Integral Humanism - Temporal and Spiritual Problems of New Christendom 0268005168, 0268005109

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INTEGRAL HUMANISM TEMPORAL AND SPIRITUAL PROBLEMS OF A NEW CHRISTENDOM

Jacques JVlaritain TRANSLATED BY

Josepb 711. Evans

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

University of Notre Dame Press edition 1973 TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT© 1968 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS First U.S. edition 1968 by C harles Scribner's Sons French edition entitled Humanisme Integral Copyright by Jacques Maritain 1936 Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Maritain, Jacques, 1882-1973. Integral hllinanism. Reprint of the ed. published by Scribner, New York. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Humanism. 2. Communism. 3. Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. I, Title, [B821.M342 1973] 73-12509 144 ISBN 0-268-00516-8 ISBN 0-268-00510-9 (pbk.)

Preface

Humanisme Intégral was first published in French in July of 1936 (Paris: Fernand Aubier). A first version of it had been published in Madrid in 1935, under the title Problemas Espirituales y Temporales de Una Nueva Cristiandad. It is one of the most major of Maritain’s many major works. Its impact has, I think, been perhaps even more widespread than that of his The Degrees of Knowledge. Until 1926 Maritain had been almost exclusively interested in metaphysics and theology. Moral and political philosophy— social and political matters—were of no particular concern to him. He was even a little bit naive in political matters. He had shared for a time with Father Humbert Clérissac, his spiritual director, certain sympathies for some of the nationalist and monarchical aspirations of Charles Maurras’ L’Action Francaise party—a party largely imbued also with agnosticism and with political naturalism. But then came in 1926 Pius XI’s condemnation of the L’Action Frangaise party, and this occasioned Maritain’s turning seriously to problems of political philosophy. “Today more than ever,” he wrote in his diary many years ago, “I bless the liberating intervention of the Church which, in 1926, exposed the errors of the Action Frangaise, following which I finally examined Maurras’ doctrines and saw what they were worth. There began for me then a period of reflection devoted to moral and political philosophy in which I tried to work out the character of authentically Christian politics and Vv

V1

PREFACE

to establish, in the light of a philosophy of history and of culture, the true significance of democratic inspiration and the nature of the new humanism for which we are waiting.” In a ten-year period this reflection issued in Maritain’s book Primauté du spirituel (1927) in which he affirmed the ‘primacy of the spiritual’ in opposition to Maurras’ “Politique d’abord’; then in Du Régime Temporel et de la Liberté (1933); and finally in Humanisme Intégral. Maritain proposes in Humanisme Intégral a ‘new style’ for the relationship between religion and culture, between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘temporal’,—a ‘new style’ very different from that of medieval Christendom, and yet firmly grounded in reason, and fully in accord with the principles of Christianity, of the Catholic faith. In doing so he gives us a rich and manifold philosophy of the human person,—of his grandeur and of his misery,—and leaves us a ‘treasure-trove’ of basic notions and themes: ‘different historical skies’; ‘sacral’ and ‘lay’ civilization;

‘concrete

historical

ideal

of a new

Christendom’;

‘theocentric humanism’; ‘pluralism’; ‘temporal mission of the Chnistian’; etc.

Humanisme Intégral has had a great influence on the whole ‘Christian Democratic’ movement in Latin America—and notably on its main architects and champions: President Rafael Caldera of Venezuela,

President Eduardo

Frei of Chile, and

Amoroso Lima of Brazil. President Caldera, in the “Personal Testimony” he wrote for the New Scholasticism issue (Winter, 1972) honoring Maritain on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, said: “He |Maritain] became the guide for an incommensurable pleiad of disciples. Thus, when in the month of April of 1947 a group of intellectuals and men of action met in Montevideo in order to start a Latin American Christian democratic movement of continental scope, the principles taught by Maritain, and particularly those contained in his

PREFACE

Vu

work Integral Humanism, were adopted as a rich and true source of guidance.” Pope Paul VI writes in the concluding paragraph of Part I of his encyclical Populorum Progressio (“On the Development of Peoples”): “What must be aimed at is complete humanism,” and then he cites in a footnote Humanisme Intégral. In my view, Humanisme Intégral—in conjunction with subsequent Maritain books like Principes d’une Politique Human-

iste and Man and the State, and with numerous ‘little essays’ of Maritain—did much of the spadework for Vatican I]. Maritain himself sees quite an afhnity between Humanisme Intégral and many aspects and currents in the American body politic. In his book Reflections on America (1958) he writes: “I hope you will pardon me if I now seem to give a more personal turn to my reflections. The fact is that I would like to refer to one of my books, Humanisme Intégral, which was published twenty years ago. When I wrote this book, trying to outline a concrete historical ideal suitable to a new Christian civilization, my perspective was definitely European. I was in no way thinking in American terms, I was thinking especially of France, and of Europe, and of their historical problems, and of the kind of concrete prospective image that might inspire the activity, in the temporal field, of the Cathohc youth of my country.

“The curious thing in this connection is that, fond as I may

have been of America as soon as I saw her, and probably because of the particular perspective in which Humanisme Intégral was written, it took a rather long time for me to become aware of the kind of congeniality which existed between what is going on in this country and a number of views I had expressed in my book. “Of course the book is concerned with a concrete historical ideal which is far distant from any present reality. Yet, what

vill PREFACE matters to me is the direction of certain essential trends characteristic of American civilization. And from this point of view I may say that Humanisme Intégral appears to me now as a book which had, so to speak, an affinity with the American climate by anticipation” (pp. 174-175).* I think Integral Humanism is a most important book. It should be read for a long time to come.

Joseph W. Evans The Jacques Maritain Center

University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana * Since he read the remarkable book of Father O’Connor, The Pentecostal

Movement in the Catholic Church (Ave Maria, 1971), Jacques Maritain took a deep interest in the “‘pentecostal’”’ movement among Catholics of the United States. (This movement began among American Catholics in 1967, and since

then has made immense progress, and there is reason to hope—there are already evidences of it—that it will spread gradually to Latin America and to Europe). I would like to note here that Jacques and Raissa always placed their confidence in “‘little flocks.” In Le Paysan de la Garonne, of which the first French edition appeared in 1966, at a time when the author had still no knowledge of

the diverse pentecostal movements, he noted, page 15, that “the initiatives of little flocks count more than everything,” when “an ardent and purified faith, a passion for the absolute, a fervent presentiment of the liberty, of the ampli-

tude and of the variety of the ways of God, a lively desire for the perfection of

charity” inhabit them, and when they “‘seek and find new ways of giving one’s life in order to bear witness to the love of Jesus for all men and to the generosity

of the Spirit of God.”

Foreword

This book presents the text of a series of six lectures delivered in August, 1934, at the Summer

School of the Uni-

versity of Santander, and which have appeared in Spanish under the title Problemas espirituales y temporales de una

nueva cristiandad. I had hoped to recast them entirely and draw from them a much more developed work. But time has been lacking; and, without abandoning all hope of proceeding some day to such a recasting, I have decided to publish my original text—revising and, on several points, considerably

enlarging it, and also adding an Introduction, a new chapter, and an Appendix. In these lectures I have used other studies,’ in which one

will find doctrinal explanations and developments that could not appear here, and from which one will excuse me for haying quoted some pages when the subject required it; moreover, the present work aims above all to propose a general picture, grouping from a particular point of view—which is

that of the problems of a new Christendom—several conclusions of my previous studies in the order of the philosophy of culture and of society. The questions dealt with here belong to that part of philosophy which Aristotle and St. Thomas call “practical 1 See J. Maritain, Religion et Culture (1930; Eng. trans., Religion and Culture [London: Sheed and Ward, 1931]); Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté (1933; Eng. trans., Freedom in the Modern World (London: Sheed and Ward, 1936]); Science et Sagesse (1935; Eng. trans., Science and Wisdom [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940]). ix

x

FOREWORD

philosophy,” because it envelops in a general way the whole philosophy of human action: a part of philosophy whose proper nature is ordinarily misunderstood in our day, whether one annihilates it by claiming to absorb it into a knowledge wholly speculative, or whether one overburdens it by claiming

to absorb the whole of knowledge into a knowledge ordained essentially and of itself to the transformation of the world and of life.

Practical philosophy

remains

philosophy,

it remains

a

knowledge speculative in mode; but, unlike metaphysics and the philosophy of nature, it is ordered from the very beginning to an object which is action, and however great may be in it the role of verification of fact, whatever account it must take of historical conditionings and necessities, it is above all a science of freedom. I make no claim to engage St. Thomas himself in debates

in which the majority of the problems present themselves in a new manner. I engage only myself, although I am conscious

of having drawn my inspiration and my principles from the living sources of his doctrine and spirit. In examining questions in which human passions and human anguish compose a vast emotional accompaniment, it is

not always easy to preserve impartiality and justice. I have tried my very best to do so. This is why I can take for my own the old formula which it is the honor of French humanism to

have made a commonplace, and present my book as one written “in good faith,” whose sole concern is truth. The world which issued from the Renaissance and the Reformation has been ravaged since that time by powerful

and truly monstrous energies, in which error and truth are closely commingled and feed upon each other—truths which

FOREWORD

Xi

lie, and “lies which speak the truth.” It is the duty of those who love wisdom to try to purify these unnatural and deadly products, and to save the truths that they distort.

It would be fruitless to try to conceal from oneself that this is a particularly thankless task. Those who the energies of which I am speaking think need of being purified; their adversaries see impurity. In vain will the philosopher arm

carry in the world that they have no in them only utter himself with per-

fect instruments of purification; he runs the risk of having the whole world against him. If he is a Christian, he knows this from of old, and scarcely cares about it, being the disciple of a God hated by both the Pharisees and the Sadducees, condemned by the chief priests and by the civil power, and mocked and scorned by the Roman soldiers. April 25, 1936

P.S. In republishing Humanisme Intégral after ten years (and what years!), I have contented a small number of corrections as it was written before events invalidating the philosophical

myself with making in the text but of detail, preferring to leave it such which, it seems to me, are far from views proposed in this work. Rome, May 31, 1946

Contents

Foreword INTRODUCTION

ili * HEROISM

AND

HuMANISM

1

General Notion of Humanism. Is a Heroic Humanism Possible?

