Montaigne: Life without Law

MONTAIGNE

CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD

O. Carter Snead, series editor

Under the sponsorship of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, the purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is Catholic in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.

MONTAIGNE

Life without Law

PIERRE MANENT

Translated by Paul Seaton

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame

Original French edition, Montaigne: La vie san loi.

© Flammarion, Paris, 2014.

Translated from the original French text by Paul Seaton.

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940880

ISBN: 978-0-268-10781-9 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10784-0 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10783-3 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at undpress@nd.edu

Contents

Translator’s Foreword

The eager reader can go directly to Manent’s own text. In this foreword I place it in two relevant Manentian contexts; then I indicate something of what awaits the reader. The contexts are Manent’s own oeuvre and his developing understanding of modernity’s origins. What awaits is an explication de texte by a master reader.

In Montaigne: Life without Law, Pierre Manent (1949–) is at the top of his game; truth be told, he’s been there for some time now. Long ago he did the homework, an intensive study of the classics of political philosophy and social theory. A close apprenticeship with Raymond Aron (1905–83) and private reading of Leo Strauss (1899–1973) completed his first formation. Then he struck out on his own.

Toward the end of the Cold War, he noted a worrisome depoliticization and attendant denationalization of life and thought in Western Europe. In the decades that followed, he tracked and criticized this attitude as it engaged in its defining project, the construction of Europe. He became one of the European Union’s best-known critics. In doing so, he went to the fundamentals. Its guiding Idea of Humanity—as "virtually integrated, with no significant collective differences"—is patently false and politically debilitating, while its byzantine structures and bureaucratic rules resemble a return of enlightened despotism.¹ At the same time, and positively, he became a defender of the nation-state.² Manent did all this from a distinctive point of view, that of political philosophy.

As the reference to the old-fashioned term political philosophy may suggest, going back as it does to Plato and Aristotle, contemporary concerns were always situated in broader contexts and pursued with an eye to the deepest issues. Tocqueville, an early guide, famously considered European man under two vastly different orders, aristocracy and democracy. Manent followed that expansive lead in an early book, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1982). Eventually, the context encompassed the entirety of the Western political and spiritual adventure, and among the regularly treated issues was that of the human soul. One was reminded of Plato’s Republic, with its dual focus on soul types and regime types.

At first, Manent tended to proceed by discrete comparisons and contrasts of ancient and modern arrangements and thoughts, but eventually he put it all together in the magisterial Metamorphoses of the City: On the Dynamism of Western Civilization (2010). This book was the fruit of a course he regularly gave at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris on political forms. The ancient Greek city had known a variety of regimes, as had the modern nation. But neither the city nor the nation was a regime, and each was different from the other. Regime analysis, therefore, the focus and forte of classical thought, had to be supplemented by a new science of political forms. Manent went about the task of producing one, and he found that the Sonderweg, the special path, of the West could be rendered intelligible as a series of distinct forms of human association.

These were the city, the empire, and the nation, with the Christian church, yet another form of authoritative human association, enriching and complicating matters. The political forms were so many efforts on the part of the Western political animal to fulfill his nature after the limits of previous forms had shown themselves, while the Christian church was found to provide the most satisfying response to the human desire for access to the transcendent divine. Its founder, the God-man, squared the circle of infinite distance respected and bridged.

However, even this enormously wide-ranging investigation was not the only thing that occupied Manent and his teaching at the time. He also taught courses on the modern soul, in which Montaigne, Pascal, and Rousseau and their archetypical explorations of the human condition and the modern situation were compared and contrasted. In a nice counterpoint to the moderns, he also conducted an ongoing seminar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics during the period.

