom do: “They thought in the long run, not because of special moral qualities, but simply because they couldn’t do otherwise, and they had to think that way because the underlying model for their whole practice was the family.” That is why Alexis de Tocqueville, while understanding the triumph of democracy, called upon his fellow aristocrats to do their best to guide democracy, even if they could no longer rule it, and advised democrats to listen to their advice. Instead, the task of long-run thinking has fallen to what is left of the churches, tenured bureaucrats, and corporate boards—none of whom can be described, as the saying goes, of being ‘family- friendly.

The family is where we learn to speak. Brague defines civilization as conversatio civilis, a phrase whose origin he attributes to Aquinas, who criticized Averroës’s “thesis of an immediate communion of all minds in the Agent Intellect,” a claim that tends to deny that understanding is “a task to be fulfilled by undertaking some sort of work,” not a spontaneous and effortless affect. Aquinas wants political life, the life of the city, where speaking with one another is “possible, even easy” to initiate if not to maintain well. Aquinas concurs with Aristotle in defining man as a political animal, a being whose nature flourishes in civilization. The give and take of conversation suggest “some sort of dialectics,” which may lead to reasoning. Unfortunately, modernity has at times inclined in the opposite direction, with Herder’s enthusiasm for the barbarian invasions of Rome (“new blood flowing into the aging body”), Nietzsche’s “blond beast,” and Heidegger’s nonsense about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Brague answers, if the barbarian invasions “had a positive effect on the culture of late antiquity,” it was “because the Germans and other invaders wanted to enter the Roman Empire not to destroy it but to share in its benefits,” to “become part of the Roman nobility.” In exchange, they eschewed human sacrifices, as is “very much to their credit.” Thoroughgoing barbarism unrepentantly seeks to destroy civilization, since barbarism wants to cut off conversation, sever the continuity among generations—very often by ‘severing’ the persons who constitute one or more generations of the peoples they target. 

This can be done violently but also peacefully, as when “reforms in the educational system give evidence of a deliberate attempt to get rid of whatever constituted the reference points of our identity. Destroy what made us ourselves, the peaceful barbarians say, and we can create ourselves anew. “Western Civ has got to go!” chanted the students, half a century or more back. Once they became the teachers, they did a fairly thorough job of that. 

Brague is no simple traditionalist, however. “What has led to us is older than history,” “even older than the whole human adventure.” Nature predates humanity. But modern historicism negates “the boundary that separated history and nature, the transitory sublunary and the eternal,” claiming that “Nature herself” forms part of “an evolutionary process.” Augustine new better, praising agriculture not as an abrogation of nature but as its measured use for human purposes through cultivation, “a metaphor for culture at large.” “Is there a greater spectacle,” he asked his readers, “and more worthy of our wonder, or where human reason can more somehow speak with nature, than when the force of the root and of the seed is asked about what it can do and what it can’t?” This means that agriculture “consist[s] in some sort of dialogue with nature,” answering “the questions we ask her.” “Reason in us has its echo in the reason that is buried in the world.” Agriculture shows us how we can “steer a middle course between two excesses, one that sees [nature] as a corpse that we can cut up as we want and another that sees in her a goddess, like the Nature of the eighteenth-century philosophes or the Gaia worshipped by some deep ecologists o of the present time.” In this, again, the medieval thinkers were better, understanding that “Nature has her laws because things have a stable nature.” They added that this was so because God created it that way, for reasons He reveals in His book. “It is mankind as a whole, the speaking animal, the conversing animal, that doubts of its own legitimacy and that needs grounds for wishing to push further the human adventure.”

In the first years of the 1970s, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger essayed a two-part geopolitical strategy: detente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China. Mitchell understands the United States as a greater Great Britain in the sense that its home territory extended across a continent. As a commercial republic, it always maintained strong ties with foreign countries: “A policy of true isolationism was never a viable option for a country dependent on outside trade.” And, as he also remarks, this was an imperial republic from the founding until 1890; its “energies were directed primarily inward, to the conquest of [its] own hinterland,” partly thanks to its early enemy, Great Britain, whose powerful navy “kept other powers from dominating Europe and turning their full attention to North America.” As a result of this commercial prosperity and mostly uninterrupted empire-building, “by the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, America was capable of holding her own against the great powers”—very much including the British, about whom Roosevelt said he had no fear of any encroachments because he could counter any such attempt by seizing Canada. 