Western Humanism and Religion. CuapPtTer I ° Tue Tracepy oF HuMANISM

8

Problems to Examine I. Mediaeval Christendom * The Problem of Man. The Problem of Grace and Freedom. The Practical Attitude of the Creature

in the Face of His Destiny. The Dissolution of the Middle Ages. II. Classical Humanism and the Twofold Problem of Man and of Freedom * The Protestant “Discovery.” The Humanist “Discovery” and the Problem of Freedom. The “Humanist” Discovery and the Problem of Man. III. Classical Humanism and the Practical Attitude of the Creature in Face of His Destiny * The Misfortune of Classical Humanism Is to Have Been Anthropocentric, and Not to Have Been Humanism, Theocentric Humanism and Anthropocentric Humanism.

IV. The Dialectic of Anthropocentric Humanism « The Tragedy of Man. The Tragedy of Culture. The Tragedy of God. X111

xiv

INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

CuapTer II * A New Humanism

35

Divisions of This Chapter —

. The Roots of Soviet Atheism ¢ “Religious” Significance of Communism. Resentment against the Christian World. First Moment of the Process of Substitution: The Rehabilitation of

Material

Causality. Marx Saw the Essential Importance of

Material Causality, but Made It Purely and Simply Pnmary. Second and Third Moments of the Process of Substitution: The

Dynamism of Matter and the Redemptive Mission of the Proletariat. A Contradiction in Historical Materialism? The Kingdom of God in History.

II. The Philosophical Problem of Atheism ¢ Atheism Is Unlivable. Can Marxist Atheism Be Lived? The Resources of Grace. III, The Cultural Significance of Russian Atheism * A Resentment against God. A Purification by Fire. The Postrevolutionary Point of View. IV. Two Christian Positions * The Barthian Position. The Thomist Position. V. A New Age of Christian Culture + The Creature Rehabilitated in God. Created Liberty. An Evangelical Consciousness-of-Self. The Man of Bourgeois Liberalism. Marxism and Man. The U.S.S.R. and Marxism. Socialist Humanism and Integral Humanism. ‘True Humanism Is Not Manichaean. Integral Human-

ism and the Liquidation of the Bourgeois Man. CHAPTER

III * THe

CurisTIAN

AND

THE

WorLD

95

Divisions of This Chapter

I. The Spiritual and the Temporal Religion and Civilization.

+ Concerning

Civilization.

IT. The Problem of the Kingdom of God + Statement of the Problem. “Politische Theologie” and Political Theology. Kingdom,

CONTENTS

XV

Church, and World. The First Error. The Second Error. The Third Error. The Ambivalence of the World. III. The Temporal Mission of the Christian * The Temporal De-

ficiencies of a Once Christian World. Some Causes of These

Failures. The Temporal Role of the Christian with Regard to

the Transformation of the Social Regime. A New Style of Sanctity. The Mystery of the World. CuHaApTer

IV ° Tue

Historicat

CHRISTENDOM I

IpeEAL oF A NEw

127

Divisions of the Chapter I. Preliminaries * The Notion of “Concrete Historical Ideal.” Historical Ideal and Liberty. The Notion of Christendom. II. The Temporal City Abstractly Considered * The Communal and Personalist Aspects. The Peregrinal Aspect. Analogous Nature of This Conception. Statement of the Problem: Mediaeval Christendom and a New Christendom. Two Preliminary Remarks. III. The Historical Ideal of a New Christendom « The Idea of the Holy Empire or the Christian Sacral Conception of the Temporal. Tendency to a Maximal Organic Unity. Effective Predominance of the Ministerial Role of the Temporal. The Use of Temporal Means for Spiritual Ends. Diversity of “Social

Races.” The Common Christ.

Work:

To Build Up an Empire for

IV. Dissolution and Pseudo-morphosis of the Mediaeval Ideal in

the Anthropocentric Humanist World * The Regime of the Baroque Age. The Vanishing Victory of Liberalism. Contempo-

rary Antiliberal Reactions.

xvi

INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

CHAPTER V ° Tue Historicat CHRISTENDOM II

IpeaL or A NEw 162

I. Pluralism + A Christian Secular Conception of the Temporal. Pluralist Structure of the Body Politic. Economic Pluralism. Juridical Pluralism. The Political Animation of the City. Minimal Unity and Civil Tolerance. The Unity of the Pluralist City.

II. The Autonomy of the Temporal

III. The Freedom of Persons + Spiritual and Temporal. The Spirit and the Body Politic. Freedom of Expression. Law and the Pluralist Body Politic. The Ownership of Earthly Goods. The

“Title of Work.” A Regime Consecutive to the Liquidation of Capitalism. The Person and the Economic Community. The Condition of Woman in Marriage.

IV. The Unity of Social Race + Authority and Fundamental Equality. A Personalist Democracy. V. The Common Task: The Realization of a Fraternal Community * The Temporal City and Brotherly Love. The Solution of an Antinomy. Believers and Unbelievers.

VI. The Spiritual Attitude of St. Thomas and the Philosophy of Culture. CHAPTER VI * THE Historic PossIsILITIES OF THE REALIZATION

OF A NEw

CHRISTENDOM

2 it

I. Internal Dimensions: The Impulse of the Spirit in Social Life ¢

A Refraction of the Truths of the Gospel in the Temporal Order. Economism ‘Transcended. Politicism ‘Transcended. The Political Good Is a Good Worthy in Itself of Being an “End”

of Human Action (Bonum Honestum). ‘The Specific Character of Political Ethics. Essence and Existence in Politics. The Utilization of Morality. Politics and the Providence of God. PseudoRealisms.

CONTENTS

XVii

II. Internal Dimensions: The Reintegration of the Masses * The Symbiosis of the True and the False. The Prise de Conscience

of the Worker’s Dignity and Solidarity. The Historic Role of the Proletariat. The Crisis of Socialism. A Historical Reorientation.

III. The Chronological Dimensions + About the Philosophy of History. The Ages of Christian History. A First Chronological Moment.

The Question of Means. A Second

Chronological

Moment. Second Aspect of the Notion of a New Christendom.

CuapTer VII * Tue More IMMmepiate Future

256

I. On Political Action * On Political Action with Immediate Objective. On Political Action at Long Range. Christians and Political Activity. The Proper Exigencies of a Politics Centered

on the Future. II. Problems of Today + “What Should A Do?” Catholic Action and Political Action. Necessity of New Political Formations. His-

toric Situation of These New Formations. Fascist Totalitarianisms and Communist

Totalitarianism. The Spiritual Bases of

the Totalitarian Principle. On Martyrdom as a Solution. Is the Christian Imprisoned in a Tragedy? The Course of the World. APPENDIX

* THE

STRUCTURE

OF ACTION

291

I ¢ The Plane of the Spiritual and that of the Temporal. They Are Clearly Distinct. They Are Not Separate. The Temporal Plane Is Subordinate to the Spiritual Plane. A Necessary DistincLOM. . Which Allows Us to Judge More Exactly the Ponae of Our Actions. The Third Plane of Activity. On This Third Plane, the Christian Acts as a Christian as Such, and, to This Extent, He Engages the Church. The Place of “Catholic Action.” II « The Three Planes of Activity of the Christian. These Three Kinds of Activities Are Necessary. Union on the Plane of “Cath-

xVili

INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

olic Action.” Diversity on the Plane of the Temporal. The Problem of the Catholic Press. To Speak as a Catholic Having a Certain Temporal Position and to Speak in the Name of Catholicism Are Two Very Different Things. Two Essentially Different Types of Periodicals. Specifically Catholic Periodicals.

Specifically “Temporal” Periodicals Catholic in Inspiration. We Must Choose Between One or the Other Formula.

Introduction

HEROISM

AND

HUMANISM

General Notion of Humanism We did not await the interest aroused by the new Communist directives concerning socialist humanism to pose the

problem of humanism. Since that time, this problem has become.common talk and we may indeed be grateful for it, as questions of central importance are henceforth posed. One will no longer be able to say that the problem of man will begin to have a meaning only after the disappearance of the capitalist economy.

But one does perhaps not yet realize that to take a position on humanism obliges one to pose simultaneously many other problems.

By way of introduction to the considerations proposed in the present work, I would like here to draw attention to one of these problems. There is nothing that man desires so much as a heroic life; there is nothing less common to man than heroism: it is, it seems to me, the profound sentiment of such an antimony which constitutes at once the tragedy and the spiritual quality of the work of M. André Malraux. I imagine that the question of humanism, of even socialist humanism, is not for M. Malraux a question without its diff-

culties. May I add that neither to Aristotle did it appear an easy 1

2

INTRODUCTION

question. To propose to man only the human, he remarked, is to betray man and to wish his misfortune, because by the principal part of him, which is the spirit, man is called to better than a purely human life. On this principle (if not on the manner of applying it), Ramanuja and Epictetus, Nietzsche and St. John of the Cross are in agreement. The remark of Aristotle’s that I just recalled—is it humanist, or is it antihumanist? The answer depends on the conception one has of man. One sees immediately then that the word “humanism”

is an ambiguous term. It is clear that

whoever uses it brings into play thereby an entire metaphysic, and that, according as there is or is not in man something

which breathes above time, and a personality whose most profound needs surpass the whole order of the universe, the idea that one forms of humanism will have very different resonances. But because the great pagan wisdom cannot be cut off from the humanist tradition, we are warned in any case not to

define humanism by the exclusion of all reference to the superhuman and by the denial of all transcendence. To leave the whole discussion open, let us say that humanism (and such a definition can itself be developed along very divergent lines) tends essentially to render man more truly human, and to manifest his original greatness by having him participate in all that which can enrich him in nature and in history (by “concentrating the world in man,” as Scheler said approximately, and by “dilating man to the world’); it at once demands that man develop the virtualities contained within him, his creative forces and the life of reason, and work to

make the forces of the physical world instruments of his freedom.

Thus understood, humanism is inseparable from civilization or culture, these two words being themselves taken as

synonymous.

HEROISM

Is a

AND

HUMANISM

3

Heroic Humanism Possible?

The preceding remarks seem to be hard to dispute. In fact, however, do not the humanist periods, in the diverse cycles of culture, present themselves in opposition to the heroic periods, and do they not seem as a decline of the latter into the human, or as a reconquest of the human over them, as a more or less general refusal of the superhuman? Is it, therefore, that humanism would be compatible with heroism, and with

the creative, ascending, and truly organic moments of culture, only when it is engaged in a historical dynamism in which it remains unconscious of itself and hidden to itself,

and in which even suffering closes its eyes on itself, and is borne in ignorance, man ignoring himself then in order to

sacrifice himself to something greater than he? Can humanism disengage itself in its own right and be conscious of itself, and conscious at the same stroke of its own postulates, only in the

moments of dissipation of energy, of dissociation and of descent, in which, to have recourse for once to that opposition of terms, “culture”

becomes

“civilization,”

and in which

suffering opens its eyes on itself—and is no longer endured? Can man know himself only by renouncing at the same time his sacrificing himself to something greater than himself?