It was very much in an Aristotelian spirit that he wrote Beyond Radical Secularism, published in France in 2015.³ In it, the French Catholic philosopher explicitly adopted the perspective of the public-spirited citizen, asking, What needs to be done, what can be done, in order to bring unincorporated Muslim communities into the national community? What followed was a sustained and candid deliberation, richly informed by French history, political philosophy, and discreet Christian faith. In it, all parties were included, all were addressed, all were challenged. Here, as was classically the case, deliberation was an attempt to articulate a possible action in view of a common, or shared, good; it was a logos that addressed and sought to knit together the parts of a community in just such a common endeavor.⁴

Bookending it, as it were, were two books, including the one before you. There are many important points of contact between the two.⁵ Montaigne: La vie sans loi appeared in 2014, and La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme, originally given as the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at L’Institut Catholique de Paris in 2017, appeared in published form in 2018.⁶ One notes that law (loi) is found in both titles, although it is paired and contrasted with two other items: with life (la vie) by Montaigne, with human rights (les droits de l’homme), according to the Zeitgeist. Montaigne attempted to articulate a satisfying human life totally apart from law, whether natural or divine, whereas in later modern thought, a new teaching of natural rights broke with traditional natural law, and the older concept was reworked accordingly. Eventually, rights were emancipated even from this altered shell.

Traditional natural law is thus something of a ghostly middle term spanning the works, conspicuous by its absence in Montaigne and among us (nous)—us who are partisans of rights and who want law—all law, any law— to serve rights and us. Modern thought, thus construed, was the critical endeavor to replace old authorities and establish new ones. We are this effort’s heirs, often unwittingly. Both investigations by Manent therefore promised increased self-knowledge, by way of a reconsideration of founding fathers and founding thoughts.

Not visible in the titles is that Manent is willing to let the scorned authorities have their say as well. In his rendering, however, these authorities are anything but hoary or hidebound. His Aristotle is as fresh and contemporary as human nature itself, his Pascal and Augustine remarkably relevant interlocutors. These are not Homer’s bloodless shades, or relics of a superseded past. Aristotle in particular provides a robust conception of reason, what Manent intriguingly calls commanding reason, while the Christian thinkers are invoked to indicate how Christianity broadened human horizons and deepened the human soul, especially with the notion of conscience. In sum, august representatives of premodern reason and faith, nature and grace, are powerfully (and sometimes pointedly) present.

Socrates too is present, not just as a subject of study or an illuminating point of contrast (although he is that) but in his philosophical spirit, the spirit of probing dialectics, which presides over both investigations. The gigantomachia of the West—its great debates—live and breathe in these works of the French Catholic philosopher.

Modernity and its creations, modern times and the modern world, have often been scrutinized and assessed, perhaps starting as early as the day after modernity was first declared. Be that as it may, several archaeologies, genealogies, and accounts have been given of modernity. Several judgments leveled, too. Manent joined in this investigation early in his career. It was, he believed, an essential part of the human endeavor of seeking self-knowledge, since we are self-proclaimed modern men and women. What does that mean, modern? Initially, he followed Leo Strauss in locating the origin of modernity with Machiavelli, or, more broadly, in modern political philosophy. Whereas Strauss was most interested in the fate of philosophy at the hands of these authors, Manent’s interest was in the genesis and ideational content of modern politics. He was guided by the twin thoughts that the regime provides the first authoritative statement of who and what we are and that the world in the first instance is the human world and the human world first comes to view as a politically articulated one.

More than one reader, however, while impressed with the readings he provided and the remarkable light they shed on the statics and dynamics, the basic structure and wellsprings, of actual political orders, nonetheless wondered about the adequacy of the account. What about religious modernity? What about Luther and Calvin? Didn’t they help shape, decisively, the modern world?

Now from time to time, Manent had brought in one or the other Reformer in his expositions of modern philosophical thought. Pascal, too, had been summoned to contribute to that task. These appearances, eccentric but apposite, indicated that he knew there was more to the story of modernity than the Straussian approach typically acknowledged. In time, therefore, he turned more directly to these religious founders, or refounders. He did so, however, as he always did, from the perspective of political philosophy. What contributions did they make to the formation of new authoritative communities in Europe? More specifically, what did they contribute to the genesis and substance of the distinctively European political form, the nation-state?

