With respect to any given order, a superior order, hence infinitely above it, can be represented in the first only by an infinitely small thing. The mustard seed, the instant as image of eternity, etc.
Point of contact between the circle and the straight line (tangent). This is the presence of the superior order in the inferior order in the form of an infinitely small thing.
Christ is the point of tangency between humanity and God.
The discretion, the infinitesimal character of pure good...
Equilibrium is the submission of one order to another, an order transcendent to the first and present in the first in the form of an infinitely small thing.
Thus a true kingship would be the perfect city.
Each person, in society, is the infinitely small thing that represents the order transcendent to the social and infinitely greater.
The love of citizen for city, of vassal for lord, should be supernatural love.
Equilibrium alone destroys, annuls force. The social order can only be an equilibrium of forces.
Since one cannot expect a man without grace to be just, a society must be organized in such a way that injustices punish one another in a perpetual oscillation. Equilibrium alone annihilates force. If one knows where society is off balance, one must do what one can to add weight to the lighter side. Although the weight is evil, in handling it with this intention, perhaps one does not defile oneself. But one must have conceived equilibrium and be always ready to change sides, like justice, "that fugitive from the camp of the victors." Meaning of the famous passage in the Gorgias on geometry. No unlimited development is possible in the nature of things; the world rests entirely on measure and balance, and it is the same in the city. All ambition is excess, absurdity. geometrias gar ameleis. What the ambitious man totally forgets is the notion of proportion.
Stupid people to whom my power chains me, alas! my very pride has need of your arms.
The feudal bond, by making obedience a thing from man to man, greatly diminishes the share of the great beast. Better still, the law. One should obey only the law or a man. This is almost the case with monastic orders. The city should be built on this model.
To obey the lord, a man, but naked, adorned only with the majesty of the oath, and not with a majesty borrowed from the great beast. A well-made society would be one in which the state had only a negative action, of the order of a rudder: a slight pressure at the opportune moment to compensate for a beginning of imbalance. The meaning of Plato's Statesman is that power must be exercised by a social milieu composed of victors and vanquished. But this is against nature, except when the victors are barbarians. In this regard, the victory of barbarians over the civilized, when it is not destructive, is more fruitful than that of the civilized over the barbarians. Technology, which places force and civilization on the same side, makes these regenerations impossible. It is accursed. Outside of these moments of intermixing, to share force between the strong and the weak is possible only with the intervention of a supernatural factor. What is supernatural in society is legitimacy in its double form: law and attribution of the highest power. A monarchy tempered by laws could perhaps effect the mixture of the Statesman. But there can be no legitimacy without religion. Obedience to a man whose authority is not illuminated by legitimacy is a nightmare. The only thing that can make of pure legitimacy, an idea absolutely devoid of force, something sovereign, is the thought: this has always been, this will always be.
That is why a reform must always appear either as a return to a past that had been allowed to deteriorate, or as an adaptation of an institution to new conditions, an adaptation whose aim is not change, but on the contrary the maintenance of an invariant relation, as if one has the ratio 12/4 and 4 becomes 5, the true conservative is not the one who wants 12/5, but the one who makes 12 into 15. The existence of a legitimate authority places finality in the labors and acts of social life, a finality other than the thirst to grow (the sole motive recognized by liberalism). Legitimacy is continuity in time, permanence, an invariant. It gives as finality to social life something that exists and is conceived as having always been and as bound always to be. It obliges men to will exactly what is. The rupture of legitimacy, uprooting when it is not due to conquest, when it occurs in a country as a result of the abuse of legitimate authority, inevitably gives rise to the obsessive idea of progress, for finality then turns toward the future. Atheistic materialism is necessarily revolutionary, for in order to orient oneself toward an absolute good of this world, one must place it in the future. One then needs, for this impulse to be complete, a mediator between future perfection and the present. This mediator is the leader: Lenin, etc. He is infallible and perfectly pure. Through him, evil becomes good. One must either be like this, or love God, or let oneself be tossed about by the small evils and small goods of daily life.
The link between progress and the base level (because what one generation can pursue from the point where the preceding one stopped is necessarily external) is an example of the kinship between force and baseness. The great error of the Marxists and of the entire nineteenth century was to believe that by walking straight ahead one had risen into the air. The atheistic idea par excellence is the idea of progress, which is the negation of the experimental ontological proof, for it implies that the mediocre can of itself produce the better. Now all modern science converges toward the destruction of the idea of progress. Darwin destroyed the illusion of internal progress that was in Lamarck. The theory of mutations leaves only chance and elimination. Thermodynamics posits that energy degrades and never rises, and this applies even to plant and animal life. Psychology and sociology will be scientific only through an analogous use of the notion of energy, a use incompatible with any idea of progress, and then they will shine with the light of true faith. The eternal alone is invulnerable to time. For a work of art to be admired forever, for a love, a friendship to last a whole life (even to last pure for a whole day perhaps), for a conception of the human condition to remain the same through the multiple experiences and vicissitudes of fortune -- an inspiration is needed that descends from the other side of the sky. A wholly impossible future, like the ideal of the Spanish anarchists, degrades far less, differs far less from the eternal than a possible future. It does not degrade at all, except through the illusion of possibility. If it is conceived as impossible, it transports into the eternal. The possible is the place of imagination, and therefore of degradation. One must will either what precisely exists or what cannot exist at all, better still both. What is and what cannot be are both outside of becoming. The past, when the imagination does not indulge in it -- at the moment when some encounter makes it surge forth in its purity -- is time with the color of eternity. The feeling of reality there is pure. That is pure joy. That is the beautiful. Proust. The present, we are attached to it. The future, we fabricate it in our imagination. Only the past, when we do not refabricate it, is pure reality. Time, in its course, wears away and destroys what is temporal. That is why there is more eternity in the past than in the present. Value of rightly understood history, analogous to that of memory in Proust. Thus the past presents us with something that is at once real and better than we, and that can draw us upward, which the future never does. Past: the real, but absolutely beyond our reach, toward which we cannot take a step, toward which we can only orient ourselves so that an emanation of it may come to us. In this, it is the image par excellence of eternal, supernatural reality. Is it for this reason that there is joy and beauty in memory as such? Whence shall our renewal come, for us who have sullied and emptied the entire globe? From the past alone, if we love it.
The contraries. Today there is both thirst and disgust for totalitarianism, and almost everyone loves one totalitarianism and hates another. Is there always identity between what one loves and what one hates? What one hates, does one always feel the need to love in another form, and conversely? The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that since the victims of force, being innocent of the violence taking place, if one puts force in their hands, they will use it justly. But except for souls close enough to sainthood, the victims are defiled by force as much as the executioners. The evil at the hilt of the sword is transmitted to the point. And the victims, thus placed at the summit and intoxicated by the change, do as much harm or more, then soon fall back again. Socialism consists in placing the good in the vanquished, and racism in the victors. But the revolutionary wing of socialism makes use of those who, though born below, are by nature and vocation victors, and so it arrives at the same ethic. Modern totalitarianism is to the Catholic totalitarianism of the twelfth century what the secular and Masonic spirit is to the humanism of the Renaissance. Humanity degrades at each oscillation. How far will this go? After the collapse of our civilization, one of two things: either it will perish entirely, as the ancient civilizations did, or it will adapt to a decentralized world. It depends on us, not to break the centralization (for it automatically snowballs until catastrophe), but to prepare the future.
Our epoch has destroyed the inner hierarchy. How could it leave the social hierarchy standing, which is only a crude image of it? You could not have been born at a better time than this, when everything has been lost.