Human, all too human, proliferating in that “anarchy of atoms” of which Nietzsche spoke—is decadence in this sense

a humanist phenomenon? It may be that the answer is less simple than it appears to a certain facile aristocratism; it may be that certain forms of heroism permit one to resolve this apparent contradiction. Communist heroism aspires to do so by revolutionary tension

and the titanism of action, Buddhist heroism by pity and nonaction. Another heroism aspires to do so by love. The

example of the humanist saints, for instance the admirable

4

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Morte, is from this point of view particularly significant. But does it show only that humanism and sanctity can coexist, or does it show also that there can be a humanism

nourished at the heroic sources of sanctity? A humanism disengaged for itself and conscious of itself, which leads man to sacrifice and to a truly superhuman grandeur, because in that case human suffering opens its eyes and is borne in love—

not in the renunciation of joy, but in a greater thirst, a thirst which is already joy’s exaltation. Can there be a heroic humanism? For my part, I answer Yes. And I wonder if it is not on the answer to this question (and on the grounds one gives for it)

that depend above all the different positions taken by various men in face of the historical work which is taking place before

our eyes, and the diverse practical options to which they feel themselves obliged.

Western Humanism and Religion I am well aware that for some people an authentic humanism can by definition only be an antireligious humanism. My idea is quite the contrary, as will be evident in the following chapters. For the moment I would simply make two statements of fact on this subject.

In the first place, it is quite true that since the dawn of the Renaissance the Western world has passed progressively from

a regime of Christian sacral heroism to a humanistic regime. But Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself: I call “transcendent” all forms of thought, however diverse they

may otherwise be, which find as principle of the world a spirit superior to man, which find in man a spirit whose destiny

HEROISM

AND

HUMANISM

5

goes beyond time, and which find at the center of moral life a natural or supernatural piety. The sources of Western humanism are both classical and Christian; and it is not only in the bosom of mediaeval times, but also in one of the least

questionable parts of the heritage we have from pagan antiquity, the part evoked by the names of Homer, Sophocles, Socrates and Virgil, “the Father of the West,” that the

qualities which I have just mentioned appear. On the other hand, by the very fact that it was a regime of unity of flesh and spirit, a regime of incarnate spirituality, mediaeval Christendom embodied in its sacral forms a virtual and implicit humanism. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this hu-

manism was to “appear’ and to manifest itself—with the radiance of a beauty that was unstable, if not premature, for soon the discord between the mediaeval style of culture and the style of classical humanism (to say nothing of the diverse

disfigurations which Christianity itself was to suffer, chief among which were Puritanism and Jansenism) was to mask and to keep hidden for a time the fundamental agreement between Christianity and humanism seen in their essences. In those mediaeval

times

a communion,

in one and the

same living faith, of the human person with other real and concrete persons and with the God whom they loved and with the whole creation, made man, amid numerous troubles,

fruitful in heroism and in activities of knowing and in works of beauty; and in the purest hearts a great love, exalting nature in man above itself, extended even to things the sense of

fraternal piety. Then a St. Francis understood that, before being exploited by our industry for our use, material nature demands in some way to be itself familiarized by our love: I mean that in loving things and the being in them, man should draw them to the human rather than make the human submit to their measure.

6

INTRODUCTION

On the other hand, and this is my second point, if we consider Western humanism in those of its contemporary forms which appear to be most emancipated from every metaphysics of transcendence, it is easy to see that, if there still remains in them some common conception of human dignity, of liberty and of disinterested values, this is a heritage

of ideas and sentiments once Christian but today little loved. I fully appreciate, of course, that “liberal-bourgeois” humanism is now no more than barren wheat and a starchy bread. Against this materialized spirituality, the active materialism of atheism and paganism has the game in its hands. But cut off from their natural roots and transplanted into a climate of violence, disaffected Christian energies—in fact and existentially, whatever the theories behind them—do

in part

move men’s hearts and rouse men to action. Is it not a sign of the confusion of ideas reaching throughout the world today, to see these formerly Christian energies helping to exalt precisely the propaganda of cultural conceptions opposed head-on to Christianity? It is high time for Christians to bring things back to truth, reintegrating in the fullness of their original source those hopes for justice and those nostalgias for

communion on which the world’s sorrow feeds and which are themselves misdirected, thus awaking a cultural and temporal

force of Christian inspiration able to act on history and to be a support to men.

For this Christians must have a sound social philosophy and a sound philosophy of modern history. Thus they would work to substitute for the inhuman regime in agony before our eyes a new form of civilization, which would be characterized

by an integral humanism and which would represent for them a new Christendom, no longer sacral but secular or lay, on the lines we have endeavored to make clear in the studies brought together in this volume.

HEROISM

AND

HUMANISM

7

We see this new humanism, which has no standards in

common with “bourgeois” humanism and which is all the more human because it does not worship man but really and effectively respects human dignity and does justice to the integral demands of the person, as oriented toward a sociotemporal realization of the Gospel’s concern for human things (which ought not to exist merely in the spiritual order, but to be made incarnate) and toward the ideal of a fraternal

community. It is not to the dynamism or the imperialism of race or Class or nation that this humanism asks men to sacrifice themselves; it is to a better life for their brothers and to

the concrete good of the community of human persons; it is to the humble truth of brotherly love to be realized—at the cost of an always difficult effort and of a relative poverty’—in the social order and the structures of common

life. In this

way such a humanism can make man grow in communion, and if so, it cannot be less than a heroic humanism. 11 consider as entirely necessary that which one calls in our day an “economy of abundance.” But without even speaking of the grave problems which the progress of science and technique will pose in diminishing the need for manpower and creating risks of unemployment, this abundance, while being distributed to all, will signify for each a relative poverty, in which sufficiency will be assured but in which luxury will be difficult.

| THE TRAGEDY OF HUMANISM

Problems to Examine The problem of man will occupy us in this chapter and the following chapter.

What we will seek to determine is, from the point of view of a philosophy of modern history, the practical and concrete

position of the human creature before God and his destiny, as this is characteristic of an age or of a moment of culture.

But this problem of the practical or ethical order is at once dominated and elucidated by a twofold speculative problem

—the anthropological problem: What is man? and the theological problem of the relation between man and the supreme principle of his destiny, or, in Christian terms, and to express the question more precisely, between grace and freedom. We shall examine these three problems, first, from the

point of view of mediaeval Christendom, then from the point of view of modern humanism. We shall then see to what positions the dialectic of this humanism has led the present age, and afterwards we shall examine these same three problems from the point of view of a “new Christendom” and of a new humanism. 8

THE TRAGEDY OF HUMANISM

I. MEDIAEVAL

9

CHRISTENDOM

The Problem of Man Let us consider, then, from the point of view of mediaeval

Christendom the anthropological problem, the problem of grace and freedom, and the problem of the concrete position

of the creature before God. For mediaeval thought (and in this it only showed that it

was Christian), man was not simply an animal endowed with reason, according to the famous Aristotelian definition, which

one can truly regard as a definition “naturally Catholic’—and

this commonplace concerning human nature already goes very far, for, making of man a spirit by the principal part of him, it shows that he must have superhuman aspirations; but it

also shows, since this spirit is the spirit of an animal, that it must be the weakest of spirits, and that in fact man will live

most often not in the spirit but in the senses. For mediaeval thought, man was also a person; and one

must remark that this notion of person is a notion, if I may so speak, of Christian index, since it was disengaged and clarified thanks to theology. A person is a universe of spiritual nature endowed with freedom of choice and constituting to this extent a whole which is independent in face of the world —neither nature nor the State can lay prey to this universe

without its permission. And God himself, who is and acts within, acts there in a particular manner and with a particularly exquisite delicacy, which shows the value He sets on it: He respects its freedom, at the heart of which He nevertheless lives; He solicits it, He never forces it.

And

moreover,

in his concrete

and historical

existence,

man, for mediaeval thought, is not a simply natural being.

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He is a dislocated being, wounded—by the devil who wounds him with concupiscence, by God who wounds him with love. On the one hand, he bears the heritage of original sin; he is born divested of the gifts of grace, and not, doubtless, sub-

stantially corrupted, but wounded in his nature. On the other hand, he is made for a supernatural end: to see God as God sees himself, he is made to attain to the very life of God; he

is traversed by the solicitations of actual grace, and if he does not oppose to God his power of refusal, he bears within him

even here below the properly divine life of sanctifying grace and its gifts. Existentially considered, one can therefore say that man is at once a natural and a supernatural being. Such is, in a general manner, the Christian conception of man; but what is important for us to note is the special character that this conception had taken on in mediaeval thought as such, considered as a historical moment. Let us say that these primarily theological knowledges sufficed for the Middle Ages. They enveloped a very powerful psychology, but not in the modern sense of the word: for it was from the

point of view of God that all things were regarded then. The natural mysteries of man were not scrutinized for themselves by a scientific and experimental knowledge. In short, the Middle Ages were just the opposite of a reflex age: a sort of fear or metaphysical modesty, and also a predominant concern to see things and to contemplate being, and to take the measures of the world, kept the gaze of mediaeval man turned away from himself. This characteristic we shall find every-

where. The Problem of Grace and Freedom

If it is a question now, no longer of the anthropological problem, but of the theological problem of grace and freedom,

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here again we must distinguish that which belongs to Christian thought in general and as such, and that which characterizes in a particular manner the thought of the Middle Ages.

The whole theological thought of the Middle Ages was dominated by St. Augustine, especially by the positions taken by Augustine in opposition to Pelagius. And in this the Middle Ages were purely and simply Catholic and Christian. When they affirmed at once the full gratuitousness, the sovereign liberty, the efficacy of divine grace, and the reality

of human free will; when they professed that God has the first initiative of all good, that He gives both the will and the execution, that in crowning our merits He crowns His

own gifts, that man nor begin by himself pare himself for it by he can do only evil

cannot save himself by himself alone, alone the work of his salvation, nor prehimself alone, and that by himself alone and error—and that nevertheless he is

free when he acts under the divine grace; and that, interiorly

vivified by it, he freely posits good and meritorious acts; and that he is alone responsible for the evil that he does; and that his freedom confers on him in the world a role and initiatives

of an unimaginable importance; and that God, who has created him without him, does not save him without him—

well then, when the Middle Ages professed this conception

of the mystery of grace and freedom, it was purely and simply the orthodox Christian and Catholic conception that it professed. At the highest point of mediaeval thought, St. Thomas Aquinas elaborated theologically the solutions that St. Augustine had discerned in his great contemplative intuitions.

