MONTESQUIEU'S TREATMENT OF JAPAN

Montesquieu censures the laws of no other country as forcefully as he does those of Japan (Dodds Reference Dodds1929, 98; Binoche Reference Binoche1998, 234; Carrithers Reference Carrithers1998, 237; Schaub Reference Schaub and Levine1999, 228). His first lengthy discussion of Japan occurs in The Spirit of the Laws Book VI, Chapter 13, a chapter whose title—“Powerlessness of Japanese Laws”—evinces his disdain for that nation's government. In that chapter he applies his most condemnatory adjective, “atrocious,” to the very souls of the Japanese. He makes it quite clear that it is the laws, not the nature, of the Japanese that have made them so; because “disobedience to such a great emperor as Japan's is an enormous crime,” every least crime committed in the state is seen as an affront to the emperor. In such a state, all transgression is treason, all punishment revenge. As a result, nearly all crimes, from gambling to lying, are punished with death (VI.13, 86–7).Footnote ³ All subjects must confess everything before the emperor; in Japan, “where the laws upset all ideas of human reason,” every secret is a conspiracy, and even the slightest disobedience a “crime of non-révélation” (XII.17, 202; 1949–51, 2:446).

Perhaps Montesquieu's forceful condemnation of the ways of an Eastern despotism that had so persecuted Christians as to have “succeeded in destroying Christianity”—a feat achieved nowhere else in The Spirit of the Laws—would not so offend in his own age when cultural relativism was not the norm (VI.13, 87). If Montesquieu is rarely found to be a particularly orthodox Christian himself, he is certainly aware that many of his readers would be, and that they would likely align with him in opposing such a manifest example of barbarous government that is not only un-Christian but atrocious and inhumane. To win the allegiance of his contemporaries in this way, Montesquieu violates his own declaration in the preface “not. . . to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever” (pref. xliv).

Nor is Montesquieu's violation of his declaration the only puzzle that emerges from this chapter. At first glance, the laws of the Japanese do not seem powerless, as the chapter title proclaims: on the contrary, they seem frighteningly potent. They rule by terror and perpetual surveillance. They brutally punish brutal souls. They have intentionally, successfully extirpated the Christian religion. In the prior chapter Montesquieu had proclaimed, without qualification, “men must not be led to extremes”—but the Japanese seem to have used extreme measures quite effectively (VI.12, 85). Must Montesquieu restrict himself to condemning extremity as a means because he cannot deny the power of the effect? He writes of the Japanese: “The astonishing character of these opinionated, capricious, determined, eccentric people, who brave every peril and every misfortune, seems at first sight to absolve their legislators for their atrocious laws [de l'atrocité de leurs lois]” (VI.13, 86; 1949–51, 2:323).

Montesquieu, however, was not one to judge anything at first glance. Although the Japanese laws may have had the power to extirpate Christianity, they nonetheless prove doubly powerless in other respects: first, with regard to security or preventing crime, and second, with regard to the souls of the citizens. After noting the indefatigable character of the Japanese, Montesquieu wonders rhetorically how much of an effect death penalties can have on people who no longer fear death. This is, certainly, a difficult case for the legislator. In the final example of the chapter, jealous members of the emperor's harem secretly kill his infant heir: those with knowledge of the crime fail to report it, despite the number and severity of the laws that require them to tell the truth. The demand for absolute truthfulness and obedience, monstrously enforced, leads not to faithful honesty but to silent criminality; the Japanese indeed brave every peril, but first among their perils is the will of their emperor. Montesquieu concludes: “When the penalty is excessive, one is often obliged to prefer impunity” (VI.13, 88; see also XII.10, 197). The laws whose extremity is meant to correct all human wickedness cultivate that very wickedness. Earlier in the chapter, Montesquieu recounts how, when the emperor went to visit the deyro of Meaco, a scene of great pomp and beauty fell almost without warning into anarchy: the ceremonial processions dissolved into warring packs, and for days afterwards, women and children were found naked, sewn into canvas bags (cf. Renneville Reference Renneville1725, 5:500–512). Montesquieu expects his readers to feel revulsion at these examples, to see how Eastern excesses have led not to restraint but to license.

