The Glory of the Empire

by Jean d'Ormesson

  Perhaps it was in philosophy more than anything else that the realities of the Empire were most splendidly reflected. It was descended, as we know, from Hermenides and Paraclites; it was encouraged, like the rest, by Alexis, who remembered with some regret his links with Asia, his conversations with the sages and saints of Persia and India, and all he owed to the lessons of Taoism and Master K’ung; and in a single generation, especially in the City, it recovered all its former splendor. It drew sustenance from the everyday life and the society of the time, it expressed and translated them, and, in its turn, it influenced and modified them. In addition to such distinguished masters as Philontes and Aristo, of whom Heidegger and Bertrand Russell both said, a few years back and in almost identical terms,[14] that they established what was to be the Western scale of values for centuries—and, indeed, they ruled unchallenged until Bacon and Descartes[15]—philosophers from Greece, Syria, Persia, and China debated all day long, beneath the colonnades of the port and in the schools of grammar, the destiny of man and his last end, the meaning of truth and justice. The spirit of the age brought about a gradual neglect of those problems concerning the nature of things and their physical origin that had so much preoccupied Paraclites and Hermenides. Instead, interest was concentrated partly on medicine, which made enormous progress under the Empire, and partly on vast metaphysical and moral systems with mathematical references, which aroused passionate enthusiasm among the young. Aristo and Philontes built up majestic edifices that have justly been compared to the temples and palaces of the imperial city. Transposed into intellectual terms, they had the same overwhelming grandeur, together with something at once sublime and tinged with extravagance. These pyramids of entities in search of unity and salvation, these processions of hypostases solemnly advancing in the shelter of abstruseness, aroused in more modest spirits an admiration tinged with suspicion, and they went on trusting rather to common sense and to the racy vocabulary of the harbor’s corn merchants and porters. But the rise of a culture is as rapid and contagious as its decline. The Emperor made it his business to be present in person at several of the great disputations in which philosophers and orators debated a prearranged subject. In his train came a crowd of courtiers, and soon after, to accommodate the debates of scholars and writers, Alexis built a portico halfway between the imperial city and the harbor, on a quiet, sheltered site with a little river that is often referred to in contemporary writings. It was there, in the course of public lectures or private meditation, that some of the most important works in the history of philosophy were conceived: the Porphyrean Ethics, the Treatise on the Worlds, and the Confessions, all by Philontes; the seventeen books of Aristo’s Metaphysics; Martian’s Summa and Contemplations; the Book of Wisdom and Folly by Aziri, a Bashkir from the Urals; the Treatise on the Government of the Mind by a curious character, a Jew from Albania or Italy, completely bald and vain as a peacock, the forerunner of Grotius and Pufendorf, a philosopher and jurist of genius, of whom we know little and who called himself Simon the Angel or the Polititian.

  The Emperor’s friendship and support gave both prestige and impetus to the work of the philosophers. A fashion for things intellectual and learned subtleties spread irresistibly, and behind the great names of metaphysics and ethics there crept in a whole herd of sophists, mountebanks, prophets more or less inspired, and sometimes mere imposters and cranks, who fell on the Empire like a plague of locusts. Perhaps the years of suffering and struggle had been too hard, and men’s characters disintegrated, in reaction, with the return of prosperity and peace. Perhaps the progress of culture and civilization inevitably creates a sort of foam or froth in which the mediocre and the fanatic find their element. In all events, the reckless teaching of the sophists and rhetoricians brought the Empire to the very brink of destruction.