Protestantism worked an all-important de-mediation of the most important aspect of people’s lives, their spiritual lives. The priesthood of the faithful entailed the rejection of the ordained priesthood, and sola scriptura placed each believer on his own before the saving Word of God. The Catholic church, heretofore the mediator between human beings and the divine, was decisively excluded from the spiritual governance of human beings. This religious critique worked in tandem with modern philosophers’ critiques (in Hobbes’s terms) of the Kingdom of Darkness and its intellectual underpinnings, Christian Aristotelity

Two consequences flowed from this decisive operation: the temporal power of secular princes was augmented, and the community of the faithful now tended to be identified with the national community. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) and, especially, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), with their cuius regio, eius religio, cemented the authority of the prince, while the Lutheran reform was simultaneously a revolt from Rome and a German rallying cry: Luther addressed "the Christian nobles of the German nation [deutscher Nation]" Remarkably, Hobbes saw this twofold development as well and in his own way endorsed it. His Leviathan was not solely the absolute sovereign, but also a Christian Commonwealth.

In these ways, concluded Manent, the break with Catholic mediation contributed to the strengthening of elements that will be decisive in the constitution of modern Europe, that is, the sovereignty of national princes and the authority or force of the national principle.⁷ Religious modernity and philosophical modernity, in conspiring against a common enemy, unwittingly conspired to produce results both could claim, albeit from quite different perspectives.

With Montaigne we encounter a third modern founder, a third founder of modernity, a third type of founder. Manent tells us that he was late coming to this recognition. It took him, he says, several years of wrestling with Montaigne’s labyrinthine Essays before he felt that he had captured at least part of his thought and, equally importantly, how he conveyed it. The payoff, however, was significant. The discoverer of new lands on the continent of modernity was discovered.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92) lived in unsettled, rather precarious, times. Throughout his adult life, France was painfully wracked by religious and dynastic rivalry and war. The French wars of religion (1562–98) saw three million die of war, famine, and disease. The classical age was still in the future. The absolute monarchy had yet to find its footing and would wait until Richelieu to do so. To add to the fermentation, the New World had been recently discovered, and the first reports of exotic human beings and customs had made their way back to Europe. What did they mean? What did they entail for the traditional understanding of the human? All in all, a wholesale reevaluation of authorities and basic thoughts appeared to be in order, at least for some.

Now as it happens, thirty years earlier, in An Intellectual History of Liberalism, Manent had commented at some length on a Hobbes who found himself in comparable circumstances in seventeenth-century England.⁸ Hobbes lived at the time of the English Civil War (1642–51), which pitted royalists against proponents of Parliament, both invoking contending versions of Christianity. Here too Christianity was rent, authority contested, the body-politic distempered. The conflict eventually led to the beheading of Charles I in 1649. The Leviathan, Hobbes’s diagnosis and solution to the ills of his country, appeared two years later.

Hobbes, however, saw in his contentious times far from an anomaly. Rather, in particularly dramatic form they revealed the natural condition of mankind, which is a war of all against all, absent recognized and acknowledged authority. Thus, Manent pointed out, Hobbes moved from an analysis of his time and place to the discovery of the permanent condition of mankind. With the fundamental problem always and everywhere the same, the solution—sovereignty—must be as well.

This little précis allows one to see three important differences between Hobbes and Montaigne. Hobbes was the philosophical architect of the modern state. His advocacy highlights its absence in Montaigne. Montaigne was no proponent of the state as the remedy to civil-religious discord; in his Essays he does not lay out its raison d’être, its genesis, its nature and scope. This lacuna prompts Manent to wonder, Why did Montaigne think he could do without what for centuries people after him thought was the sine qua non of secure and civilized existence, civilized because secure? What does the human world look like absent the towering presence, the orienting presence, of the state?

These are questions not without contemporary relevance in Europe and various other parts of the world. Here Manent is interested in the way of looking at the human world that consists in articulating it in terms of customs and cultures. Montaigne paved the way to what we call cultural anthropology. Its Montaignan origin is here duly considered, contrasted with a powerful Aristotelian alternative, and incisively critiqued in Natural Law and Human Rights. A powerful advocate for political philosophy, Manent has long critiqued the dubious methodological presuppositions of the human and social sciences.⁹ In so doing, he seeks to wake his fellows—social scientists and European citizens—from their antipolitical slumber. Here, with a seminal thinker, he continues his long-standing criticisms of depoliticization, theoretical as well as practical, in order to help revive politics itself and what he calls the political perspective.