Not only are the Japanese laws thus powerless to maintain any type of consistent security, but they are likewise powerless to improve the souls of the citizens who live under them. Montesquieu will not “absolve” the Japanese “legislators” of fault “for their atrocious laws.” In escalating punishments for even the smallest crimes, the Japanese legislators have made “[s]ouls that are everywhere startled” “more atrocious” such that it seems they “can be guided only by a greater atrocity” (VI.13, 86–7). The legislators’ resolute but ineffective correction of their citizens has only exacerbated the abuse: the attempt to make men better through extreme violence has made them more violent, the attempt to remove their vices through immoderate laws has only made their souls as atrocious as those laws. The legislators, not the people or the climate, bear the ultimate fault for the character of the Japanese.

Montesquieu could guess that some of his European readers would most likely join him in his condemnation of this particularly twisted example of Oriental despotism. Indeed, he could predict that many of them would relish looking down on the East. Aflame with righteousness, they could come to love their homeland a little more—feeling themselves blessed to have been born not in the barbaric, anti-Christian Far East, but rather in the wise, moderate West.

Montesquieu reiterates and elaborates this characterization of the Japanese and reapplies his most condemnatory adjective in the last chapter of Book XIV, but he does so in a way that begins to complicate this easy divide between East and West. He begins the chapter affirming that the “Japanese people have such an atrocious character that their legislators and magistrates have not been able to place any trust in them.” He explains here that “these laws” “find no innocent men where there can be a guilty one” and “are made” “so that each scrutinizes the conduct of the other, and so that each is his own inspector, witness, and judge” (XIV.15, 244). The laws of Japan make criminality the obsession of each individual, but the heightened terror has only worsened the impotence of the government in preventing all crime.

In the same chapter, Montesquieu challenges the reductive association of the East with despotism when he offers the Indies as a stark contrast to Japan. In this other Asian land, he finds that the people “are gentle, tender, and compassionate.” Because they have this admirable character, “their legislators have put great trust in them”—so much trust, in fact, that “it seems they have thought that each citizen should rely on the natural goodness of the others” (XIV.15, 244–5). Here, then, are two peoples of Asia who could not be more different. Whereas in one, the legislators assume the people's utter corruption, in the other they assume their natural goodness. Asia may be no more a monolith of despotism than Europe is a monolith of moderation, liberty, or Christian gentleness (cf. XIV.4–9).

In considering the Indies, then, Montesquieu offers an instructive contrast to Japan, and it seems that Europe may in some ways be closer to the latter than to the former. By describing the Japanese—rulers and ruled alike—as scrutinizing each other for wrongdoing, Montesquieu offers a ruling mentality that regards all subjects as corrupt. In order to root out that corruption, he notes, the Japanese “have subjected [the people] at every step to the inquisition [l'inquisition] of the police” (XIV.15, 244; 1949–51, 2:489). Of course, Europeans, like the Japanese, have their own inquisition, specifically, the “tribunal of the Inquisition” [l'Inquisition], which Montesquieu elsewhere proclaims to be “contrary to all good police” (XXVI.11, 504; 1949–51, 2:761; see also XXVI.12, 505; Carrese Reference Carrese2003, 80). The European Inquisition, too, assumes the corruption of human beings; it, too, endeavors to seek out transgressions hidden in every heart and in every home. As we shall see, it also results in atrocious punishments and in destruction. Here Montesquieu offers his first, ever-so-slight suggestion in the work that the Japanese and the Christian Inquisitors share some fundamental commonalities.

THE INQUISITION AND MONTESQUIEU'S APPROACH TO RELIGIOUS PENALTIES

In Book XXV of The Spirit of the Laws, devoted to “the religion of each country” and “its external police,” Montesquieu depicts a form of Christianity, persisting in his own day, that maintains itself by inflicting the most severe punishments on those who do not maintain the religion's purity. In the chapter entitled “Very Humble Remonstrance to the Inquisitors of Spain and Portugal,” Montesquieu speaks in his own voice only at the beginning of the chapter, introducing the letter of remonstrance and explaining that the author of this clearly fictitious letter is a Jewish man writing in response to “the last auto-da-fé” when an “eighteen-year-old” Jewish woman was burned in Lisbon for not believing as did her Christian tormentors (25.13, 490). Well equipped with his acidic wit, the flimsily masked Montesquieu delivers a philippic on the abuses of the Inquisition. Thus, in the voice of the Other, Montesquieu shows himself no more partial to Europe than to Japan in his opposition to atrocious criminal punishments: he breaks his usual tone of almost neutral observation for the sake of his impartial commitment to opposing the most atrocious, unnecessary, and ineffectual cruelties wherever they occur.