  Martian and Aziri, both very profound minds, professed a theory that was to have a great future, and to which Péguy pays homage in his famous genealogy: “Martian qui genuit Aziri . . . qui genuit Kant, qui genuit Fichte, qui genuit Schelling, qui genuit Hegel, qui genuit Marx . . .” The originators of this doctrine or tradition—the point is disputed—called it sometimes substantial idealism and sometimes spiritual realism. It taught that the phenomena of everyday were insignificant, and that behind the appearances of things there was an ideal world much more real than the other. Hence the use of the two names, realism and idealism, for this school—a practice which gives so much trouble to beginners. It is clear that true reality is not that of the illusion of the senses, which merely offers the soul a deceptive show. True reality is in the intoxicating loftiness of a world beyond this one, doomed as it is to decay, change, and in fact nonexistence. The real world, i.e., the world of the soul, can only be reached, according to Martian and Aziri, through sanctity, ascesis, and death. It has often been pointed out how close all this is not only to German idealism but also to the most orthodox Christianity. And Saint Thomas did not hesitate to incorporate into the God of the Christians Martian’s conception of a supreme spiritual reality or substantial idea. In such a doctrine, as in Christianity itself, death was the true recompense of life. Death was waited for, hoped for, wished for, because through it one passed from the illusion of appearances to reality. Aziri went slightly further than Martian. They both maintained that the ordinary world is a prison. But instead of being content, like Martian, to await the ineffable hour of deliverance, Aziri did not hesitate—covertly, it is true, and very cautiously—to recommend escape. The Book of Wisdom and Folly opens with the famous little phrase that Albert Camus so admired and that was to have such grave consequences for the Empire: “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

  The great rebels, the prophets of violence and disaster, often die in their beds. Aziri died at the age of ninety-two of a burst blood vessel, after a banquet at which he had done too well by himself. But meanwhile all over the Empire there had been a great flood of mystical and esoteric teaching that claimed to follow on from the doctrines of Martian and Aziri and that culminated in an apology for suicide. It was the young men who most eagerly attended the lectures and sermons given in schools, on the steps of temples, in village squares, in the open fields, or in the shade of a tree. At the end of one such meeting, which usually ended in scenes of hysteria or possession, two or three fanatics went and threw themselves from the top of a cliff. The news spread rapidly, and by the end of a month there had been more than six hundred voluntary deaths in the Empire. From then on an out-and-out epidemic spread through town and country, lasting nearly three years. Justus Dion says the roads were strewn with the corpses of people who had cut their throats or dashed out their brains against a wall or tree. Brotherhoods were formed in which each member swore to help his fellows to die. Mothers slew their children before killing themselves. Revenge often sheltered under metaphysics, but it was difficult to know whether in fact death was not, for the victim, the most eagerly awaited blessing; the judges, unable to make out such obscure motives, would acquit the murderer and punish his friend at random. The madness spread to the army. Whole battalions marched shoulder to shoulder toward death, and if there was no enemy to give them what they wanted, they would throw themselves into the sea or on to spears and pikes fixed breast-high in the wall. The Empire was seized with a mortal folly. Wise and foolish vied with each other to see who would be first to leap into death. Suicide attracted the pious, the brave, the cowards, the philosophers, the unfortunate, the fashionable, the clever, and the stupid. It all mounted up. Anyone could foresee the moment when the Empire would be depopulated for the sake of that real world to which death gave access. Generals, governors, the Emperor himself grew uneasy at this strange and ominous malady. At the same time they realized it was almost impossible to struggle against it. One particularly thick-witted governor suggested applying the death penalty to any attempted suicides caught in the act. Another, more subtle, proposed carefully meted-out tortures. But it did not take long for everyone to discover
how easy it is to die. Men and women who had been put in chains found the strength and the courage to hold their breath and die of asphyxiation.

  The barbarians were untouched by the suicide epidemic. It attacked only those whose love of life had been undermined by metaphysics and civilization. The barbarians, who despised death but loved life, looked on curiously as these priests, merchants, peasants, and young people, seized with mystic frenzy, rushed toward extinction. Justus Dion declares that infatuation with the beyond cost the Empire as many lives as the struggle against the barbarian tyrants. It was at this point that Isidore, now aged eighty or so, wrote the masterpiece so admired by Saint Francis of Assisi, André Gide, and Francis Jammes—The Joy of Living or, according to other translators, The Pleasures of Living or The Love of Life. This charming book, too often forgotten now, once delighted whole generations. As late as the eighteenth century, the works most frequently found in great private libraries were The Imitation of Christ, Buffon’s Natural History, the Fables of La Fontaine, Rousseau’s New Heloise, the Encyclopedia, and The Pleasures of Living.

