The Great Beast

The great beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of an object that is infinitely distant from me and that is me. If one could be selfish, that would be quite pleasant. It would be rest. But literally one cannot. It is impossible for me to take myself as an end, nor consequently to take my fellow being as an end, since he is my fellow. Nor any material object, for matter is even less capable of receiving finality than human beings. One single thing here below can be taken as an end, for it possesses a kind of transcendence with respect to the human person: the collective. The collective is the object of all idolatry; it is what chains us to the earth. Avarice: gold is social. Ambition -- power is social. Science, art too. And love? Love is more or less an exception; that is why one can go to God through love, but not through avarice or ambition. Yet the social is not absent from love (passions excited by princes, famous people, all those who have prestige...). There are two goods, bearing the same name but radically different -- the good that is the opposite of evil and the good that is the absolute. The absolute has no opposite. The relative is not the opposite of the absolute; it derives from it by a non-commutative relation. What we want is the absolute good. What we can attain is the good correlative to evil. We tend toward it by mistake, like the Prince who prepares to love the servant instead of the mistress. It is the clothing that causes the mistake. It is the social that casts upon the relative the color of the absolute. The remedy lies in the idea of relation. Relation bursts violently out of the social. It is the monopoly of the individual. Society is the cave; the way out is solitude. Relation belongs to the solitary mind. No crowd conceives relation. This is good or evil in regard to... to the extent that... That escapes the crowd. A crowd does not do an addition. He who is above social life re-enters it when he wishes; not he who is below. The same holds for everything. Non-commutative relation between the better and the less good. The vegetative and the social are the two domains where the good does not enter. Christ redeemed the vegetative, not the social. He did not pray for the world. The social is irreducibly the domain of the prince of this world. One has no duty toward the social except to try to limit the evil (Richelieu: the salvation of states is only in this world). A society with divine pretensions like the Church is perhaps more dangerous through the ersatz of good it contains than through the evil that stains it. A divine label on the social: an intoxicating mixture that licenses everything. The devil in disguise. Conscience is deceived by the social. Surplus energy (imaginative) is largely attached to the social. It must be detached from it. This is the most difficult detachment.

Meditation on the social mechanism is in this regard a purification of the first importance.

To contemplate the social is as good a way as withdrawing from the world. That is why I was not wrong to be so long involved with politics.

It is only through entry into the transcendent, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual that man becomes superior to the social. Until then, in fact, whatever he does, the social is transcendent with respect to man.

On the non-supernatural plane, society is what separates from evil (from certain forms of evil) as by a barrier; a society of criminals or the depraved, even if composed of just a few men, removes this barrier.

But what drives one to enter such a society? Either necessity, or frivolity, or, most often, a mixture of both; one does not believe one is committing oneself, for one does not know that, apart from the supernatural, society alone prevents one from naturally passing into the most atrocious forms of vice or crime. One does not know that one is going to become other, for one does not know how far the domain of what is modifiable by the external extends in oneself. One always commits oneself without knowing.

Rome is the great beast that is atheist, materialist, adoring only itself. Israel is the great beast that is religious. Neither one nor the other is lovable. The great beast is always repugnant.

Is a society ruled only by gravity viable, or is a little of the supernatural a vital necessity? In Rome, perhaps, gravity alone. Among the Hebrews perhaps also. Their God was heavy. Perhaps only one ancient people was absolutely without mysticism: Rome. By what mystery? An artificial city made of fugitives, like Israel. Plato's great beast. Marxism, insofar as it is true, is entirely contained in Plato's page on the great beast, and its refutation is contained there too. Force of the social. Agreement among several men contains a sense of reality. It also contains a sense of duty. Deviation from this agreement appears as a sin. Thereby all reversals are possible. A state of conformity is an imitation of grace. By a singular mystery -- which comes from the power of the social -- a profession gives average men, for the objects pertaining to it, virtues which, if they extended to all circumstances of life, would make them heroes or saints. But the power of the social makes these virtues natural. So they need compensation. Pharisees: "Truly I say to you, they have received their reward." Conversely, Christ could say of publicans and prostitutes: truly I say to you, they have received their punishment -- namely, social reprobation. Insofar as they have it, the Father who is in secret does not punish them. Whereas sins not accompanied by social reprobation receive the full measure of punishment from the Father who is in secret. Thus social reprobation is a favor of fortune. But it turns into additional evil for those who, under pressure of this reprobation, fashion for themselves an eccentric social milieu within which they have license. Milieux of criminals, of homosexuals, etc. The service of the false God (of the social Beast in whatever incarnation) purifies evil by eliminating the horror of it. To whoever serves it, nothing seems evil except failures in the service. But the service of the true God leaves intact and even intensifies the horror of evil. This evil that one regards with horror, at the same time one loves as emanating from the will of God. Those who today believe that one of the adversaries is on the side of good also believe that it will have the victory. To look upon a good, loved as such, as condemned by the near course of events is an intolerable pain. The idea that what no longer exists at all could be a good is painful, and one pushes it away. That is submission to the great beast. The fortitude of the communists comes from the fact that they tend not only toward what they believe to be good, but toward what they believe is ineluctably and imminently going to happen. Thus, without being saints -- far from it -- they can endure dangers and sufferings that only a saint would endure for justice alone. In certain respects, the state of mind of the communists is very analogous to that of the early Christians.

This eschatological propaganda explains very well the persecutions of the early period. "He to whom little is forgiven loves little." This concerns the person in whom social virtue occupies a large place. Grace finds little free space in him. Obedience to the great beast in conformity with good -- that is social virtue. A Pharisee is a man who is virtuous by obedience to the great beast. Charity can and must love in all countries everything that is a condition of the spiritual development of individuals, that is to say, on the one hand, social order, even if it is bad, as being less bad than disorder, on the other hand, language, ceremonies, customs, everything that partakes of the beautiful, all the poetry that envelops the life of a country. But a nation as such cannot be an object of supernatural love. It has no soul. It is a great beast. And yet a city... But that is not of the social; it is a human milieu of which one is no more conscious than of the air one breathes. A contact with nature, the past, tradition. Rootedness is something other than the social. Patriotism. One should have no other love than charity. A nation cannot be an object of charity. But a country can be, as a milieu bearing eternal traditions. All countries can be.