But it is not difficult nevertheless to find here again the particular note of this age of Christian civilization, the note of which I was just speaking apropos the anthropological problem, namely, this absence of the deliberately reflexive

glance of the creature on itself.

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The Middle Ages kept its eyes fixed on the luminous points which St. Augustine revealed in the mystery of grace and

liberty, and which concerned the divine depths of this mystery. The vast regions of shadow which remained, and which concerned the created and human depths of this mystery, in particular all that which relates to the divine permission of the evil act and to the engendering of evil by the creature, as also

to the meaning and proper value, I say in the philosophical and theological order itself, of the temporal and “profane” activity of the human being—the Middle Ages laid down forcefully, on the threshold of these regions, the principles of solution; they entered but little into the obscurities and the problems

here, they let much of the terrain lie fallow and left a whole problematic unexplored.

The result was that certain parasitic representations, taking the place of the more elaborate solutions which were lacking, were able in this domain to superimpose a particular and momentary imprint on the eternally Christian conceptions of

which I was speaking just now. I am thinking of a @grtain too facilely pessimistic and dramatic imagery concerning fallen human nature, and of a certain too simple and too summary

image of the divine election and of the comportment, if I may so speak, of the divine personality vis-d-vis created destinies. I am thinking of a certain theological inhumanity of which mediaeval Catholicism—while in other respects maintaining within the limits of orthodoxy these deficient elements that by themselves asked (one has seen this well from subsequent events) only to become aberrant—was naturally and constantly tempted to seek a justification in the less sound parts of the Augustinian synthesis. St. Thomas put everything in order again, but too late for mediaeval thought to be able to profit from his principles and bring them to fruition.

It would be absurd to pretend that in the Middle Ages the

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13

prise de conscience of the creature by itself was not accomplished implicitly in the very movement of metaphysical or theological thought toward being and toward God, or of poetical and artistic thought toward the work to be created. But it was on the side of a deliberately and expressly reflexive scrutiny that this prise de conscience was lacking. We

find a striking example of this in the mystics themselves. The Middle Ages are rich in incomparable mystics, but if we possessed only the documents left by them, if we did not

know the works of a St. Teresa, of a St. John of the Cross, of a Marie de I’Incarnation, we would know little about the interior states, trials, and nights of the souls who have entered

upon this way; and we could think that the mystics of the Middle Ages were unaware of them. They were not unaware of them, they lived them; they were not “interested” in them,

and, except at the decline of the Middle Ages, at the time of Ruysbroeck and of Tauler, they did not judge it useful to

speak of them. Likewise the Middle Ages had a profound and eminently Catholic sense of the role of the sinner and his own initiatives,

of his resistances, and of the mercies of God with regard to him in the economy of divine Providence. They had a profound sense of nature, of its dignity as well as of its weakness; they knew better than any other epoch the price of human

pity and tears. But all this was for them lived rather than conscious, rather than the object of reflex knowledge. And if we considered only the documents of the mediaeval theological tradition (I am not speaking of Thomas Aquinas, who is much too great to characterize an epoch), we could think, and this would be an error, that mediaeval thought knew the human creature only in terms of soteriological problems and the divine exigencics with regard to man, in terms of the ob-

jective laws of the morality required of him, and not in terms

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of the subjective resources of his grandeurs or of the subjective determinism of his miseries.

The Practical Attitude of the Creature

in the Face of His Destiny Let us come now to the third of the problems which we must examine, to that of the practical attitude of the creature

with regard to his destiny. Our earlier observations make clear to us that mediaeval man, in his response to the divine initiatives, advances with a direct and simple movement,

a

movement unconcerned with reflex prises de conscience—let us say, and without attaching to this word any pejorative

sense, with a naive movement, glancing at himself only in passing.

The proper style of mediaeval Christendom is thus characterized by the unexperienced and unreflecting simplicity of man’s movement of response to God’s movement of effusion.* It was, amid a swarm of passions and crimes, a simple movement of ascent, of the intellect toward the object, of the soul toward perfection, of the world toward a social and juridic structure unified under the reign of Christ. With the absolute ambition and unpremeditated courage of childhood, Christendom built then an immense stronghold on the summit of which God would sit; it was preparing for Him a throne on the earth, because it loved Him. All the human

was thus

under the sign of the sacred, ordered to the sacred and protected by the sacred, at least as long as love made it live on the sacred. What mattered the losses, the disasters? A divine

work was being accomplished by the baptized soul. The creature was severely lacerated and in this even magnified; it

forgot itself for God. 1]. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, op. cit., Ch. III.

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15

The Dissolution of the Middle Ages When the lan of heroism which thus carried it along was

stayed, and when it fell back upon itself, the creature felt itself crushed by the heavy structure of the world which it had built; it felt the horror of being nothing. The creature wishes indeed to be “despised’”—that is to say, held for nothing before God—by the saints; it knows that they do it justice. It does not tolerate being despised by men

of flesh, be they

theologians or philosophers, men of the Church or men of the State. It felt itself thus despised at the end of the Middle Ages, during the long miseries of the fifteenth century at the time when the dance of death was coursing through men’s minds and when St. Vincent Ferrer was announcing the end

of the world—and when at the same time new and powerful structures, answering to a type of culture altogether different and purely human, were seeking to come to light. The catastrophe of the Middle Ages thus opens the epoch of modern humanism. The radiating dissolution of the Middle Ages and of its sacral forms is the engendering of a secular civilization —of a civilization not only secular, but which separates itself

progressively from the Incarnation. It is still, if you wish, the age of the Son of man: but in which man passes from the cult of the God-man, of the Word made man, to the cult of

humanity, of sheer man. To characterize as briefly as possible the spirit of this epoch,

the spirit of the epoch dominated by the humanist Renaissance and by the Reformation, let us say that it has wished to proceed to an anthropocentric rehabilitation of the creature,

of which a palpable symbol, if one sought in religious archi-

tecture a correspondence of the soul, could be found in the substitution of the Baroque style (very beautiful in itself,

moreover) for the Roman and Gothic styles.

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II. CLASSICAL HUMANISM AND THE TWOFOLD PROBLEM OF MAN AND OF FREEDOM

The Protestant “Discovery” It is this which we can see at once apropos the twofold speculative problem: that of man, and that of grace and freedom. Let us begin by examining it from the side of the Protestant

“discovery.” This rehabilitation appears to us in this case as disguised in its opposite; it is in a solution of despair that it reveals itself to us.

There is here an antinomy of a rare dynamic violence, which it is important to disclose.

If St. Augustine is interpreted in a material sense, with the simple lights of a reason not truly theological but geometrical, it seems that in his doctrine the creature is annihilated. Man

by original sin is essentially corrupted—it is the doctrine of Luther, of Calvin, of Jansenius.

Is not this a pure pessimism? Nature itself is essentially spoiled by original sin. And it remains spoiled under grace, which is no longer a life but a mantle. Yes, this is a pure pessimism. But notice: this nature itself before sin possessed as its due the privileges of Adam. And now this man corrupted, who can merit nothing for heaven and whom faith covers with Christ as with a mantle, will be of value for the earth, and moreover according to that which he is, in the very corruption of his nature. There is a place here below for the creature whom one has sullied, since it is

necessary indeed that it live in this hell which is the world.

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17

Such is the dialectic and the tragedy of the Protestant conscience, with its admirably ardent and sorrowful—yet itself purely human, tenebrously human—sense of human misery and of sin. The creature declares its nothingness! But it is itself that declares this, and it does so by itself alone. Man is a walking corruption; but this nature irremediably corrupt cries nevertheless toward God, and man has thus, do what

one will, the initiative of the cry. The problem of grace and freedom receives likewise a simple and even simplistic solution: there is no longer any free will; it has been killed by original sin. It is, in short, the doctrine of predestination and reprobation in the sense of the Protestant schools, the theology of grace without freedom. Calvinism is the best-known illustration of it. And we are

still in the presence of the same antinomy: man is bound down, annihilated under despotic decrees. But the predestined one is sure of his salvation. Thus he is ready to confront any-

thing here below and to conduct himself as the elect of God on earth; his imperialist demands (he who is substantially soiled but saved, still sullied by the sin of Adam but the elect of God) will be limitless; and material prosperity will seem

to him a duty of his state.”

The Humanist “Discovery” and the Problem of Freedom Let us now examine our two problems from the side of the

humanist “discovery.” As regards the problem of freedom and grace, we shall have 2 Many attenuations, as R. H. Tawney in particular has shown, must be brought to the theory of Max Weber on the origins of capitalism. The fact remains that Calvinism (and Calvin’s doctrine on lending at interest) has played on its plane, and among other factors, a certain and important role.

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to distinguish between a mitigated humanist theology and an absolute humanist theology.

What I call mitigated humanist theology is Molinism. I hold that the celebrated Spanish theologian, who in the sixteenth century invented a new theory of the divine foreknowledge and of the relations between grace and the created will, has a very high significance for the history of the culture. I have no intention of here scrutinizing this problem or of entering into the theological details of the quarrels de auxiliis;

it is from the cultural point of view, from the point of view of the philosophy of history and of civilization, that I would

like to say a word on these matters. And from this point of view, however it may be with the theological subtleties, one may say that Molinism claims for the creature a share only, doubtless, but in the end a share, of first initiative in the order of good and of salvation.* 3 Let me quote here a passage from a reply of mine, published in the American periodical Thought (September, 1944), to an article of M. Louis Mercier which had appeared in the same review: “Mr. Mercier will possibly understand the sense of my criticism if he meditates upon the following texts in Molina’s Concordia: ‘Sane quod bene aut male ea opera exerceamus, quae per solam arbitrii nostri facultatem et concursum Dei generalem possumus efficere, in nos ipsos tanquam in causam particularem ac liberam et non in Deum est referendum... . Non igitur causa est Deus virtutis nostrae ac vitii, sed propositum nostrum et voluntas. . . . Cum auxiliis ex parte Dei, cum quibus unus justificatur et salvatur, alius pro sua libertate nec justificatur nec salvatur.’ “The most interesting part in Professor Mercier’s article deals with the literary history of ideas, in which his competence is unquestionable and his observations are always inspiring. I read what he wrote about the seventeenth century with great pleasure and profit. But with regard to my ‘integral humanism,’ I cannot help feeling that he missed the point. Did he believe for one moment that I presented the century of Pascal as having all its forces and elements impregnated with Molinism, and that I ‘condemned’ the great spirituals of that century, whom I cherish, or Polyeucte which I admire as much as he does? I did not ‘condemn’ anybody, even Molina or the average ‘Christian gentleman of the classical age.’ I have tried to situate them and to bring out their significance in the philosophy of modern culture and history. That is why it was not the place to embark on a theological discussion of Molina. Neither did I look on the particular influence he may have indirectly exercised on

seventeenth-century literature (in the order of efficient causality). My book is a philosophical one, and, because I think that the main stars in the philosophy