  Isidore’s book is a prose poem full of passion and delight. It looks on creation with curiosity, fervor, and humble submission. It does not reach for the heights of metaphysics but, rather, makes discreet fun of what it calls, long before Renan borrowed the expression, “the most tedious of the abstract sciences.” The author goes on to ask himself, in minor mood and with an assumed naïveté:

  Must one then die in order to be peaceful and innocent?

  Take care: to die is to perform an act with incalculable consequences. . . . To say life is good or to say life is evil is to say something meaningless. We must say it is good and evil at once, for it is through life and life alone we derive the idea of good and evil. The truth is that life is delightful, horrible, charming, dreadful, sweet, bitter—that it is everything.

  The poem is devoted to the exaltation of life. The tone rises gradually from the simplest reflections to lyric raptures. Streams, snow, gardens, pomegranates, palm trees and dates, the grass of the field, sunrises, books, war, east-bound caravans in search of sandalwood and pearls, south-bound caravans in search of amber and musk and gold dust and ostrich plumes, forests and cities, ardor and love—everything supplies the author with an occasion for happiness and amused wonder. The poem restores to a people exhausted by too rapid a rise the love of both adventure and peace. It sings of water and fruit, the alternation of day and night, the marvels of the earth and of existence, the paths that wind through the fields, and the cool freshness of fountains:

  Springs delicate at evening, delicious at noon; icy waters of morning; gusts on the shore; spar-strewn bays, warmth of rhythmic shores . . .

  Ah, if there are still roads to the plain; flush of noon; the fields’ cool draughts, and for the night a hollow in the hay;

  if there are roads to the East; waves on beloved seas; gardens in Samarkand; dances in Aquileus; poets’ songs on the Amphyses;

  if there are roads to the north; fairs at Onessa; sledges making snow spray; frozen lakes—Ah, then our desires shall not flag.

  Boats sail into our ports with ripe fruit from unknown shores. Make haste and unload their cargoes that we may taste at last.

  And elsewhere:

  I am Isidore, watchman of the tower. The night had been long. From the top of the tower I cried out to you often, ye dawns! Never-too-radiant dawns!

  Till the very end of the night I still hoped for a newness of light; I see nothing yet, but I hope; I know in what quarter the day will dawn.

  A whole nation makes ready; from the height of the tower I hear a murmur in the streets. The day will break! Already the people go rejoicing to meet the sun.

  “What of the night? Watchman, what of the night?”

  I see a generation that rises, and a generation that descends. I see a great generation that rises, armed, armed with joy toward life.

  “What do you see from the watchtower, Isidore, my brother?”

  Alas, alas, let the other prophet weep! The day cometh, and the night also.

  Their night cometh, and our day also. Let him who wishes to sleep slumber. Isidore, come down now from the watchtower. Day is breaking. Come down to the plain. Look closer at each thing. Come, Isidore, come near! Day is come, and we believe in it.[16]

  If ever a book played a role in human history, Isidore’s Pleasures of Living has done so, just as much as Saint Augustine’s City of God or Marx’s Capital. But it is neither didactic nor revolutionary. It is a work of unconstrained delight and wonder at simple things, full of both enthusiasm and irony. It foreshadows Montaigne and Anatole France. Like the Essays it is shot through with tolerant skepticism; like Penguin Island and the Garden of Epicurus it combines good-natured raillery with human pity—but it is also full of religious and physical optimism. It sometimes reminds one distantly of Gide’s Fruits of the Earth, with its lyric praise of life and all life’s delights. The Pleasures of Living gave more to the Empire than a victory: it reconciled it to itself. “The Emperor,” writes Justus Dion, “jested with Isidore, saying never had pleasure so well performed its duty.”