The Leviathan state is the response to the natural condition of mankind. While Montaigne does not have the state, he does have an analogue to the natural condition of mankind. He gave it a name that had a great career, not only in philosophy but in letters: la condition humaine, the human condition. Montaigne is the Columbus of this terra nova, this terra incognita. Tracking Montaigne’s discovery and exploration of this new land is one of the chief aims, and achievements, of Manent’s commentary.

In delineating the human condition, Montaigne does not go to the opposite extreme from Hobbes, as will Rousseau: war and death continue to figure essentially in his rendition. But war is paired with honor and civilized by what Montaigne calls conférence, vigorous intellectual exchange, and death can be properly addressed without the instrument of the state. Likewise, while the human condition does give rise to the problems human beings inflict upon themselves, it remains the norm of a life well lived. It needs to be inhabited, not overcome.

Manent sums up Montaigne’s analysis in three terms: virtue, pleasure, and death. The conventional terms, however, mask radically new understandings, neither pagan nor Christian. Definitely not Christian, as Pascal pointed out and Manent amply demonstrates, while Montaigne’s admiration for Cato and Socrates not only does not incline him to imitation, but his Socrates is a fabrication shorn of eros and the Ideas, and his republicanism finally cedes to a life shorn of ties to others or participation in a collective endeavor. What results is a self-sufficient private life that, by writing, creates the public that is invited to become privy to its candor and human wisdom.

A third contrast takes us to the character of the Essays and of Manent’s commentary on them. Hobbes was one of the most systematic of thinkers and writers, Montaigne, among the least. He was acutely aware of the strange character and challenge of his literary form. He was also quite explicit about its innovative uniqueness: at most, it had two or three ancient antecedents, but they were lost to history (nor does he deign to name them). New content required new forms. However, even that formula is too indebted to old thought.

What is presented in the Essays is a new form of thinking and a new form of living, not the material of a teaching, not a thought that can be systematized. Systematization presupposes thought that is in complete control of itself and its material. That is beyond thought’s real abilities; it cannot be its true aim. It is not thought’s true relationship to life. So the Essays take us into a new form of thinking and living; they take us along on the journey of a truly thoughtful life.

Manent responds with docility, attentiveness, and the requisite learning. Docility allows him to follow Montaigne’s lead; attentiveness, to notice subtle shifts and shocking statements; and learning, to be able to appreciate Montaigne’s use as well as abuse of classical texts. If Montaigne takes seven essays before he explicitly states the purpose of the Essays, this fact is duly noted and the previous seven essays are considered in the light of their preparatory character. One can thus see how an analysis of the contemporary scene leads to, and requires, Montaigne’s intervention and enterprise. Likewise, if, many essays later, Montaigne adds another statement of purpose, it too is noted and brought into illuminating contact with the earlier statement. The intervening text, again, will have prepared and occasioned the new formulation. The philosophic reader, as a friend of mine once said, has a keen sense of the obvious.

There is more to the reading of a philosophical text, of course, especially one as complex as Montaigne’s. Themes must be pursued, connections made, developments and qualifications noted. Significance drawn out as well. It is in connection with the last that Manent particularly shines. Between exegesis and eisegesis is a space for independent philosophical illumination. Manent, as we suggested above in connection with Socrates, tends to do so by way of comparison and contrast. There is exquisite art here, tactful and telling. The gigantomachia lives.

But Manent also has his own categories that he brings to bear on Montaigne’s novel thinking. As befits a philosopher at the peak of his powers, these are often the most elemental of categories. As the reader will soon discover, Manent makes great hay out of two basic pairs: speech and action; active and passive. While Montaigne philosophically considered human life in action and activity, especially among the ancients, he himself opted for a speech that tracks the passive movements of his self. And while he was quite aware of the philosophical discourses of Socrates as presented by Plato, he himself opted for a discourse dominated by moi, whose argument and subject was [him]self.