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19

Until then, the Catholic Christian thought that he had indeed the initiative and the free initiative of his good acts, and of his good acts in their entirety, but an initiative that was second, not first, God alone having the first initiative: our

good acts being thus wholly from God as first cause and wholly from us as free second cause. Now, the Christian

thinks that there are two parts to be considered in his good and salutary acts: these acts are divided, split, shared between God and man; in each of his acts, there are two parts,

one of which depends on man alone, the other on God alone. And thus the Christian thinks that, as regards one part, he too has the first initiative of the good that he does. Formerly, it was an idea of the vital and spiritual order that

occupied his mind on the subject of the mystery of the relations of his freedom with the divine freedom: God was the life of his life; not only had He given man life, but He vivi-

fied constantly from the profoundest springs of being this created life and this created activity. Now, it is an image of the mechanical order that illumines

his thinking—something which resembles what one will later call the parallelogram of forces. God and he each pull from their respective sides on the ship of his destiny, and to the extent that it is man who pulls, to that extent it is not God. There you have the man of the Christian humanism of the

anthropocentric epoch. He believes in God and in His grace, but he disputes the terrain with Him; he claims his share in the matter of first initiative with regard to salvation and to acts meritorious of eternal life, while he undertakes to conof culture are to be found in the heaven of theology, I have taken Molina’s theology (in the order of formal causality) as an eminent sign, an illuminating

type for one of the most characteristic currents—I mean the richest in historical or ‘prospective’ potentialities—in the cultural behavior of the seventeenth century. It is clear for me that this current had an ‘anthropocentnic’ direction, and could logically lead but to the separated humanism of the eighteenth century.”

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struct by himself alone his earthly life and his earthly happiness. Let us say that Molinism, considered in its psychological

conditioning, is the theology of the Christian gentleman of the classical age, just as Jansenism is the theology of the Christian magistrate of this same age. But as representative

sign, it has an Molina was a cultural point ern civilization

altogether different value. I do not know if great theologian, but I think that from the of view he is highly representative for modand for the modern dissolution of Christen-

dom.

Considered doctrinally, this mitigated humanist theology was something unstable. It had logically to give way to a pure

form. We arrive thus at that which one can call absolute humanist theology. It is the theology of rationalism. Of this theology, the formula is much more simple; like Molinism, it accepts the opposition, the so-called incompatibility, against which Protestantism had stumbled—between

the efficacy of grace and freedom; and like Molinism, it resolves this antinomy in a sense inverse to that of Protestantism, seeking to save human freedom at the expense of divine causality. But it goes the whole way in this direction. Just as the pure Protestant theology of grace is a theology of grace without freedom, the pure humanist theology or metaphysic of freedom is a theology or a metaphysic of freedom without grace. The great classical metaphysicians will moreover

experi-

ence many difficulties in justifying and saving speculatively, with the principles of absolute rationalism or of absolute intellectualism, this very freedom of the human will. Leibniz

and Spinoza will strive to furnish substitutes. But it remains always, in the ethical and practical order, that freedom, to whatever substitute one may reduce it speculatively, is for

man a claim and a privilege which he realizes and causes to

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21

triumph by himself alone. To himself alone it belongs henceforth to make his destiny, to himself alone it belongs to intervene like a god, by a dominating knowledge which absorbs within it and surmounts all necessity, in the conduct of his own life and in the functioning of the great machine of the universe delivered over to geometric determinism. Finally, with the Hegelian conception of history, one will be in the presence no longer of two freedoms confronting each other, that of God and that of man, but of a single freedom,

that of man, in whom will come to self-realization the divinityin-becoming in the world and in history.

The Humanist “Discovery” and the Problem of Man Let us pass to the second speculative problem, that of man. Here again it will be necessary to distinguish between a mitigated humanist theology and an absolute humanist theology.

The mitigated humanist theology is that humanism, or rather that Christian naturalism, which regards grace as a

simple ornament capping nature (a nature which has need only of itself to be perfect in its order); grace thus renders

meritorious for heaven and colors with a supernatural varnish those acts whose perfect rectitude the reason of the upright man suffices to assure. The Averroism of the Middle Ages and the Cartesian ra-

tionalism of the seventeenth century claimed in this manner to furnish the world with a perfect natural wisdom of which man existentially considered would be capable in actual fact, while keeping himself in isolation and separation from the

things of faith and of revelation, in a climate apart, removed from that of Christian wisdom.

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In the practical and moral order, one will arrive then at this

conception, from which the political thought of Dante does not seem to be exempt,‘ that man and human life are ordered simultaneously to two different absolutely ultimate ends, a purely natural ultimate end, which is perfect prosperity here

on earth, and a supernatural ultimate end, which is perfect beatitude in heaven.

Thus, by a sagacious division of labor which the Gospel had not foreseen, the Christian will be able to serve two masters at once, God for heaven and Mammon for the earth, and will be

able to divide his soul between two obediences each alike absolute and ultimate—that of the Church, for heaven, and that of the State, for the earth.

Here again we are confronted with a mechanical dichotomy substituted for an organic subordination. Man such as mediaeval Christendom conceived him has been split in two: on the one hand, one has a man of pure nature, who has need

only of reason to be perfect, wise and good, and to gain the earth; and on the other, one has a celestial envelope, a beliey-

ing double, assiduous at worship and praying to the God of the

Christians, who surrounds and pads with fluffs of grace this man of pure nature and renders him capable of gaining heaven. Knock over this double, or rather, for the thing is not so

simple, reabsorb him into the subject which he envelops—he will remain the man of pure nature, such as the absolute humanist theology conceives him. *The good of “civil life” or of civilization is an ultimate end in a given order, in the temporal order or the order of the acquired virtues (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. theol., LH, q. 65, a. 2; De Virtut. cardin., a. 4, ad 3), but not absolutely; and by their subordination to the absolutely ultimate end,

i.e., to eternal life, this relatively ultimate end and the temporal order itself find themselves intrinsically superelevated. Despite a reserve indicated

(very

lightly) in the very last pages, it appears that in the De Monarchia, Dante has treated the end of the temporal or political order as an absolutely ultimate end

(cf. Bk. III, c. 16): the reproach of Averroism, which M. Gilson addresses to

him in this regard, seems therefore justified.

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What I call here absolute humanist theology is, above all, that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the theology of natural goodness. As one knows, the man of Rousseau is not only free original sin and of the wounds of nature; he possesses essence the pure goodness which renders him a participant the divine life and which was manifest in him in the state

of by in of

innocence. Thus grace has been reabsorbed in nature. The true meaning of Rousseau’s theory Much more holy indeed than end of his life, no longer clung good; he was good more than

is that man is naturally holy. virtuous! (Jean-Jacques, at the to being virtuous, but to being ever. . . .) Man is holy, if he

establishes himself in divine union with the spirit of Nature, which will render good and right all his primary movements. Evil comes from the constraints of education and of civilization, of reflection and of artifice. Only let nature open out,

and pure goodness will appear—it will be the epiphany of man. The name of another great thinker must be cited here, that of Auguste Comte. His theory of the Great Being has much interest for us, in the sense that it shows us to what an idea

of man that believes itself purely naturalistic logically leads. It is clear that the God-humanity of Comte is at one and the same time the human race in its natural and terrestrial reality

—and the Church, the mystical body of Christ—and Christ himself and God.

And Hegel especially, while he asks philosophy to save religion, and while he reabsorbs

for this all the content

of

religion into the supreme metaphysical enunciations of pure reason, Hegel in reality introduces the very movement of the

redemption into the dialectic of history, and in fact makes of the State the mystical body through which man attains to the freedom of the sons of God.

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Whether we turn to Rousseau, to Comte, or to Hegel, we

notice in these great representatives of the modern soul that, on the one hand, man is regarded in his existential condition as a purely natural being, whom one represents to himself as detached from any connection with a supernatural order connoting original sin and grace. And nevertheless in reality one does not succeed in thinking him as purely natural, so powerful in him are the connections of which we are speaking. One

thinks he has to do with a being of a purely natural condition or state, and one reabsorbs into this man of pure nature all the aspirations and all the appeals to a life properly divine—ego dixi: dit estis—which for the Christian are dependent on the

grace of God. So that man separated from God claims and demands everything for himself as if it were all owed to him; as if he were (and in truth he is, but precisely on condition that he does not

make himself his own center) the heir of God.

III. CLASSICAL HUMANISM AND THE PRACTICAL ATTITUDE OF THE CREATURE IN FACE OF HIS DESTINY

The Misfortune of Classical Anthropocentric, and Not to

Humanism Is to Have Been Have Been Humanism

Let us turn now to the third problem, the problem of the practical attitude of the creature in face of his destiny. What is this attitude in the epoch which follows the Renaissance and the Reformation? We note at that time a remarkable confluence of the two attitudes—one pessimistic, the

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other optimistic—which we observed a moment ago, and the logical prevalence of the second. By an unforeseen dialectical detour, the ultra-pessimist conception that Calvin and Jansenius had of human nature was also to result in an anthropocentric scission. For pessimism detaches the creature from any link with a

higher order. And then, as one must in any event live, the creature takes his ease and makes himself the center, in his

own lower order itself. This phenomenon has been evident even in the religious sphere with the liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century.