From 1890 to the First World War, America’s economic, political, and military heft increased materially, as its population became half again as big, its steel production increased nearly two-and-a-half times, its warship tonnage more than threefold. “In 1914, U.S. GDP was already four times that of Imperial Germany; by the eve of World War II, it was larger than all the other major powers combined.” That hardly meant that it faced no dangers by the time the young Nixon began his political career in the years after that war. Having allied with the Soviets against the Nazis, the United States confronted a rival empire that extended its reach into Eastern and Central Europe, hoping for much more. And by 1949, Communists allied with Stalin had seized control of mainland China. Recognizing that “Soviet Russia was a mortal enemy with whom there could be ‘no permanent modus vivendi,'” State Department Russia expert George F. Kennan proposed a policy of “containment” whereby diplomatic initiatives to countries not yet under Communist rule would establish alliances against that threat. President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson set about forming such alliances in Western Europe and East Asia. “Standing U.S. military commitments would replace Britain’s guardianship of the balance of power, backed by U.S. financial aid to thwart Communist subversion and a new international monetary system, brokered at Bretton Woods, that established a gold-backed U.S. dollar as the paramount global currency and created mechanism to prevent currency wars between the United States and her allies.” In Europe, the military alliance was formalized in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while the Marshall Plan provided financial aid “to rebuild foreign economies shattered by the war” and, not incidentally, to lessen socialist and Communist temptations among the allied nations. Paul Nitze, heading the State Department Policy Planning Staff, put more teeth into containment than Kennan had wanted by writing NSC-68, which recommended a military buildup backing a diplomatic strategy that amounted more or less to a public opinion campaign to reassure American citizens and the citizens in allied countries that war was not imminent and to maintain communications with the Kremlin to prevent war from erupting accidentally, as it had done in 1914 Europe.

During these years, the capital military fact became the acquisition of nuclear weapons arsenals by the Soviet Union, which could now threaten the United States with destruction as readily as the United States could do the same to it. Nuclear weapons “made diplomacy more necessary than ever” but also “more difficult.” Whereas “for millennia, the task of diplomats had been to convert the potential for violence into political outcomes without bloodshed,” the threat of which gave negotiations urgency and often led to compromises that avoided war, against a nuclear-armed state “this logic broke down.” “If negotiation failed, nuclear weapons made war less likely than before, which in turn weakened the necessity to compromise.” Given the sharp regime differences between the Allied and Soviet blocs, including their fundamental disputes over moral principles, the prospects for diplomatic relations worsened. 

As a Harvard political science professor in the 1950s, Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, arguing that the existence of nuclear weapons “made it harder to harness war to political ends in the way Carl von Clausewitz had envisioned.” He recommended American attempts to identify “limited objectives against the Soviets,” objectives that did not raise the all-or-nothing threat of nuclear war—a way of devising,” as he put it, “a framework in which the question of national survival is not involved in every issue.” As an émigré from Germany, Kissinger had studied not only Clausewitz but Kant, whose hope for a League of Nations he also deprecated. And he published a careful study of Metternich’s balance-of-power diplomacy, which he judged more realistic than either Clausewitz’s maxims (now in need of revision) and Kant’s (always in need of revision). Independently, as a practicing politician—a United States senator, then Eisenhower’s vice president—Nixon had arrived “at the same conclusion.” Under conditions of the late 1960s, when they arrived at the White House, the containment policy seemed to them unsustainable. Nixon regarded it as politically and financially unsustainable, especially given the ongoing war in Vietnam and America’s “deteriorating balance of payments position”; Kissinger regarded it as too rigid, leaving too little room for bargaining. 

Mitchell remarks the resemblance between America’s circumstance as understood by Nixon and Kissinger and the British circumstance as understood by Lord Salisbury in 1900. “Like the Edwardians, Nixon wanted to bring his nation’s commitments in line with the new realities not in order to abnegate its global position but to preserve it.” The Pentagon’s attempt to sustain the capacity to fight two major enemies and “a minor contingency in a third theater” was neither practicable nor necessary, given the success of the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the alliance with erstwhile enemy, Japan; those countries could now pay for a more substantial portion of their own defense. The United States devoted eight percent of its GDP to military spending, with 1.1 million troops, most of them in Asia, most of those in and around Vietnam. Victory there would require still more troops, still more expenditures, for which political support was doubtful. Nixon moved quickly, shifting to military policy of financing a war against one major enemy, not two, and cutting the military budget. By the time of his resignation from office in 1974, military spending and force levels had been reduced “to levels not seen since before the Korean War.” The two principles of the “Nixon Doctrine” were continued military commitment to allies with the proviso that “they would be expected to handle internal threats to their security”—a reprise of Westphalia, at least regarding allies. Nixon needed to be careful when insisting that allies increase their military spending; in previous years, France’s president de Gaulle and others had warned that Americans wanted nothing more than to abandon them, and such an insistence might look like a first step toward doing so. 