The masked Montesquieu begins his unmasking of European hypocrisy by explicitly comparing the Christian inquisitors to the Japanese: “‘You complain,’” he writes, “‘that the emperor of Japan had all the Christians in his states burned by a slow fire, but he will answer: We treat you, you who do not believe as we do, as you yourselves treat those who do not believe as you do; you can complain only of your weakness, which keeps you from exterminating us and which makes it so that we exterminate you’” (XXV.13, 490; Schaub 1998, 229; Rahe Reference Rahe2009, 198). Montesquieu's imaginary Jewish accuser imagines the Japanese emperor mocking the Christians for their hypocrisy: both the Inquisitors and the emperor endeavor to cleanse the perceived contamination of those who adhere to a different religion. They both pursue this end with punishing severity; in persecuting the Jews of Europe, the Christians are no different than the Japanese emperor persecuting the Christians of Asia. Montesquieu does not suggest in his own voice that the supposed men of God are as cruel as the Japanese emperor—the perfect image of an execrable, anti-Christian despot—but his Jewish character does, and his fictitious character does not stop there—he compares the Inquisitors to both the Muslims (who, he says, spread their religion by iron, while the Inquisition spreads its own by fire) and Diocletian (who famously persecuted Christians during the Roman Empire). The Jewish character concludes his remonstration by skewering the Europeans on their own great standards—the God of the Old Testament, the laws of nature, the life of Christ, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment (XXV.13, 490–2).

Montesquieu is more reserved, but no less committed, than his Jewish character in his opposition to the Inquisition. In a key chapter of Book XII, he offers principles regarding criminal punishments in religious matters that, if applied, would eradicate the abuses of the Inquisition from Europe. In that chapter, Montesquieu delineates “four sorts of crimes”: those that “run counter to religion;” those that undermine “mores”; those that upset the “tranquility” of the society; and those that threaten “the security of the citizens.” Although he names religious crimes first and treats them most extensively in this chapter, particularly the horrors that their pursuit can engender, he insists that religious crimes should never lead to corporal penalties. He explains: “In order for the penalty against simple sacrilege to be drawn from the nature of the thing, it should consist in the deprivation of all the advantages given by religion: expulsion from the temples; deprivation of the society of the faithful for a time or forever; shunning the presence of the sacrilegious” (XII.4, 189–190). His use of the term temple rather than church renders his statement of universal application; these principles are meant for all societies.

Montesquieu's universal principles would have an immediate and tangible effect if applied in Christendom: they would quell the inquisitorial excesses of the European mind that revealed themselves in the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and inquisitors could no longer hand over their victims to the authorities of the state to be killed. Indeed, Montesquieu states quite baldly that there is no criminal offense as such in strictly religious infractions: in those things “that wound the divinity, where there is no public action, there is no criminal matter; it is all between the man and god who knows the measure and the time of his vengeance.” Religious representatives must not assume for themselves the powers and rule that rightfully belong to God. Only God—not his human ministers on earth—can seek vengeance for religious crimes or sins: “one must make the divinity honored, and one must never avenge it” (XII.4, 190; Bartlett Reference Bartlett2001, 17; Kingston Reference Kingston, Carrithers, Mosher and Rahe2001, 386–7; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2013, 162–5; Sullivan Reference Sullivan2017, 102--9).