As to the practical attitude of the men of the Renaissance,

it did not begin by a rupture with Christianity—far from it. As the pessimism of the Reformers overstressed the Christian datum of original sin, the optimism of the Renaissance overstressed also a Christian datum, but an opposite one: the con-

viction of the value of this human being, who is the living image of God. The sense of the abundance of being, the joy of the knowledge of the world and of freedom and the élan toward scientific discovery, the creative enthusiasm and the love of the beauty of sensible forms reveal in the time of the

Renaissance sources inextricably natural and Christian. It is a kind of euphoria that seizes man then; he turns toward the documents of pagan antiquity with a fever which the pagans had not known; he believes he can possess the totality of him-

self and of life, without having need of passing by the path of interior purification; he wishes joy but without asceticism; it was a wish to bear fruit without being pruned, or without one’s sap being vivified by Him whose grace and gifts can alone divinify man. Here again, everything was to issue in

anthropocentric scission. Thus, in a general manner, the effort of the age of culture

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of which we are speaking has tended toward that rehabilitation of the creature of which it was a question

a moment ago,

but toward a rehabilitation of the creature turning back upon

itself and, so to speak, separated from its transcendent vivifying principle. With the Renaissance, it is the cry of its grandeur and of its beauty that the creature makes mount toward heaven;

with the Reformation, the cry of its distress and of its misery. In every way, the creature asks, either in tears or in revolt,

to be rehabilitated. Now, considered in itself, and abstraction made of the aberrant mode which it took, what does this demand mean? The creature claims the right to be loved. And could God, whose love, according to the words of Thomas Aquinas, infuses and creates goodness in things—

could God make the creature without making it worthy of being loved? I do not say “preferred.”. . . Considered in this

pure formal line, such a claim was in conformity with the laws of development of history. So a certain divine exigency torments the modern epoch. Let us say that it is a question of a prise de conscience and of a practical discovery of the proper dignity of that which is hidden in the mystery of the human being.

Much progress has thus been made, concerning above all the world of reflexivity and the prise de conscience of self, revealing, sometimes through sordid doors, to science, to art, to poetry, to the very passions of man and to his vices, their

proper spirituality. Science undertakes the conquest of created nature, the human soul makes unto itself a universe of its

subjectivity, the profane world differentiates itself according to its own proper law, the creature knows itself. And such a

process taken in itself was normal. 5 J. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, op. cit., Ch. III.

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The misfortune of modern history has been that all of this process has been dominated by an anthropocentric spirit, by a naturalistic conception of man and an either Calvinist or Molinist conception of grace and freedom. Finally, it has been accomplished not under the sign of unity, but under the sign of division. And so an experience of suffering and catastrophe has instructed us; it is onto the interior hell of man a prey to himself that incontestable enrichments of civilization have opened. Man, forgetting that in the order of being and of good it is God who has the first initiative and who vivifies our freedom,

has sought to make his own proper movement as creature the absolutely first movement, to give to his freedom-of-creature the first initiative of his good. It was therefore necessary that

his movement of ascent be henceforth separated from the movement of grace; this is why the age in question has been an age of dualism, of dissociation, of splitting in two, an age of

humanism separated from the Incarnation, in which the effort of progress was to take on an inevitable character and itself contribute to the destruction of the human. In short, let us say that the radical vice of anthropocentric humanism has been its being anthropocentric, and not its being humanism.

Theocentric Humanism and Anthropocentric Humanism

We are thus led to distinguish two kinds of humanism: a theocentric or truly Christian humanism; and an anthropocentric humanism, for which the spirit of the Renaissance and that of the Reformation are primarily responsible, and of which we have just been speaking. The first kind of humanism recognizes that God is the

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center of man; it implies the Christian conception of man, sinner and redeemed, and the Christian conception of grace

and freedom, of which we have noted the principles. The second kind of humanism believes that man himself is the center of man, and therefore of all things. It implies a

naturalistic conception of man and of freedom. If this conception is false, one understands that anthropocentric humanism merits the name of inhuman humanism,

and that its dialectic must be regarded as the tragedy of humanism. It is about this dialectic that I wish to say a few

words in the last part of this chapter. I shall consider it from three different points of view: according as it concerns man himself, and culture, and finally the idea that man

fashions

for himself of God.

IV. THE DIALECTIC OF ANTHROPOCENTRIC HUMANISM

The Tragedy of Man As regards man, one can note that in the beginnings of the modern age, with Descartes first and then with Rousseau and Kant, rationalism had raised up a proud and splendid image of the personality of man, inviolable, jealous of his immanence and his autonomy and, last of all, good in essence. It

was in the very name of the rights and autonomy of this personality that the rationalist polemic had condemned any intervention from the outside into this perfect and sacred universe, whether such intervention would come from revelation

and grace, from a tradition of human

wisdom, from the

authority of a law of which man is not the author, from a

Sovereign Good which solicits his will, or finally, from an objective reality which would measure and rule his intelligence.

THE TRAGEDY OF HUMANISM

29

Yet in little more than a century this proud anthropocentric personality has fallen, has quickly crumbled to dust, caught in the dispersion of its material elements.

In this process a first significant moment is noted in biology, in the triumph of the Darwinian ideas of man’s simian origin. According to this view, man is regarded not only as coming

from a long evolution of animal species—that, after all, is a secondary, purely historical question—but as issuing from this biological evolution without metaphysical discontinuity, with-

out, at a given moment, with the arrival of the human being, anything absolutely new appearing in the series, namely, spiritual subsistence, implying that at each generation of a human being an individual soul is created by the Author of all things and cast into existence for an eternal destiny.

Supported by revealed dogma, the Christian idea of man and of the human person has not been shaken by Darwinism. But the rationalist idea of the human person has received a mortal blow. The second blow, the knockout, if I may so speak, was in

the psychological domain, and it was Freud who gave it (I do not speak of Freud’s methods of psychological investigation,

which include discoveries of genius, but of his metaphysics). The Christian knows that the heart of man, as Pascal said, is

hollow and full of rottenness, but that does not prevent him from recognizing man’s spiritual grandeur and dignity. But for rationalist and naturalistic thought, what has man become in our day? The center of gravity in the human being has sunk

so low that, properly speaking, we no longer have any personality, but only the fatal movement of polymorphous larvae in

the subterranean world of instinct and desire—Acheronta movebo, Freud himself says—and all the well-regulated dignity of our personal conscience appears as a deceitful mask.

In short, man is only the place of intersection and conflict for a radically sexual libido and an instinct for death. ‘This mys-

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tery of sorrowing life and divine life, bearing the imprint of the Creator’s face, becomes an enigma despondent over the complications of death. Man, who at first had been looked

upon as both a heroic and quasi-divine figure and a purely natural being, thus falls, following the law of all paganism, into an unnatural mockery of his own nature, which he scourges all the more cruelly the more he nourishes complacency and sentimental piety for it. He is sacked and pillaged, he becomes a monster, a monster dear to himself.

After all the dissociations and dualisms in the age of anthro-

pocentric humanism—the separation and opposition of nature and grace, of faith and reason, of love and knowledge, as also

of love and the senses in affective life—we are now witnessing a dispersion, a final decomposition. ‘This does not prevent man

from claiming sovereignty more than ever. But this claim is no longer made for the individual person, for he no longer knows

where to find himself, he sees himself only as torn apart from society and fragmentized. Individual man is ripe for abdica-

tion—what a rebirth if he refuses to abdicate and at the point where he refuses! He is ripe to abdicate in favor of collective man, in favor of that great historic image of humanity which for Hegel, who gave us the theology of it, consisted in the

State with its perfect juridic structure, and which for Marx will consist in Communist society with its immanent dyna-

mism.

The Tragedy of Culture Let us look at things now from the point of view of culture.

From this point of view, what has been the dialectic of anthropocentric humanism? Three aspects or moments inseparably bound together may

be distinguished in what we may call the dialectic of modern

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31

culture. These three moments are in continuity in spite of strong secondary oppositions; they have followed one another in time, but they also coexist, mixed one with another in vary-

ing degrees. I have attempted to characterize them elsewhere.® In the first moment (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), when civilization was prodigal of its fairest fruits, forgetful of

the roots whence the sap comes, man thought civilization should inaugurate solely by the power of reason a human order, still conceived according to the Christian pattern in-

herited from preceding ages, a pattern which became forced and began to be corrupted. We may call this the classical moment of our culture, the moment of Christian naturalism.

In the second moment

(eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies) man saw that a culture which separates itself from supreme supernatural standards is bound to take sides against them. The demand then was for culture to free man from the superstition of revealed religion and to open up to his natural

goodness the perspectives of a perfect security to be attained through the spirit of riches accumulating the goods of the earth. This is the moment of rationalist optimism, the bourgeois moment of our culture. Even now we are scarcely out

of it. A third moment (twentieth century) is the moment of the materialistic overthrow of values, the revolutionary moment

when man, placing his ultimate end decisively in himself and no longer able to endure the machine of this world, engages in a war of desperation to make a wholly new humanity rise out of a radical atheism. Let us take a closer look at the character of these three moments. The first moment is a reversal in the order of ends. Instead of orienting its proper good, which is an earthly good, toward eternal life, culture seeks its supreme end in itself. And 6], Maritain, Religion et Culture; and Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté.

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the end it seeks is the domination of man over matter. God becomes the guarantor of this domination. The second moment is like a demiurgic imperialism in relation to the forces of matter. Here culture fails to understand that the effort to perfect man’s nature by a process itself conformed to the profound demands of this nature, that is to say by an interior perfection of wisdom both in knowing and in

living, should always be its principal effort. Instead, culture puts before all else the aim to be lord of exterior nature and

to reign over it by means of technological procedure, an aim good in itself but raised to first place and expected to create, thanks to physico-mathematical science, a material world where man will find, following Descartes’s promises, a perfect felicity. God becomes an idea. The third moment consists in a progressive driving back of the human by matter. In order to rule over nature and yet take no account of the basic laws of his own nature, man, in

his knowing and his living, is in reality forced to submit himself more and more to technological and inhuman necessities, and to energies of the material order which he makes use of and which invade the human world itself. God dies; material-

ized man thinks he can be man or superman only if God is not God. Whatever may be the gain from other points of view, the conditions of life for the human being thus become more and more inhuman. Let things continue in this way and it seems

that earth will no longer be habitable, to use a phrase of the venerable Aristotle, except by beasts or gods.

The Tragedy of God Let us consider lastly the dialectic of anthropocentric humanism relative to God or to the idea man has of God. We

THE TRAGEDY OF HUMANISM

33

may remark that this idea, so far as it ceases to be supported

and purified by revelation, itself follows the fate of culture. I have said that in the first moment of the humanist dialectic,

God becomes the guarantor of the domination of man over

matter. This is the Cartesian God. Divine transcendence is then maintained, but it is taken in a human sense—univocally —by a geometric reason incapable of rising to analogical

understanding. This transcendence thereby begins to be in danger. At the opposite pole from rationalism, Jansenius was already afhrming the inscrutable transcendence of the divine majesty, but only in the sense that this majesty confounded reason and

smashed it to pieces. Reason could know the divine majesty only by sacrificing itself. Why is that so? Because the reason of theologians in the classical age had lost the sense of analogy and had become a geometrical reason, the enemy of mystery, like the reason of the philosopher in the same age. Let reason recognize mystery and annihilate itself, or let it refuse to annihilate itself but deny mystery. In Descartes’s case, God is the guarantor of science and of geometric reason, and the idea of God is the clearest of all

ideas. Yet the divine infinite is declared to be absolutely inscrutable; we are blind to it; and so a germ of agnosticism is already present in Cartesian rationalism. God acts by a pure plenitude of efficiency, without ordering things to an end; and just as His despotic liberty could make square circles and

mountains without valleys, so it rules good and evil by an act of pleasure. In spite of his polemics against anthropomorphism, Malebranche represents the glory of God (the most mysterious of all concepts, a concept related to the depths of uncreated love) as the glory of a monarch or of an artist glorified by his works

and causing his own perfection to be admired in them.

