To the end De Maistre was true to his character; he would not yield a foot of the ground that had been lost centuries before.[2]
He is a great and fascinating personality, this successful advocate of a lost cause, which unmistakably gained ground during his lifetime. As the upholder of authority, of monarchy, and of the gloomy view of life, as the disputant, as the knight of Christianity, and as the scorner of science, he has a faint resemblance to Kierkegaard. But his system is an edifice of ideas relating to the outer, Kierkegaard's one of ideas relating to the inner, world.
De Maistre is the thoroughly convinced and vehement, yet cold-hearted champion of the principle of authority. There is heart in his letters, but there is none in his books. In them there is nothing but heated argument, propounded with much subtlety of logic and pungency of wit. In his sarcasm he often reminds us of Voltaire, and his grim delight in horrors at times recalls Swift. It gives him pleasure to astonish and to irritate. He loves paradox, because it makes him feel his superiority, because it perplexes the reader, and because it makes attack difficult, paradox being a redoubt which one can without dishonour evacuate before the assault.
His Christianity is an entirely external thing. He is a Christian as a man is a Protectionist or a Free-trader, on grounds of general theoretical conviction. His Christianity is a Christianity without brotherly love--nay, it is a Christianity without Christ as saviour and reconciler. In it Christ is only the sanguinary sacrifice demanded by the offended Deity--like Iphigenia or Jephthah's daughter. Faguet has aptly said that De Maistre's Christianity is "fear, passive obedience, and state religion." It is a Christianity which does not originate in Jerusalem, but in Rome; and he himself "is something in the nature of an officer of the Pope's bodyguard."
The most ardent assailant of the spirit and philosophy of the eighteenth century, the century in which he was born, has this in common with it, that he is destitute of the proper apprehension of history. He would fain ignore the eighteenth century, just as it was fain to ignore the Middle Ages. He is the counterpart of the woman who represented the goddess of reason--he is the man who represents the principle of authority pure and simple, without any historical qualification. And at heart he is as devoid of religious feeling as the century which he attacks in the name of revealed religion.