“Also like the Edwardians, Nixon wanted to reduce tensions with U.S. rivals.” Détente had actually started under the woebegone Johnson administration, which intended to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Overtures to China, however, were all his own. Mao Zedong hadn’t mellowed with age. His brutal ‘Cultural Revolution,’ initiated in 1966, continuing until the tyrant’s death ten years later, was in the process of claiming something along the lines of one to two million lives of a variety of the regime’s ‘class enemies.’ At this point, the old Stalinist was more dangerous to his own people than the Kremlin oligarchs were to theirs. Further, Nixon “had long advocated a policy of maximum pressure against the Red Chinese state.” In his estimation, the time had nonetheless come to reverse course; “engaging with Beijing in some fashion was necessary for U.S. interests,” an important potential component of a rebalance of power in the world. Never at a loss for words of praise for his proposals, Kissinger called this strategy “a subtle triangle” designed to “improve our relations” with both enemy powers. While initially he considered Nixon’s overture to China premature if conceptually sound, he quickly warmed to it.

“For all of Nixon and Kissinger’s creativity, their policy might have miscarried had it not been for the unwisdom of Soviet Russia”—a phenomenon surely not unknown in its history, but not sufficiently prevalent to be depended upon. The Soviets had already worsened their relations with China unilaterally, without any American initiatives. Not only had the Soviets diluted their Stalinism, much to Mao’s contempt; an eager imitator of his beau ideal of a butcher, Mao was “probably” the “biggest mass murderer in history,” his estimated 65 million kills surpassing the numbers racked up by the master himself. More, the Chinese “feared Soviet aggression and wanted to expand their own influence in the Communist world.” (It will be recalled that the American ‘New Left,’ for example, had lionized ‘Chairman Mao’ and his ‘Little Red Book’ of pithy aphorisms.) Just as Nixon had his foreign policy ‘doctrine,’ Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev had his. The Brezhnev Doctrine upheld the Soviet Union’s prerogative of intervening in any Communist country whose regime was threatened, and its words were not idle; Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia a year before Nixon’s inauguration, quelling republican partisans. Sino-Soviet tensions heightened in March 1969 in a series of border clashes, “which the Chinese almost certainly initiated,” and there were even signs that the Soviets might retaliate by striking Beijing with nuclear weapons. That is, statesmen in all three of the major powers needed to worry about a two-front war. 

Mao’s chief diplomat was Zhou En-lai, whose “quiet manner and philosophic bent belied a hardened core of the kind that one finds in people accustomed to having to survive under a brutal and arbitrary regime”—in his case, as “the committed lieutenant of one of history’s most ruthless killers,” having himself “ordered the deaths of many innocent people.” “True to the revolutionary ethos of the Maoist state, Zhou saw diplomacy as an arm of warfare against China’s enemies,” a dialectical “war of words” complementing the “war of swords,” as he put it. “Diplomacy falls within the province of the war of words,” he explained, and “as sure as day turns into night, there will be a constant war of words, every day of the year.”

Nixon and Kissinger wanted Communist Chinese help in getting out of Vietnam on the terms of a ‘peace with honor,’ as the slogan went. Unbeknownst to the Americans but well known to both the Chinese and the Vietnamese, China had little leverage with its fellow Communists in Hanoi, Vietnam being a centuries-long enemy of the Empire of Heaven. For its part, China wanted the U.S. out of Taiwan. In exchange for empty promises of influencing the Vietnamese, Zhou did extract some concessions from the U.S. regarding Taiwan: a drawdown of American troops in the country and, just as crucially, the adoption of Beijing’s ‘One China’ claim, which enables Beijing to claim that any American military defense of the Republic of Taiwan would amount to ‘outside interference in Chinese affairs.’ The two countries agreed to oppose—exactly how was unstated—hegemony in Asia by “any other country,” meaning the Soviet Union. They also agreed to the usual increase in trade, intergovernmental communication, and “people-to-people contacts”—the benefit of the latter to the United States chiefly being the infliction of Shirley MacLaine upon Mao’s personally blameless subjects. The main benefit to the Americans was that all of this made the Kremlin nervous. 

