The tumultuous history of Western transformation is all a sequence of “theological insurrections.”¹¹⁹ The narrative of auctoritas and potestas—how they are separated after Melchizedek, how they join forces and then clash with each other, how one subordinates, nourishes, and defines the other in their relationship with the gods of the cosmos or in their relationship to a single god beyond the cosmos, how they divide the earth and heaven between them, how auctoritas is finally absorbed into potestas, but injects it with that spiritual venom that will henceforth make it demonic—is primarily a sequence of theological glosses.

The mechanics who built, oiled, and started up the unwieldy modern machine were theologians. Then they quietly withdrew. All that remained now was to observe its most banal aspect: the transformation into facts, the procession of revolutions. All modern artificialism, which is by far the most effective device for operating on the world and developing power, finds the seal of its tortuous history not in some secular empiricist but in Calvin. According to the definition of Louis Dumont, that artificialism is “the systematic application of an extrinsic, imposed value to the things of the world.”¹²⁰ In order to operate on this world with such sharp knives, it is necessary for the action to originate in something that is outside the world: and it is Calvin himself who fixes that element of will as arbitrary power derived from God, who is “the archetype of the will.”¹²¹ Something that does not belong to the world—and will soon wish to ignore its own origin—is placed at the center of the world and rattles, claws, and fumbles around in it. The most devastating effects of this Will tend to happen when no one remembers any longer that the origin of that power is outside the world, since it is no longer customary to talk about something outside the world—and all that remains is to submit to its action without recognizing it. From theology one moves to a kind of black magic whose source cannot be discovered. For that source is in coelestibus. And so, in all his paroxysms, in all his claims for autonomy, in his every peremptory and tentative gesture, “what we call the modern ‘worldly individual’ has within him, concealed in his inner constitution, an unperceived but essential element of extra-worldliness.”¹²² And yet everything takes place as if that dazzling crystal, that almond buried deep in the psyche, did not exist. Graecum est, non legitur: but that unread language is the language that remains active.

Talleyrand traces his ancestors back to the legendary Aldebert. Around the year 1000—so the story goes—Hugh Capet asked him: “Who made you a count?” and Aldebert replied: “Who made you king?”—a very early allusion to the particular intimacy the Talleyrand family always enjoyed with the arcana imperii. A dangerous question for every sovereign is his origin. A question that Aldebert answered with impudence, and by doing so he showed himself to be a sovereign. As for the secret of sovereignty, it is alluded to in the motto of the counts of Périgord: Re que Diou, “None other than God” (a different interpretation, but meaning the same in the end, is: “No other king than God”). Sovereignty can be attacked by tracing back to its origin, but sovereignty wins its contest when it refuses to give an account of itself, except to something (“Diou”) on which no one can reckon. This is the origin of that arcane truth formulated by Disraeli: “Never explain.”