/lit/ - Literature

Discuss Joseph de Maistre, René Guénon, etc.

De Maistre devoted a great deal of thought to theodicity in his Saint Petersburg Dialogues. All suffering, he believes, is a punishment for sin. However, rather than punishing individuals for their personal sins in this life—an arrangement that de Maistre thinks would render virtue meaningless—God punishes the human race as a whole.

>People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man. We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch in Asia to the infant who smothers a bird with its hand for the pleasure of seeing that there exists in the world a being weaker than itself.

>Thus is worked out, from maggots up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world…