“Without doubt, the world was brought into greater balance, in the sense that Chinese and American power redirected toward the shared Soviet threat.” The three countries nonetheless persisted in “bleed[ing] and harass[ing] one another wherever possible” in what Mitchell calls “a period of strategic rest” intended “to regain strength before resuming the contest on more favorable terms,” which all three expected to find. Mitchell rightly criticizes Kissinger for claiming that Mao was animated by “a motive of order-building.” On the contrary, contemporary documents show that the old tyrant’s intention aimed at “aggravat[ing] the contradictions” between the Americans and the Soviets in order to “divid[e] up enemies and enhance[e] ourselves.” This is Marxist dialectic at work, equally consistent with the traditional Chinese policy of “ally[ing] with the Wu to oppose the Wei.” “All under heaven is in great chaos,” Mao exulted, anticipating the delights of ever-increasing worldwide power, which his regime has continued to accrue, decades after his death. 

These long-term deficiencies aren’t the whole story, however, inasmuch as to get to the next century in good condition one must first survive the current century. “The goal of Nixon’s grand strategy was to alleviate the military and fiscal burdens on the United States without forfeiting the overall U.S. position.” Reduced American expenditures of blood and treasure in Asia enabled Nixon to return America’s foreign-policy focus to “the place that was most important to U.S. national security, which was Europe.” Kissinger’s diplomacy “made the shift from a 2.5 to a 1.5 war standard possible,” in part by putting pressure on America’s Asian allies to put more effort into defending themselves. “Nixon’ pivot was not an end in itself; it was meant to give America an edge against her main opponent, the Soviet Union” by “forc[ing] the Soviets to bear the full brunt of their own two-front dilemma.” America went from a 70-30 ratio of forces in Asia and Europe to a 30-70 ratio, while the Chinese could transfer some of its forces away from its border with Korea to its border with the Soviet Union. His policy of détente with the Soviets, meanwhile, enabled Nixon to reduce military spending overall, as did his policy of ‘Vietnamizing’ the war in Indochina. “His policies allowed America to get her second wind spiritually,” to recover from the intense factionalism attendant to that war, “as well as strategically, at a moment when it might have turned inward,” as de Gaulle had expected. In the longer term, the United States could now put more resources into military research and development, which “resulted in a range of breakthrough technologies that the Soviets could not match.” While the Ford and Carter administrations didn’t take these advantages, they didn’t block the research, and President Reagan “was able to capitalize” both on “Nixon’s early reconcentration of effort to Europe” and on the technological advances Nixon had initiated and Reagan substantially augmented. Reagan also continued to use the Chinese Communists as a counterbalance to the Soviets. “The consequences of his administration’s deepening of ties with China, for good and for ill, remain with us to this day.” [1]

Mitchell draws some lessons for American statesmen. The character of the American regime makes diplomatic maneuvering more cumbersome than it was (for example) in the monarchic Austria of Metternich or the Prussia of Bismarck. It takes more effort to effect a change of course “because the complexity of the U.S. federal system,” to say nothing of its democratic republicanism, “rewards consensuses that, once locked in, are difficult to alter.” Such a regime will exhibit “long periods of inertia that can only be broken by a big jolt.” (It might be ventured that the Trump administration has specialized in such big jolts, initiated by the president himself.) “As Nixon and Kissinger showed, ‘bursts’ of innovation in policy require highly focuses leadership that is willing to devote primary attention to foreign policy and able to rewire aspects of the U.S. system to chart a new course.” 

America’s regime has forged “more alliances than any previous great power,” involving “much deeper commitments” which include “binding treaties that are approved by the Senate and considered to have the force of law.” These alliances “enhance U.S. diplomatic leverage by positioning the country to act as a kind of spokesperson for a large grouping of states,” sometimes even including ever-balky France. This does have the deficiency of setting up “a perverse incentive to free-ride”—another Trumpian concern. “A perpetual dynamic in U.S. diplomacy of trying to both reassure and motivate allies…would have been familiar to Bismarck from his dealings with Austria, but on a much bigger scale.” But “then as now,” America’s allies “lack viable alternatives to the U.S. market and security umbrella,” as President Trump evidently has concluded. 

