"Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure"
About this Quote
De Maistre skewers human piety with the cool cruelty of a courtroom brief: the believer who swears allegiance to eternity can still be bought off by a moment. The line is engineered to embarrass. It stages a daily, almost slapstick transaction in which infinite punishment is wagered against "the smallest pleasure" - not grand rebellion, not principled heresy, just a petty appetite. The disproportion is the point. He wants the reader to feel the absurdity of a mind that can recite doctrine and then behave as if tomorrow doesn't exist.
The intent is less psychological curiosity than counter-Enlightenment polemic. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, de Maistre distrusted rationalist accounts of man as a self-governing, improving creature. "Muddled" is a verdict on human reason; "dependent on the things immediately before his eyes" is a diagnosis of our captivity to sensation, convenience, and social pressure. He aims at the soft underbelly of modern moral confidence: the fantasy that belief, once professed, reliably governs conduct.
Subtext: institutions must do the work that individual virtue cannot. If humans are this distractible, then religion can't be a private, interior sentiment; it needs ritual, fear, habit, and authority to counter the tyranny of the present moment. The diplomat's realism peeks through: he reads souls the way statesmen read treaties - as paper promises under constant temptation to defect. The jab at "the most submissive believer" widens the indictment: obedience isn't character, it's posture, and posture collapses when pleasure is close enough to touch.
The intent is less psychological curiosity than counter-Enlightenment polemic. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, de Maistre distrusted rationalist accounts of man as a self-governing, improving creature. "Muddled" is a verdict on human reason; "dependent on the things immediately before his eyes" is a diagnosis of our captivity to sensation, convenience, and social pressure. He aims at the soft underbelly of modern moral confidence: the fantasy that belief, once professed, reliably governs conduct.
Subtext: institutions must do the work that individual virtue cannot. If humans are this distractible, then religion can't be a private, interior sentiment; it needs ritual, fear, habit, and authority to counter the tyranny of the present moment. The diplomat's realism peeks through: he reads souls the way statesmen read treaties - as paper promises under constant temptation to defect. The jab at "the most submissive believer" widens the indictment: obedience isn't character, it's posture, and posture collapses when pleasure is close enough to touch.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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