Montesquieu proceeds in this same chapter to examine the ill that occurs in a society where his approach to penalties is not observed. “For if the magistrate, confusing things, even searches out hidden sacrilege, he brings an inquisition [inquisition] to a kind of action where it is not necessary” (XII.4, 190; 1949–51, 2:433). Continuing to speak in general terms here, he refers not to the Inquisition but rather to an inquisition, a system of broad investigative powers that could be formed in any society whatsoever. In fact, he specifies both that there are “inquisiteurs d’État” in Venice (XI.6, 157; 1949–51, 2:397) and, as we have seen, that the police of the Japanese conduct a type of “inquisition” (XIV.15, 244; 1949–51, 2:489). But in using the very word “inquisition” in this particular discussion of penalties associated with religious infractions, Montesquieu invokes the methods and results of the various inquisitions of the Catholic Church. Any such “magistrate” imbued with the powers of corporal punishment and infused with the desire for vengeance “destroys the liberty of citizens” (XII.4, 190).

When speaking in his own voice, Montesquieu does not use the incendiary rhetoric of his Jewish character, but instead limits himself only to subtle invocation. In chapter 4 of Book XII, he proceeds to adduce a horrifying instance of cruelty that occurred when religious penalties were long ago applied illegitimately in Europe. “An historian of Provence,” he says, recounted how a Jewish man, who had been “accused of having blasphemed the Holy Virgin, was condemned to be flayed.” The state's executioner could not carry out the sentence because “[m]asked knights with knives in their hands mounted the scaffold and drove away the executioner in order to avenge the honor of the Holy Virgin themselves.” Thus did avenging zeal beget maculate justice. Montesquieu comments that the story of these Christian knights, who mistakenly assumed for themselves a judgment that should be God's alone, “paints very clearly for us what this idea of avenging the divinity can produce in weak spirits” (XII.4, 190). Montesquieu criticizes the denizens of his own country—which was, in fact, the birthplace of the papal Inquisition half a millennium before he wrote—for deeds that occurred centuries ago in order to stigmatize the broader practices of his own time (Gottheil and Kayserling Reference Gottheil and Kayserling1906, 6:587–8). The recent outrages of the Iberian Inquisitors and those of the first Inquisition in southern France are not so very different. Even Montesquieu's strongest moral criticisms of his fellow Europeans come only through comparisons with other peoples.

MONTESQUIEU'S CORRECTIONS OF JAPAN, THE INQUISITION, AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Although only the Jewish writer draws the connection explicitly, Montesquieu sets up other comparisons that serve to link the inquisitorial abuses of Japan with those of Europe in his books on religion (XXIV and XXV). In his discussions of religious penalties in these books, he repeatedly adduces the atrocious punishments of the Japanese, and his comparative art once more renders those distant exemplars all too familiar. Once again Montesquieu uses the example of Japan to turn the tables on his European readers, leading them abroad to view contemptuously the practices of a foreign state and then bringing them home to show them how, in so censuring the Other, they have in fact censured themselves as well. The Japanese and the Christians have made similar errors—they have turned to extreme measures in avenging their leader in the attempt to correct abuses and improve human souls. Both have wished to root out evil by cruelty, to force men and women to become more perfectly loyal and obedient by the perpetual terror of the most severe punishments. Both the Japanese authorities and the Inquisitors think that human beings are wicked; both believe they can control or correct this wickedness only by extremity; the Japanese legislators and the Inquisitors are the most consistently immoderate characters in The Spirit of the Laws.

Montesquieu very subtly suggests the similarity between the Japanese authorities and the Iberian inquisitors in the two chapters that surround the “Very Humble Remonstrance to the Inquisitors of Spain and Portugal.” In the chapter that precedes the remonstrance, entitled “On Penal Laws,” he reiterates his earlier point regarding the illegitimacy of criminal penalties for religious infractions. Indeed, in his first sentence of the chapter he explicitly restates the teaching of Book XII: “Penal laws must be avoided in the matter of religion” (XXV.12, 489; cf. XII.4 and VI.12). He concedes that such laws “impress fear, it is true,” but then argues against their promulgation because “religion also has its penal laws which inspire fear, [and] the one is canceled out by the other” (XXV.12, 489). But chapter 12 of Book XXV is not merely a recapitulation: when Montesquieu refers here to the penal laws of religion, he means not merely those dispensed by human beings in this world—those that magistrates must avoid, according to his analysis (XII.4)—but also the divine consequences that follow either in this world or in the next as a result of failing to observe the strictures of God. He explains that “[b]etween these two different fears,” the fear of the magistrate's punishments and that of God's, “souls become atrocious” (XXV.12, 489). It is not only earthly punishments—in which the Japanese specialize—but also beliefs in extreme otherworldly punishments that produce undesirable effects in society and in the soul. In Book XXV, Montesquieu leads his good European reader to wonder whether the Catholic Inquisitions have achieved a level of atrocity beyond even that of the worst Oriental despotism. We will return to this question shortly.