While recognizing the audacity, and tracking the consequences, of this great reform of the basic elements of human life, Manent wonders whether we might do well to reconsider the options of speaking and acting that Montaigne thought worthy of considering but ultimately rejected. In this precise and expansive commentary, he therefore reopens the horizons of human speech and deed that Montaigne’s founding work worked to reduce.¹⁰

Paul Seaton

St. Mary’s Seminary & University

Feast of St. Joan of Arc

MONTAIGNE

Introduction

The Word and the Promise

If there is a shared diagnosis of the causes of the European malaise, no doubt it is the following: we have lost confidence in our own powers. One could also say: we have made promises that we cannot keep, we know that we cannot keep them, and we have neither the strength nor the courage to renew them or to conceive others. In a profound peace, in complete liberty, in a prosperity that is still enviable, we no longer have the strength to promise anything to ourselves, whereas in terrible disorders, in servitude and misery, our forebears conceived the hopes of science and power, of liberty and happiness, on which we have lived during three or four centuries. What has the promising and enterprising animal become? What has the European become?

This profound change in our relationship to ourselves and to our future causes us to look with astonishment at who we were for so long a time, and it encourages us to consider attentively the one who promised, projected, and undertook. The promise that seemed so clear when it bore us becomes so mysterious when it abandons us! What did the promising animal then resemble? What did he promise, and how? How we would love to see with his eyes and to will with his will! To be sure, answers to such questions come in great number, clothed in majuscules. Our fathers promised themselves the relief of man’s estate¹. They promised that man would become, as it were, the master and possessor of nature. They promised us the freedom to pursue happiness. These promises, moreover, were not so poorly kept, but that does not tell us what was the source of the promise, what the one who promised such great things saw, and how he readied himself.

To be sure, the promise aimed at something unseen, but it was not simply something conceived by the imagination. The one who promised intended to make it real, to realize the thing that was imagined, and he was confident in his ability to carry through with this realization. Is that all? No, it is not all, and, in fact, it misses the essential. What we just said only concerns ordinary promises, those that are inscribed within a given order of things and only aim to modify it, to simply draw from it something worthwhile. The promise that interests us, the promise that made us what we are, or still were yesterday, the promise that is coextensive with Europe, is something else as well because it is a promise that aimed to change the very order of human things. Where could such an idea have come from? The imagination of poets has always invented other worlds, but worlds in speech, or in sculpted stone or painted walls. But here it was a matter of really bringing into being a new world, or at least a renewed, or reformed, one. The last word is the best: not to invent elements of the human world that did not exist, but to radically reform, to give a new form to, the constituent elements of the human world, by radically reforming the political order, the religious order, and the order of knowledge. Perhaps one can say in a synthetic way that it was a matter of reforming actions and words and the way in which they were related or were connected to each other. The promise of modern Europe, the promise that astonishes us and that seems to have exhausted its strength, was the promise of a new action and a new word, the promise of a new relationship of word to action and of action to word.

The last formulation, however, causes us to pause, to hesitate. Action and word, these are the two halves, distinct but inseparable, of man’s being. How can one change them without changing the central organ (if I can put it that way) of man’s humanity? If we radically reform that . . . then, adieu to man! This, however, is what we did, without abolishing humanity but by profoundly transforming the human world. Once again, how did we do that?

Man is the speaking animal, and he is the acting animal. One cannot do anything to change that, except by destroying man. What one can change perhaps, what in fact we were able to change, was the relationship between the two. The simplest form of the relationship is distance. One can bring action closer to or move it farther from speech, and the same with speech vis-à-vis action. If, for example, the believer receives the rules of his action from a church that interprets scripture for him, the word that regulates action is doubly removed from the action that it regulates. Between word and action are the church and scripture. As everyone knows, it was by suppressing the mediation of the church that the Reformation brought the action of the Christian closer to the Christian word.

Let us take a closer look at this operation of the Reformation. Here we are not interested in the theological issues or in historical developments, but only in the human gesture implied in the Reformation. Calvin puts this gesture before our eyes in the very first chapter of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. He begins by observing that while God manifests himself to human beings in a thousand ways by his works, by their own fault humans show themselves incapable of seeing such a clear thing. His works being ignored, God made himself known directly by his Word, which is a more certain and familiar mark to know him.² We thus have scripture alone to know the divine truth. Calvin then objects to the very pernicious error of the Catholics, who make the interpretation of scripture depend upon the consent of the church, which is equivalent to subjecting the eternal truth to the [good] pleasure of men.³ To the objection, How, then, can we know that Scripture is the Word of God?, Calvin responds: Scripture shows no less evidence of its truth than black or white things do of their colors, or sweet or bitter things of their taste. At the end of the chapter, Calvin summarizes his argument by saying that, for the believer, God gives himself to be as sensed by experience, as he declares himself by his word.⁴