Leibniz, too, wants the perfection of the divine artisan to be

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judged by the perfection of His work (in which case the work also should be divine), and he undertakes to justify God by showing that the ways of Providence agree with the reason of philosophers. I have said that in the second moment of the humanist dialectic, God becomes an idea. This is the God of the great

idealist metaphysicians. Divine transcendence is now rejected, and a philosophy of immanence takes its place. In Hegel, God

appears as the ideal limit of the development of the world and of humanity. Finally, in the third moment

of the humanist

dialectic,

Nietzsche feels it his terrible mission to announce the death of God. How could God still live in a world from which His image, that is to say the free and spiritual personality of man, is in the act of being effaced? ‘The most proudly representative form of this moment of anthropocentric humanism is con-

temporary atheism. Upon coming to the end of a historic, secularistic evolution, we find ourselves face to face with two pure positions: the pure

atheist position, and the pure Christian position.

I] A NEW HUMANISM

Divisions of This Chapter I have said that at the end of the dialectic of anthropocentric humanism one finds himself in the presence of two

pure positions: one atheist, the other Christian. I would like, in the first part of this chapter, to speak of these two positions and to examine in particular some impor-

tant problems which are bound up with the first one. In the second part we shall come at last to the questions which concern no longer the Middle Ages and no longer the

modern epoch, but the new age of Christendom whose character and features the typical changes which have taken place

in the twentieth century summon us to envisage.

I. THE

ROOTS

OF SOVIET

ATHEISM

“Religious” Significance of Communism I shall dwell at some length on the problems concerned with atheism as a historical force, and shall consider it in its ex-

pressly atheistic form, of which recent history gives us a typical 32

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example in Russian Communism (not that the pseudo-religious or even the pseudo-Christian forms of atheism are less perfidious, as a study of racist doctrines would readily show).

I shall first inquire what the deeper reasons for contemporary atheism are; then I shall examine the philosophical problem posed by this atheism; lastly, I shall inquire what its cultural significance is.

The question is sometimes asked why the Communist social solutions, concerned with the organization of work and of the temporal community, cannot be separated from atheism, which is a religious and metaphysical position. The reply, I believe, is that, taken in its spirit and its principles, Communism as it exists, above all the Communism of the Soviet republics, is a complete system of doctrine and life claiming to reveal to man the meaning of his existence, an-

swering all the fundamental questions posed by life, and manifesting an unparalleled power of totalitarian envelopment. It is a religion, and a most imperious religion, certain that it is called to replace all other religions, an atheistic religion for

which dialectical materialism is dogma and of which Communism as a regime of life is the ethical and social expression. Thus atheism is not demanded as a necessary consequence of the social system—that would be incomprehensible; on the contrary, it is presupposed as the principle of this system. It is

the starting point.’ And that is why Communist thought holds 1 Historically, atheism is also the starting point for the thought of Marx himself. Marx was an atheist before he was a Communist. Moreover, it was the idée-mére of the atheism of Feuerbach which, transferred from the order of religious criticism into the order of social criticism, determined Marx’s

adherence to Communism. M. Auguste Cornu has very well shown (Karl Marx, de Vhégélianisme au matérialisme historique [Paris: Alcan, 1934]) that the genesis of Communism in Marx was not of the economic order as it was in Engels, but of the philosophical and metaphysical order: man is alienated from himself and from his work by private property as he is alienated from himself

by the idea of God into which he projects his own essence, and by religion. In a first moment, Marx, in dependence on Feuerbach, conceived the alienation

A NEW HUMANISM

37

so ardently to it, as to the principle which stabilizes its practical conclusions and without which these would lose their necessity and their value.? How is this atheism of principle constituted, and what is its due to private property along the lines of the type of alienation due to religion; and then, in a second moment, he was led, in contradistinction to Feuerbach,

to regard it as first in fact and conditioning the other (historical materialism) ; it is from this, as primordial condition, that the alienation of man in God stems. It is necessary to cause to cease (Communism) the alienation of work: after that will come as a corollary (atheism) the cessation of the other aliena-

tion. “By the abolition of private property and the suppression of all alienation, Communism

will mark the return of man

to human

life; as the alienation

takes place at once in the domain of conscience and in that of concrete life, the economic

and social emancipation,

Communism,

will have as necessary

corollary the religious emancipation, atheism” (Cornu, op. cit., p. 339; following the MS of 1844 Economie politique et Philosophie). The fact is that in reality historical materialism, and Communism such as Marx conceived it in the very instant in which he devoted to it his thought and his heart, have Feuerbachian atheism for root. 2 The objection has been raised against us, on the Communist side (Georges Sadoul, Commune, December, 1935), that Marxism is without doubt “entirely and totally atheistic,” but that atheism is a consequence in it and not a starting point. The consequence of what? Of the “recognition of this fact which is the class war.” It is not easy to see how one passes from the recognition of the fact that a class war exists to the conclusion that God does not exist. Doubtless hatred for the “class enemy” can entail associatively the detestation of his religion as of all that which seems a sign of his existence. But we are in search here of a philosophical sequence, not of nerve or visceral connections. Does religion diminish the combative efficiency of the proletariat? Even if this were true (in the sense that the true religion, in fact, brings obstacles to hatred, confused with combative efficiency), there would still be a pretty dis-

tance between this assertion and that of the nonexistence of God. If bound up together in the mind of a thinker like Marx, it is because out, as is indeed admitted, from “the materialist conception of the And this latter prevented him certainly from making the struggle

they are he sets world.” against

religion the first article of his social program (since on the contrary in his eyes it is the disappearance of the regime of private property which will entail

of itself the disappearance of religion); but this is not at all what is the question for us. What we are asking is whether atheism is not at the root of the materialist conception of the world itself. And the answer seems to me to be clear, if one takes this conception such as it is in Marx (that it can undergo

certain purifications is another matter), and if one understands the role of

metaphysics in the genesis of systems which conclude against metaphysics itself. We would be glad moreover if this same question were examined also on the Communist side. Perhaps it would lead some to question themselves on the value of their atheism.

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logical tie-in with a particular social conception? This is what I wish to examine. A difficulty arises, however, and one which would seem of its nature to bar our inquiry at the outset: if one takes a merely psychological point of view and considers the actual state of mind among Communists (1935-1936), particularly in France, one gets the impression that if many of them have received with satisfaction the new directives of the Party as to collaboration with believers, it is precisely because, contrary to what I have just advanced, Communism has in their eyes no metaphysical or religious significance, but only the significance of a socio-economic ethics, or even only the significance of a technique for changing the economic regime

—and belief in this significance appears to be the only faith they have. If then they can henceforth attract to this faith

some “separated brethren” whom the discipline of their party had formerly obliged them to avoid on “a priori” grounds— because they were Christians—it is natural that they would feel some joy and exaltation over it, for in this they have a promise of apostolic expansion and a release of the natural

desire for human communication and fraternizing. Such is, I believe, the reality of sincere sentiments, although

bound to an obedience, experienced today by a certain number of young Communists. But when they interrogate themselves, do not these men find that at the same time, and as if not to create difficulties for this enthusiasm, certain fundamental

data are left in shadow, by a sort of involuntary censorship which retards or inhibits awareness of them? It seems in particular that they do not disengage, in order to bring fully to light, the philosophical problems underlying their revolution-

ary faith, problems which this faith assumes to be solved. The fact is that their atheistic position has become so total and unconditional, so detached

from the conditions

of its own

A NEW HUMANISM

39

origins, that henceforth they take it as a matter of course, like a truth known per se or a datum of experience. They are established on the ground of atheism as if it were the only ground on which anyone could build and as if a philosophical journey were not needed in order to reach that ground. In a word, neither in atheism nor in the materialistic conception

of the world do they see any problem, and that is why they are unaware of the metaphysical process logically implied by these positions.

This itself confirms the assertion that faith in the Communist revolution really presupposes a whole universe of faith and religion in the midst of which it constructs itself. But this universe is so natural to them that they do not bother to notice it. Besides, this religion and this faith do not appear to them as a religion because the religion and faith are atheistic, nor as a faith, because the religion and faith are seen as an

expression of science. Thus they do not sense that Communism is a religion for them, and yet that is what it really is. The perfect religious prays so well that he does not know that he prays. Communism is so profoundly and substantially a

religion, an earthly one, that the Communist does not know it is a religion.

That this religion, though naturally intolerant as is any strongly dogmatic religion (to make a strongly dogmatic religion tolerant, supernatural charity is needed), should now call to a common temporal action the believers of other religions whose ultimate end is in Heaven, and should contem-

plate the hypothesis that it would really recognize their freedoms in the temporal city is a paradoxical psychological fact to be taken account of, a fact which, considered in itself and

whatever be the tactical reasons for it and the political Machi-

avellianism provoking it, certainly has a human significance.

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A precarious one, however, we may believe; the precariousness of these good dispositions is in fact all the greater because it is a question of a religion entirely and exclusively directed to earthly ends, and because the least divergence or opposition in regard to the “general line,” defined in relation to these ends, hurts it at once and awakens in its believers the sense of

the sacred. It is in the logic of things that some day a religious hatred and vindictiveness will be aroused against the faithful of other religions, if they refuse to follow the line at all, as

generally against every political nonconformist. These questions of concrete psychology, however, are not what I am concerned with here. I am concerned with the con-

tent and texture of doctrines. It is from the point of view of the content of doctrines, taken in itself and its intimate structure, that I claim that Communism comes, as from a first

principle, from atheistic and antireligious thought. We have to understand the roots and the development of this atheism and this opposition to religion.