  The epidemic disappeared as rapidly as it had spread. But it had been a near thing. Alexis could understand better than anyone that distaste for life, that fascination with another world that he himself had once felt and that toward the end of his life, as we shall see, he was to feel again. But as Emperor he could not let death overcome life and depopulate the Empire. Those who had trusted themselves to him had to be saved from themselves. In this sense, to rule men is to oppose them. It was as if, by some malediction, each new event impelled Alexis further toward that absolute power and authority that before he had avoided and distrusted. Alexis saw this tendency quite clearly, and realized that others called it pride, madness, thirst for power, tyranny. But the time for hesitation was past. He had put his hand to the plow, and he must not look back. The suicide wave had shown how difficult it was to wield authority over those undeterred by death. So, since he could not govern effects, the Emperor attacked causes: education, speech, and writing were strictly controlled. Though counseled to do so by some of his advisers, he did not resort to such extremes as those Chinese emperors and Arab conquerors who burned all books, but, perhaps reluctantly, Alexis came to exercise an ever-closer supervision over all writing. He told Bruince of his astonishment at his own acts. If he had had a vision of the Emperor in the temple tombs or on the roads of Asia, he said, he would have been horrified. But time insinuates itself into us, men and events constrain and shape us, things change, and we change also. “Power corrupts,” the Emperor said. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I knew that, and wanted to avoid it. But the gods decreed otherwise. It is no use complaining; all I can do is exercise worthily the power I could not set aside. Worthily means without weakness. It is not necessary to rule, any more than it is necessary to be a philosopher or write poems. But he who has chosen to rule, to lead men (who are not always good), to make peace and war, has chosen authority, brutality, violence, and blood, just as Philocrates chose justice and Justus Dion truth.”[17]

  It seemed to Alexis there was never enough rigor in people’s thoughts and words. After, just as much as before, what Justus Dion with his usual naïveté calls “the epidemic of culture and philosophy,” the Emperor still took great pleasure in literature and poetry. But now he liked them to be stricter, more difficult, more disciplined. The idea that anyone who liked the sound of his own voice should take himself for a Polyphilus or a Valerius amused and angered him. With age, he grew naturally less and less tolerant of novelty and ingenuity, and preferred the great works that had marked the heyday of his reign. He believed and perhaps he was right, they possessed a simplicity, a grandeur, a perfection of form and content that would never be surpassed. External circumstances, about which a few words must be said, encouraged Alexis toward purism in art and intransigence in everything.

  The rules of language and of taste had been fixed toward the end o
f the first half of the reign by Logophilus, a long-obscure scholar whom we have already come across several times; half grammarian and half mathematician, he was possibly of Greco-Syrian origin. His Plan for a Universal Calendar, his Treatise on Versification, and above all his Treasury of the Language of the Empire, which was greatly admired by Malherbe and Boileau and sanctioned the assimilation into Greek of many Syrian and Mongol words, eventually won him eminence. Alexis made Logophilus not only literary legislator of the Empire, but veritable dictator of culture and the arts; and Logophilus, that great lover of language, strangely enough urged the Emperor to great rigor against the written and spoken word. Logophilus soon went far beyond the strict limits of his post, which was that of proveditor of the treasury and works, and had a great influence on the fate of the Empire. In the last years of Alexis’s reign, power was in fact exercised by a triumvirate, which made all important decisions together. The triumvirate consisted of the Emperor himself, Bruince, and Logophilus. The grammarian was not the most backward of the three in advocating authoritative and sometimes violent measures, even in fields that properly belonged to politics. The sack of Pomposa and Rome is attributed by several historians to his love of beautiful things. The famous bronze horses that decorated the great temple of the City, the two rows of chryselephantine statues at the entrance to the palace, and the fabulous collection of gold vases encrusted with emeralds which, according to Justus Dion, represented a third of all the wealth in the world—all these splendors, and many more, were spoils of war, part of the loot amassed by the learned Logophilus, who after restoring the language of the Empire employed much vigor and not too many scruples to the task of beautifying its squares and palaces.