For the moment, though, it is necessary to recognize that in this context, Montesquieu displays a particular urgency in making sure that his readers recall the deeds of the Japanese. With the reflection that “the character of the human spirit has appeared in even the order of the penalties that one has used,” he commands his readers: “Remember the persecutions in Japan” (XXV.12, 489).Footnote ⁴ Once again he condemns the harshness of the Japanese, as he had done in Book VI, but he here does more. In the note attached to this statement Montesquieu points his reader to a historical account of the persecutions suffered by Catholic Christians in Japan. His instruction to recall the shocking and deadly punishments of these Christians must surely arouse indignation in his readers—particularly his Catholic readers. He impugns the character of those responsible for the murder of these Christians: “one is more revolted by cruel punishments than by the long penalties that weary more than they frighten” (XXV.12, 489). These thoughts are entirely in keeping with the atrocious souls he describes earlier. It is at this very moment, with his reader's indignation properly stoked against the Japanese, that Montesquieu brings his Jewish character onto the stage to compare explicitly the persecutions of the Inquisition to those of the Japanese.

If such preparation and such execution were not enough for the reader, in the chapter that directly follows the epistle of the Jewish character to the Inquisitors, Montesquieu returns a third time to the condition of Christians in Japan. Entitled “Why the Christian Religion is So Odious in Japan,” Montesquieu begins the chapter both with the reminder—“I have spoken of the atrocious character of the souls of the Japanese”—and a note referring the reader to chapter 13 of Book VI, the chapter on the character of the laws and souls of the Japanese (XXV.14, 492).Footnote ⁵ He also repeats here his claim that the Japanese regard “punishing” “as vengeance for an insult done the prince.” He explains that because in Japan, the civil and political laws are so stringent, the Christians’ pursuit of martyrdom and their “songs of gladness” appeared “to be an attack on” the emperor and thus to constitute “rebellion” (XXV.14, 492). Here is a positive depiction of Christianity, one in which it is a potentially liberating force against the all-controlling aspirations of despotism. Christianity is no more a monolith of despotism than is Asia.

But not all forms of Christianity offer such a haven from despotism, as we have seen. Indeed, the references to Japan in these three chapters—Book XXV, chapters 12–14—form something of a cohesive whole that highlights the manner in which the Inquisition undermines the redemptive power of Christianity. For example, a reader who acts on Montesquieu's reminder in chapter 14 of Book XXV and returns, with the humble remonstrance of the Jewish writer fresh in her mind, to chapter 13 of Book VI will find that certain aspects of that initial treatment of the Japanese apply quite aptly to the Inquisitors. At a pivotal point in that chapter Montesquieu concludes, in a sentence set off in its own paragraph, that “[s]ouls that are everywhere startled and made more atrocious can be guided only by a greater atrocity” (VI.13, 87). In the context of this particular chapter, whose explicit subject is the powerlessness of Japan's laws, the reflection clearly applies to the Japanese. But it need not apply exclusively to them. The souls of any people whatsoever who are exposed to such horrible punishments may become so corrupted: “In a word, history teaches us well enough that the penal laws [of religion] have never had any effect other than destruction” (XXV.12, 489). Montesquieu posits this effect without exception—the penal laws of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions have had the same pernicious, destructive effect on the souls of their subjects as the penal laws of Japan have had on the souls of the Japanese. And perhaps the inquisitors are guilty of another kind of destruction; perhaps they, like the Japanese magistrates, “have succeeded in destroying Christianity”—at least the form of the religion that is gentle rather than violent, a liberator rather than an oppressor (VI.13, 87).