“Nixon’s successes demonstrate that realist precepts are compatible with republican government.” Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalin against Hitler, Nixon’s simultaneous détente with Brezhnev and his rapprochement with Mao against Brezhnev, Reagan’s sometime support of anti-Communist tyrants against the Soviets, were all “short-lived affairs,” given the regime differences between republicanism and Communist oligarchy and Communist tyranny alike—modi vivendi “that allowed American to tread water and regain her strength.” Despite the fact that “the 20th century is strewn with many U.S. diplomatic tombstones,” notably Wilsonian and Rooseveltian internationalism, “it also saw the triumph of a uniquely American variety of hard-nosed diplomacy that blended aspects of British maritime strategy, continental realism, and homegrown meritocratic pragmatism,” with the use of diplomacy “as a tool of strategy to outlast powerful enemies that would have been recognizable not only to the not only to the classical European statesmen whom Kissinger so admired but also to the descendants of the Chinese emperors who would now succeed the Soviet Union to become the American Republic’s greatest adversary.”

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Mitchell concludes his discussion of great power diplomacy with observations drawn from all of his examples, across centuries, regimes, and civilizations. He has invited readers to consider circumstances in which great powers faced the prospect of a war “beyond the state’s immediate ability to win by force alone,” although its military officers might imagine otherwise. Appeals to the law of nations were futile. But “the diplomat offered a service that neither the soldier nor the jurist could provide: the possibility of rearranging power in space and time to the state’s advantage, s that it did not face tests of strength beyond its ability to bear,” usually “either by augmenting the resources at the state’s disposal externally”—gathering allies—or “by reducing the number of enemies requiring immediate attention, or both.”

Such work entails three strategies: conciliation, enmeshment, and isolation/containment. Conciliating an enemy might involve bribing him, appeasing him (i.e., giving him what he wants), or détente (persuading him that he needs to back off as much as you do). Enmeshment means pulling the enemy closer through trade or identifying shared political priorities. “Most of the examples of enmeshment in this book involved a relatively weak power looking for ways to lighten the load of defense expenditure and maintain empire on the cheap,” as in the cases of Vienna, Nineteenth-century Austria, and Britain after the Treaty of Versailles. Isolation means building coalitions that are militarily, politically, and economically strong enough to deter the enemy because attacking the coalition would be too costly. Mitchell hastens to note that “none of these strategies offers any assurance of success” and that they “are not a first choice but rather a necessity…foisted upon a great power by geopolitical and financial exigencies.” 

To increase his chances of success, a diplomat will need to study history. Admittedly, “diplomatic history does not provide pat lessons for the present any more than military history does.” Such study is rather an extended exercise in prudential reasoning in which errors are instructive instead of ruinous. Nonetheless, Mitchell does offer fourteen “basic principles” drawn from his own study—fourteen in number, perhaps as a counterweight to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which turned out to be less than prudent.

1. Diplomacy concentrates power.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Diplomacy concentrates power and dilutes the enemy’s power by reducing your “exertions in one place” and “increas[ing] them in another.” You may be weaker or stronger than your enemy, but you must select the more immediate threat for your primary attention, as the Byzantine emperor did when he and his chief diplomat “conciliated Persians to focus on Huns” and when “Americans and Chinese both sought détente with one another to concentrate against Soviets.”

2. Effective diplomacy constrains the enemy.

This requires understanding of the enemy’s geography, his fear of nations other than your own, economic weaknesses, military weaknesses (especially weakness of military technology). Very often, your enemy will know his weaknesses better than you do, so these are points of leverage in negotiation. “Effective negotiation works with the grain of these constraints to narrow the options for profitable aggression and stack the deck in favor of stability.” Do not expect to discover good intentions; do not assume that diplomacy can “transform opponents internally,” making their regime compatible with yours. Regime change is an overly ambitious task for diplomats to undertake. It typically results from harsher methods, overt and covert.