This very condensed summary brings to light the audacity of Calvin’s procedure. He suddenly places human beings—who wander about in ignorance of God or who, under the cover of the church, use scripture for their purposes—before the evidence of a sensed where experience merges with the Word. The demoralizing dispersion of the signs of truth suddenly gives way to adhesion to this truth without any distance. Reduced to its core, Calvin’s gesture consists in overcoming an infinite distance, in leading human beings from the greatest distance to proximity, and even coincidence, with God, or at least his Word. The decisive point does not reside, first of all, in the free interpretation of Scripture. Christian liberty is an effect before it is a cause. It results from the gesture by which the Reformer, intervening in the half-light in which the truth is both given and hides itself, separates the clear from the obscure and isolates a circle of light in which evidence reigns. It is true that contemporaries, and even more historians, have tended to see in the Reformation above all the liberation of the individual vis-à-vis an external rule and institution—in our language, a victory of autonomy over heteronomy. Be that as it may, this liberation presupposes taking up a position from which we relate the truth to the immediate evidence of a sense or a sentiment, and in this perspective we reject everything that introduces distance and mediation. The procedure of the Reformer thus proposes resolutely putting aside or even systematically eliminating everything that could hinder or complicate our ever-more-direct and immediate grasp of the truth of things. The liberty in question, no doubt quite real, is suspended from the promise of coinciding with the truth that is, at last, entirely appropriated. Faith in the saving God finds its certification in the certainty of the believer’s personal salvation.

To be sure, the Reformer does not enact this gesture except to liberate the truth from the human intermediaries who confiscate or disfigure it. His intention is certainly in this vein. He would be horrified by the autonomy of the modern subject. But by envisaging an appropriation without an intermediary, by promising it, he commands himself, and he commands us, to bring all the signs of truth toward ourselves, ever closer to us, to the point of coincidence itself, which entails reducing as much as possible the distances by which the human world is ordered and disordered. Sola scriptura contains the promise of a coincidence between the Christian and the truth, but the command to seek this coincidence engages us in a process that cannot end with the suppression of ecclesial mediation. It will not be long before scripture itself, at first the medium of this coincidence, becomes the obstacle to it. All the constitutive distances of the human world, of whatever order, are summoned to be suppressed. Such is the command, such is the promise.

The commonplace according to which the Reformation inaugurated the modern revolution is thus well founded, as long as one specifies that the decisive gesture does not concern liberty but the truth, or our relationship to it. We will find a confirmation of this by considering another innovation, another reform, which is strictly contemporary with the Reformation, but whose project exclusively concerns this world, and even with a very sharp point directed against Christianity. I am speaking of Machiavelli’s enterprise, which aims at suppressing, or in any case reducing, the too great gap that the Christian religion installed between humans’ words and their deeds. Human beings speak in a certain way, and they act in another. Their words, however, are not without effect, since their actions are different from what they would be if they did not speak that way. For example, the Christian religion commands love of one’s enemies. Since this is not the best way of defending oneself, Christians continue to defend themselves against their enemies by the ordinary means, but they do so with a divided will, hence with lessened powers. The Christian word, as distant as it is, does not have the force to command action and get human beings to act like Christians, but it retains enough force to prohibit them from acting in accordance with their nature. Machiavelli therefore undertakes to bring to light what he calls the effectual truth of political things,⁵ what one could call the art or logic of action when it is not shackled or falsified by any word, Christian or other. On Machiavelli’s horizon is a world where the human agent would coincide so perfectly with his action that he would not have any need of a word.

Thus at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Luther and Calvin on one hand, Machiavelli on the other, make opposite claims, but claims that betray a strange resemblance. As we just saw, the principle of order reveals itself to be the principle of disorder, that is, the authority of Christian words which command without being obeyed. There is therefore an immense gap to overcome between Christian words and the real actions of human beings. While Luther and Calvin aim to suppress the obstacles that are placed between Christians and the Word of God, Machiavelli aims to suppress the obstacles placed between the prince, or the political agent, and the founding, or refounding, action that Europe