As for the question of whether the practices of the Inquisition might even be worse than those of Japan, one must turn to Book XXIV, where Montesquieu reiterates the extreme harshness of the Japanese laws, noting that these laws “have been made with an extraordinary severity and have been executed with an extraordinary punctiliousness” (XXIV.14, 468). He reintroduces this topic in the heart of that book because the Japanese provide a particularly salient example of his point that there should be an inverse relation between the fear induced by earthly sources—that is, religious, political, and civil authorities— and that induced by divine sources regarding retribution in this life or the next. It would seem that if a religion does not instill obedience through the fear of divine retributions, then the laws should instill a fear of earthly punishments; as the Japanese have no doctrine concerning heaven or hell, and therefore, do not fear punishment in the life to come, they have used their earthly laws to overcompensate where their divine laws undercompensate.

Although Montesquieu does not discuss Christianity's dogmas in this chapter, he offers an implicit contrast because his use of the example of the Japanese religion, which “proposes neither paradise nor hell” (XXIV.14, 468), follows directly on his reflections at the end of the prior chapter on Christians’ fear of eternal damnation. There he speaks of a religion—clearly Christianity—which, “though it gives fears and expectations to all, it makes them feel sufficiently that if there is no crime that is inexpiable by its nature, yet a whole life can be so.” In other words, Christians believe that any of their particular sins can be forgiven by God, but despite the reassuring prospect of such divine forgiveness, the ultimate fate of their soul remains uncertain. Such uncertainty regarding eternity must instill grave fear. Montesquieu, taking the first-person plural, writes of Christian faith “that, troubled over old debts, never settled with the lord [le Seigneur], we should fear contracting new ones, overfilling the cup and reaching the point at which paternal goodness ends” (XXIV.13, 468; 1949–51, 2:723). This is the type of religious fear that Christians experience when they contemplate the possibility of meriting God's ultimate condemnation.

By emphasizing Christians’ fear of God's punishment, Montesquieu suggests that the earthly punishments to which Christians are subject should be mild. But the Christian inquisitors—who zealously inflict extreme corporal punishments for religious infractions—are not at all mild. As we know, Montesquieu cautions that “[b]etween these two different fears,” the fear of the magistrate's punishments and that of God's, “souls become atrocious” (XXV.12, 489). The Inquisitors add terror to terror: the despotism of the Inquisition is more extreme than even the most violent despotism of Asia. The Japanese fear only the punishments of those who seek to avenge their emperor; the Europeans fear the prospect of God's wrath and also, in some cases, the much more immediate penalties of His ministers who seek to avenge Him on earth. It is Montesquieu's manifest purpose to use his overt moral criticisms of Japan to correct this most abusive and abhorrent strand of Christianity: it is thanks to extremists like the Inquisitors that the “gentle religion” that gave Europe a right of nations “for which human nature can never be sufficiently grateful” has been transformed, in Spain and Portugal, into the “raging superstition” that scourged the New World (X.4, 142 and XXIV.3, 462; cf. IV.6, 37; XV.4, 249; XV.5, 250; and XV.7, 252; Carrese Reference Carrese2016, 109–42).