3. Conciliate to constrain, not to appease.

You are unlikely to change your enemy’s motives. Whereas Theodosius the Younger correctly attended to the weaknesses of the Huns, negotiating with them on that basis, Neville Chamberlain “tried to remove the sources of conflict by giving Hitler what he wanted,” namely, the territory which strengthened the tyrant’s military position, enabling him to demand, and seize, still more. 

4. Use enmeshment to restrain your opponent, not you.

“There is a fashionable modern notion,” propounded by the prominent academic, John G. Ikenberry, “that enlightened states use diplomacy to wrap themselves in layers of commitments that restrict their own freedom of maneuver and thereby win the trust of other states” by rendering themselves harmless. Bad idea. You want “to foster economic dependencies”—your enemy’s dependence on you. “Communist China has used the economic enmeshment occasioned by Nixon’s opening and confirmed by post-Cold War U.S. presidents to created dependencies that translate into constraints on the United States in wartime, while the U.S. side has been much less adept, until recently, at using these arrangements to its advantage.”

5. Isolate your enemy to prevent war.

The Communist Chinese rail against ‘encirclement’ and ‘containment’ strategies deployed against them, even as they take every opportunity to push into Latin America. But in fact, containment strategies usually “make war less likely, for the simple reason that it forces a would-be aggressor to diffuse its military attention in multiple directions, therefore reducing its chances of success through conquest.” This puts the enemy on the diplomatic path rather than the military one. “The sine qua non of strategic diplomacy is to foist the multifront burden back onto an opponent in order, as Richelieu put it, to ‘keep your enemies so busy everywhere that they could not win anywhere.'” One suspects that the Chinese Communist Party understands this quite well, happily watching the United States embroiling itself in ‘long wars’ against Muslim terrorists and others. The Party is likely to be less than pleased with America’s successful brief, sharp strikes against its enemies.

6. Generally speaking, interests outweigh moral, religious, and political doctrines.

That is, “the law of self-preservation” usually prevails, inasmuch as a regime cannot advance whatever moral and political principles if reduced to a puff of smoke. This has been true throughout diplomatic history, as seen when states propounded religious principles, risking “the wrath of God” and “their own souls.” “The force that repeatedly led bitter enemies to find common cause was fear of a shared enemy,” a sentiment “that has consistently trumped the dictates of conscience, faith, or creed,” or perhaps consistently informing such dictates with the prudence of serpents. This notwithstanding:

7. Effective diplomacy is imbued with a higher mission than “the science of fear.”

Ideology is one thing, identity another. A nation’s identity depends in large measure on its regime: its purposes, its way of life, the kind of people who rule it, the institutions within which they rule. Byzantium had gold to offer, but it also had Roman law, the Christian Church, and the beauty of its capital city; during the Cold War, American diplomats “had at their back a great democratic republic grounded in the humanizing ideals of the U.S. Constitution.” If foreign countries see that a regime consistently upholds an ethos, a character, that benefits others along with themselves, trust increases. “Many of history’s most disastrous breakdowns of order occurred when a leading state discarded time-proven missions in favor of the power principle,” as when Wilhelm II sacked Bismarck and replaced the alliance system Bismarck had built with Weltpolitik.” Foreign policy realism isn’t necessarily as realistic as its proponents suppose. In contrast, Austria’s Kaunitz and America’s Kissinger “were both able to engineer radical reorientations in their nations’ foreign policies without sacrificing long-standing alliances with smaller states because the great powers they represented were understood to be committed to a mission that was preferable to those of other great powers.”

8. Smaller powers matter.

Sweden was no France, but it forced the Habsburgs to “divert attention and resources away” from France, as did Albania for Venice, menaced by the Ottomans. These kinds of alliances occur when the great power’s interest in fending off another great power coincides with a smaller power’s interest in not getting squashed by that other great power. If, however, the great power aims at detente with its great-power enemy, the smaller ally needs reassurance that it won’t be abandoned, as President Nixon appreciated in attempting “to allay Taiwanese and Japanese fears about rapprochement with China.” 

9. In negotiation, culture counts.

Know your enemy’s ethos. “The Byzantines used conventional treaty diplomacy with the Persians, a literate cosmopolitan civilization like themselves, but used methods of barter and intrigue hen dealing with a nomadic, ego-driven culture like the Huns.” Mitchell’s contrasts here are Wilhelmine Germany, which attempted to terrify the British, who hadn’t built their empire on cowardice, and both Chamberlain and FDR, who imagined “that their autocratic interlocutors” (Hitler and Stalin, respectively) “would negotiate on the basis of consensual give-and-take of the kind that characterized their democratic systems at home.”

