Note 86 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

This has been perfectly obvious to all those guardians of the spiritual who have condemned it, whatever their motives may have been. More precisely, Maurras’s work makes the passion of man to found the State (or to strengthen it) an object of religious adoration; it is really the worldly made transcendental. This displacing of the transcendental is the secret of the great influence exerted by Maurras on his contemporaries. These persons, especially in irreligious France, were plainly eager for such a doctrine, if one may judge by the outburst of gratitude with which they greeted it, and which seems to say: ‘At last we are delivered from God; at last we are allowed to adore ourselves in our will to be great, not in our will to be good; we are shown the ideal in the real, on earth and not in heaven.’ In this sense, Maurras’s work is the same as Nietzsche’s (‘be faithful to the earth’), with this difference, that the German thinker deifies man in his anarchic passions, and the Frenchman in his organising passions. It is also the same as the work of Bergson and James, inasmuch as it says like them: the real is the only ideal. This secularizing of the divine may be compared with the work of Luther.