At this point we must note that Montesquieu may be carrying out an even more ambitious project of correction. For if the Japanese legislators were able to impose earthly punishments so extreme that they made the souls of their citizens atrocious even without adding the fear of hell, then perhaps, by the same logic, the otherworldly punishments of Christianity can be invoked in such extreme terms that they are alone sufficient to make souls atrocious in Europe—perhaps correcting the earthly punishments of the Inquisition alone is not enough. Montesquieu would be suggesting, then, that legislators not find a balance between intimidating their citizens either by terror of punishments in this world or in the next, but rather that they moderate punishments in both. Montesquieu's arguments on Japan and the Inquisition would be arguments for mild punishment both on earth and in heaven, arguments according to which one should neither sheath the sword of justice—for men are not angels (V.11, 58 and VI.21, 95)—nor believe that the wickedness or sinfulness or the errors of human beings can be cut out by iron or burned away by zeal (VI.16–18, 91–3). And if one were to wonder whether Montesquieu thought that by reducing the terrors of hell he was in fact chipping away at the foundation of Christianity, we would say that Montesquieu never clearly states his position on the matter, declaring, within the three chapters leading up to the “humble remonstrance,” that the “fundamental principle for political laws in religious matters” is to tolerate the established religion within a state and then, two chapters later, laying down the promotion of commerce—a position for which he himself is quite justly famous—as the best means by which “to attack religion” (XXV.10, 488 and XXV.12, 489). As Ronald Beiner puts it, there is “a certain tension between Christianity as it originally defined itself and the political vision vindicated in The Spirit of the Laws,” and yet “[t]he core of Montesquieu's civil-religion teaching is this: Stick with what you have got” (Beiner Reference Beiner2010, 193–5).Footnote ⁶ If Christianity is to be renewed, Montesquieu teaches that it ought to emphasize its softer, gentler teachings and simpler principles without reliance on terror and on inquisitorial correction; if Christianity is to fall, Montesquieu teaches that the cost of removing it cruelly, through a Japanese mode of correction, would sink Europe into another age of extreme despotism (VIII.8, 118 and XXIV.8, 465). Not only the partisans of Christianity but its partisan enemies, the philosophes and their teachers, many of whom wish to succeed as have the Japanese in “destroying Christianity,” will find in Montesquieu's most overt moral passages a most salutary lesson in moderation (VI.13, 87 and XXIV.2, 460). As Montesquieu puts it in his preface, “One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself” (pref. xliv).

Through his inquiries into the laws of the Japanese, Montesquieu leads his fellow philosophes not only to see the worst abuses of Christianity, which he well knows they already despise, but also the potential abuses of radical corrections of Christianity—of eliminating all concern with the afterlife and raising up new earthly idols, great Princes and Leviathans, who will replace the fear of heaven with the fear of extraordinary punishments and violent death, but who will, by those very measures, repeat the worst parts of the errors they wish to correct. It is not only the Christians whom Montesquieu finds in the Other; at his most daring, Montesquieu implies that the impious inquirers of the modern age, who have prided themselves on their enlightened humanity, have risked repeating the errors of their most hated rivals, the pious Inquisitors. Thus Montesquieu uses his most extreme departure from his practiced reserve to check the extremity of his readers; he takes a middle path in his treatment of Christianity, attempting to remedy its worst abuses and to moderate its abusers.

POWERLESSNESS, USELESSNESS, AND MONTESQUIEU'S APPROACH

Montesquieu suggests that a particular type of Christianity is in some ways equivalent to—and in one particular aspect even harsher than—the harshest form of Eastern despotism. The mirror he holds up to Europe reflects not a privileged haven from barbarity but rather yet another manifestation of a universal human propensity to turn to extremes when attempting great corrections. The Inquisitors attempt to spread Christianity with the same fire that the Japanese use to destroy it. Even when the ends of such cruelty seem opposed, these harshest possible methods create equivalent results. The methods of the Inquisition are as powerless as those of the Japanese: they cannot succeed in making the entire world Christian, and in the attempt to do so, in the attempt to purify humanity, they too have wounded their own and their subjects’ souls, they too have destroyed Christianity—at least any version that preaches love and peace and endeavors to lead human beings away from cruelty by compassion and forgiveness.

In the only part of the “humble remonstrance” in which Montesquieu speaks in his own voice, our author describes the letter as “the most useless that has ever been written” (XXV.13, 490). One might well imagine that no appeal, no comparison, no word could cure such faithful persecutors of their zealotry and their bigotry. Thus, the letter of Montesquieu's character would, in fact, be useless. But Montesquieu, unlike his Jewish character, does not address his work solely to Portuguese inquisitors; The Spirit of the Laws is an education for all Europeans (and perhaps not just Europeans). Wishing to refashion his readers' way of thinking about punishment, Montesquieu propounds principles that would not only make the Inquisitors’ methods completely illegitimate but would repudiate any type of criminal penalty for religious infractions. Yet even in this, his most overt opposition to the harshest form of Christianity, Montesquieu never harangues his readers in his own voice.