10. Superior diplomacy fosters superior technology.

The delays diplomacy arranges gain time for technological innovation, including the development of better weapons systems. Commercial relations generate wealth, and wealth can be used for research, development, and manufacture; alliances can enable their members to “specialize in and therefore get better at, a certain range of technologies that are the most vital for its unique geographic situation.” Resources expended in Vietnam were turned toward the development of computers, missile guidance systems, and an array of other technologies that proved useful in outpacing the Soviet Union, the power the war in Vietnam had been intended to contain.

11. Money is more effective at attraction than deterrence or compulsion.

By this, Mitchell means that financial sanctions work less well than incentives. States have successfully used money “to get someone to do something helpful for them,” but have enjoyed less success in using money “to prevent someone from doing something harmful to them.” The Byzantines and Venetians deployed bribes “to succor the enemies of their enemies.” Britain used its powerful banking system to prop up small states on continental Europe whose interests happened to align with theirs.

12. Effective diplomacy depends on disciplined institutions.

Foreign policy bureaucracies arise in response to the need to keep good records and to gather and assess information on foreign countries, whether they are friendly or hostile. But any bureaucracy can become too big for its own, and its government’s good: “states developed bureaucracy to gain an edge in competition, yet the larger the bureaucracy became, the more it took a life of its own and stifled diplomatic creativity.” A too-large bureaucracy also tends to separate itself from the executive branch of government that it is intended to serve, becoming a government-within-the-government. “Almost every leader in this book wrangled the bureaucracy into alignment with his or her will at moments of international danger, either by creating parallel structures or by radically overhauling the bureaucracy, or both.” More recent American examples include presidents Reagan and Trump.

13. Democracy doesn’t guarantee success.

Better at trade and coalition-building than other regimes, more stable internally and more attractive internationally (partly because they are more inclined to keep faith with treaty partners), democratic and commercial republics enjoy “credibility, which is the foundation of effective diplomacy.” That doesn’t mean that they guarantee progress from one triumph to another, that ‘History’ is ‘on their side.’ “Some of the greatest disasters in this book came about when elected leaders tried to conduct diplomacy on the basis of progressive notions about the way the world should work”: Wilson at Versailles, Chamberlain at Munich, Roosevelt at Yalta. A democratic regime “does not allow great power to transcend power realities or exempt it from the tradeoff that lie at the heart of effective diplomacy.” Susceptible to “mood swings,” democracies need statesmen who are “deliberate about sustaining a focus on the national interest and nurturing the classical repertoire of skills that comprise diplomacy’s professional core, lest these be subsumed by fashionable causes.”

14. Expect no gratitude.

“There are plenty of statues of the West’s most famous generals and admirals, but very few of its great diplomats,” first of all because a Dwight Eisenhower cuts a more esthetically pleasing figure than a Henry Kissinger. The sword will always prove a more dashing accessory than an attaché case. On a more sober level, diplomatic triumphs are less spectacular than military ones. They often inspire “the messy anguish of compromise” rather than the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. 

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Kissinger titled one of his books The Necessity of Choice. In all, Mitchell impresses upon his readers the necessity of diplomacy. Liberalism in its progressivist form “did not expunge geopolitics from human history.” Statesmen still need ways to close “gaps between national-security means and ends” and of “keeping war’s costs and aims subordinate to politics.” The end of national security has become more complex, not simpler to reach “in an age of military balances, mutual nuclear vulnerability, and proliferating conventional military technologies.” Even AI technology cannot replace diplomacy, “cannot formulate preferences or provide the finesse and interpersonal skill that have always constituted the X factor of success in negotiations.” Twenty-first century Chinese Communists have become “adept at using diplomacy to win friends and influence people,” exhibiting “the mixture of political acumen, ideological flexibility, and patience that typically characterize successful great powers.” To counter such an impressive enemy, the United States and its allies will need to jettison the illusions of historical progress that have characterized the modern West for at least two centuries. 

Note

1. For an extensive discussion of Reagan’s foreign policy, see “Reagan Geopolitics: The First Term” and “Reagan Geopolitics: The Second Term” on this website under the category, “American Politics.” See also “The China Strategy” on this website under the category, “Nations.”