If the inquisitors are equivalent to the Japanese, then Montesquieu's recommendations apparently aimed at a legislator in Japan on how to deal with the powerlessness of Japan's extreme laws should also be relevant for a European legislator's approach to the European Christians and their own atrocious laws. Montesquieu writes in the chapter in which he so condemns the souls of the Japanese that “a wise legislator would have sought to lead men's spirits back by a just tempering of penalties and rewards; by maxims of philosophy, morality, and religion, matched to this character; by the just application of the rules of honor; by using shame as a punishment, and by the enjoyment of a constant happiness and a sweet tranquillity” (VI.13, 87). To confirm that the methods of this wise legislator are those of Montesquieu himself, one need only consult the previous chapter devoted to “the power of penalties.” There Montesquieu explicitly recommends moderate punishments: “Men must not be led to extremes; one should manage the means that nature gives us to guide them.” And then he enjoins his readers: “Let us follow nature, which has given men shame for their scourge, and let the greatest part of the penalty be the infamy of suffering it” (VI.12, 84–5).

The laws of Japan and the practices of the Inquisition are extraordinarily bad, and on account of this extraordinariness, Montesquieu is unusually blunt in his negative assessment of them. Because of their extreme harshness, Montesquieu abandons, as we have seen, his promise not to censure, and instead selects these incidents to reveal his own grief over the inhuman extremes of the human mind. It is no surprise, then, that in that first lengthy treatment of Japan and the powerlessness of its laws, Montesquieu raises the issue of how the legislator should respond to an extraordinary case in which souls have been most adversely affected: “And, if this legislator had feared that men's spirits, accustomed to being checked only by cruel penalties, could no longer be checked by a gentle one, he would have acted silently and imperceptibly and would have moderated the penalty for the crime in the most pardonable particular cases until he could manage to modify it in every case” (VI.13, 87). Is this any different from Montesquieu's own rhetorical method? Does it not describe his own approach to moderating the spirits of Europeans, which have become atrocious because they have become accustomed to the cruelest punishments? Montesquieu's taciturnity before the galaxy of human prejudice and abuse that fills The Spirit of the Laws does not indicate indifference but rather a thoughtful calculation based in human psychology about reserving overt moral judgment for those few matters in which it is most necessary and most useful to take a stand, and it is only a further sign of that thoughtfulness—that moderation—that he makes those rare, overt judgments in a way that turns his readers’ zealous indignation against itself.

Just as Montesquieu advises a legislator in Japan to act in the most pardonable cases, so Montesquieu himself chooses to focus on the most pardonable and pathetic cases in Christian Europe—those of the Jewish man flayed by overly zealous knights and of the young Jewish woman burned alive in Lisbon. Just as he advises a legislator to be selective in his corrections, so he condemns not all of Christianity, but rather the most extreme aspects of it—those aspects that are most despotic. After all, he broaches so gingerly the intense fear of eternal damnation under which Christians suffer that his biographer could refer to that very passage as “more than a formal homage to Christianity” (Shackleton Reference Shackleton1961, 352). The Japanese, of course, wanted to detach the Christians from their religion, and the Inquisitors the Jews. Nor are these lessons only for the two groups most explicitly addressed; the lessons of Japan and the Inquisition also serve as a warning to those who would use extreme measures to rid Europe of the Christian religion. Montesquieu's method of dealing with what Voltaire referred to as the infâme of Christianity serves to distinguish his approach from that of other would-be correctors of the religion (Rasmussen Reference Rasmussen2014, 20, 166, 173–8). By his peculiar method, he seeks in part to avoid the trap of those legislators who pursue too drastic a correction: “A legislator who wants to correct an ill often thinks only of that correction; his eye is on that object and not on its defects. Once the ill has been corrected, only the harshness of the legislator is seen; but a vice produced by the harshness remains in the state; spirits are corrupted; they have become accustomed to despotism” (VI.12, 85). True prejudice, Montesquieu says, is that which makes man forget himself and his nature (pref. xliv-v), and it is often in our blind pursuit of an amelioration of an ill that we become most abusive; it is often in our obsession with correction that we forget that first legislative virtue, moderation (XXIX.1, 602).