But still further precision is important. Among the original elements of Communism are also some Christian elements. St. Thomas More expressed some Communist ideas. In its early phases Communism was not always atheistic. The idea of communion, which gives Communism its spiritual power

and which it wishes to realize in the socio-terrestrial life (and in fact it ought to be realized there, but not exclusively there, nor by ruining the life in which it is realized in the most perfect way and in line with the highest aspirations of the human

person), the idea of communion is of Christian origin. And it is alienated Christian virtues, the “virtues gone mad” of which G. K. Chesterton spoke, it is the spirit of faith and of sacrifice, it is the religious energies of the soul which Communism endeavors to drain off for its own uses, and these it needs in

order to subsist.

A NEW HUMANISM

41

Resentment against the Christian W orld But it is perfectly typical of Communist thought, as it was formed in the second half of the nineteenth century and as it exists today, that it has used these energies of Christian origin in an atheist ideology, whose intellectual structure is turned

against Christian beliefs. Why is this so? It is, I believe, because at the origin of Communism, and above all owing to the

fault of a Christian world unfaithful to its principles, there lies a profound resentment against the Christian world, and not only against the Christian world, but (here is the tragedy)

against Christianity itself, which transcends the Christian world and should not be confused with it, and against every notion related, however remotely, to what we may call the natural Platonism of the human mind. Let me add—since otherwise I am not a Platonist at all—that the Platonism in

question amounts to something Plato was able to infer about the essence of man: if I speak here of a Platonism natural to

our mind, it is only so far as our mind is naturally drawn to admit eternal truths and transcendent values.

I just said that the Christian world is other than Christianity. It is essential to get this distinction clearly. The word “Christianity,” like the word “Church,” has a religious and spiritual meaning; it designates a supernatural faith and super-

natural life.* By the words “Christian world,” on the contrary, 8 The word “Church” designates the “mystical body of Christ,” at once visible in its social configuration and divine in its soul, and whose proper life is of the supernatural order. It happens that the “Christian temporal world” may cause to rise up, not certainly to the very heart of the Church but into

the more or less extended regions of its human structure, impurities which come from the spirit of the world: intoxication with magnificence and virtu at the time of the Renaissance, the “bourgeois” spirit in the nineteenth cen-

tury. Then, and because the “gates of Hell” cannot prevail against her, come the purifications. Saints had been clamoring in vain for three centuries for the reform of the Church before the great Lutheran tempest arrived.

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I mean something temporal and terrestrial, something that

relates to the order not of religion itself, but of civilization and culture. It is a particular body of cultural, political, and economic formations characteristic of a given age in history,

and the typical spirit of this body is mainly due to the social elements which play the directive and predominant role in it: the clergy and nobility in the Middle Ages, the aristocracy and royalty under the ancien régime, the bourgeosie in modern times. When the philosopher of culture raises the question

of the Christian world, he is not posing the problem of the truth of Christianity, but rather that of the temporal responsibilities of Christians.

There was for the Christian world a temporal task, an earthly task to fulfill; an earthly task, because a civilization, as

civilization, is directly ordered to an end specifically temporal;

a Christian earthly task, because this civilization is by hypothesis a Christian civilization, the world in question having re-

ceived the light of the Gospel. The temporal task of the Christian world is to work on earth for a socio-temporal

realization of the Gospel truths. For if the Gospel is concerned first of all with the things of eternal life and infinitely transcends any and all sociology and philosophy, nevertheless it

gives us sovereign rules for the conduct of our lives, and traces for us a very precise ethical code to which any Christian civil-

ization, so far as it is worthy of the name, should try to conform socio-temporal reality, with due respect to varying historical conditions. A socio-temporal realization of the Gospel truths—how ridiculous the expression appears when we take a

look at the temporal structures of modern centuries, in particular of the nineteenth century! Meditating on these things, we have good reason to say that the Christian world of modern times has failed in the duty of

which we just spoke. In general it has shut up truth and the

A NEW HUMANISM

43

divine life within a limited part of its existence, within the things of worship and religious practice, and, at least in the case of the best men and women, within the things of the interior life. Matters of social and economic and political life it has abandoned to their own carnal law, withdrawn from

Christ’s light: Marx, for instance, “is right when he says that capitalist society is a state of anarchy, where life is entirely given over to the play of particular interests. Nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of Christianity.” Hence the resentment of which we spoke, resentment

against those who have not made real the truth which they bore, resentment which reacts against this truth itself.

First Moment of the Process of Substitution:

The Rehabilitation of Material Causality What has occurred as a consequence is a process of substitution. This has been effected by Marxism above all, and several stages of it are evident.

In the first place, the proper task of Marxism as a philosophy of resentment has been, as one has put it, to denounce “the lie of exalted ideas.” It claims to pronounce a death sentence on idealism, both as a metaphysical doctrine—which leaves us few regrets; and—quite another thing—as a simple affirmation of the value of the immaterial in general. In short, Marxism

is an absolute realist immanentism, and this vast ideological

proliferation of resentment and indignation would have been

impossible without Hegel. In a sense, Marx appears to be the most consistent of the Hegelians. For if “all that is rational is real,” and if historical

reality, which means temporal existence, entirely and abso4N. Berdyaev.

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lutely absorbs, because it is identical with, the whole “ideal”

order, which used to be thought supratemporal and was later confused with the logical being of reason and its characteristic movement, then the “turning over” to which Marx, following

in the footsteps of Feuerbach, subjected the Hegelian dialectic is justified. And just as philosophy should become practical

not in the Aristotelian sense, but in the sense that speculative philosophy should give way to thought wholly involved in praxis, to thought which in its very essence would be an ac-

tivity transformative of the world,® so the dialectical movement should for the future be wholly absorbed in “matter,” that is to say, in historical reality separated from any tran-

scendent element and considered above all in its primordial concrete substructures.

It is quite clear that the materialism of Marx is no ordinary materialism, neither that of the French

materialists

of the

eighteenth century nor mechanistic materialism. But for the metaphysician, its wholly Hegelian quality and its confusion with pure immanentism only make it more real and more

profound. ‘To try to understand the bearing of this materialism, one can, as I indicated before with regard to Georges Sorel, have recourse to the Aristotelian distinction between

formal causality and material causality. ‘The foolish idealist or “angelic” nonacknowledgment of material causality was to lead by reaction to an equally strong defense of material > “The question whether objective truth is an attribute of human theught— is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, ice. the reality and power, the ‘this-sidedness’ of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is

a purely scholastic question.” “The philosophers have only interpreted the

world differently, the point is, to change it” (Theses on Feuerbach, II and XI,

as an Appendix in Marx-Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I & III, ed. R. Pascal [New York: International Publishers, 1947], pp. 197, 199). “When reality [practical activity] is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence” (The German Ideology, p. 15)

A NEW HUMANISM

45

causality, justified in its origin though equally untenable in its results, since these two kinds of causality must go together as a principle of explanation. In Aristotelian language we may

say that Marxism proceeds from a sort of vengeful perception of the importance of material causality; that is, in a very general way, of the part played by material factors in the course of nature and of history. This material causality gets the

primacy and, by making dialectic integral with itself, becomes the matrix of all activity.

What does material causality represent in the historical and social order? The process of human activities of the economic

order. An Aristotelian will not contest that the economic order really plays a role of essential importance. But Marx

gives it the principal role and makes it the radically determining factor.

Marx Saw the Essential Importance of Material Causality, But Made It Purely and Simply Primary I know quite well that there is reason to revise the current interpretation of historical materialism, according to which interpretation everything else, all “ideology,” the spiritual life, religious beliefs, philosophy, art, etc., is but an epiphenomenon of economics. This is the interpretation of popular Marxism, and it is far from negligible, for it is now the opinion of many people and has become a historical force. But Marx himself saw more deeply into things, and just as we may speak of a first “spiritual” impulse in him (his indignation at the conditions imposed on man oppressed by things born of himself and his work, and himself made a thing), so we must say

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that in spite of certain formulas he always believed in a reciprocal action between economic and other factors;* economics

taken alone was not in his view the one and only source of history.

Nevertheless, on deeper reflection and with more careful study it appears that the rejection of the metaphysical primacy of act over potency, of form over matter, and the consequent rejection of the proper autonomy of spiritual energies—it appears that this double rejection, which is the metaphysical characteristic of materialism, is inevitably tied up, as I suggested earlier, with Marx’s radical realist immanentism.* On the one hand, Marx had a profound intuition—an intuition that I believe to be the great flash of truth running through his work*—of the conditions of heteronomy or alienation imposed in the “capitalist” world on the work-force, and of the dehumanization with which the owners and the proletariat are thereby simultaneously stricken. But he immediately conceptualized this intuition in an anthropocentric monist metaphysics, in which work is hypostasized into the very essence of man, and in which, by recovering his essence through the transformation of society, man is called to take on the 6 Frequently cited recently, and rightly so, is this text of Engels: “Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-d-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the other elements in-

volved in the interaction to come into their nghts.” (Letter of Engels to J. Block, September 21, 1890; in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works [Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955], Vol. II,

P- 499.)

™ The immanentism of Hegel is already as such a virtual materialism, which idealism alone prevented from unveiling itself. ® Cf. the study by Paul Vignaux, “Retour 4 Marx,” Politique (November, 1935). The proper task of a Christian critique of Marxism would be to divest this intuition of the philosophical errors in terms of which it is conceptualized in Marx. Such a task imposes itself all the more so because, in truth, whatever aversion Marx may personally have nourished against Christianity, this intuition itself is pregnant with Judaeo-Chnistian values.

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attributes which the religious “illusion” would confer on God.? If then the economic servitude and the inhuman condition of the proletariat are to cease, it is not in the name of the human person, whose fundamental dignity is in reality spiritual and has, as regards economic conditions, such imperious demands only because it is in the last analysis bound up with transcendent goods and rights; it is in the name of collective man, in order that in his collective life and in the free discharge of his collective work he may find an absolute deliverance (strictly speaking, aseitas),’° and in a word deify within himself the titanism of human nature. On the other hand, if the economic factor taken alone is not

the one and only source of history for Marx, it still remains that, since the essential dynamism from which the evolution

proceeds is that of the economic contradictions and social antagonisms engendered by the production system, the eco® A similar ambiguity is found, and for similar reasons, on the economic

plane. Marx saw that the capitalist regime lives in fact on the principle contrary to nature of the fecundity of money; he blocked this view with an inexact and “‘monist” theory of value and profit. 10 “Communism,

. . . being an achieved naturalism, . . . is the real end of

the quarrel between man and nature and between man and man, the true end

of the quarrel between existence and essence, between objectification and the affirmation of self, between liberty and necessity, between the individual and the species. It solves the riddle of history and it knows that it solves it”

(Preparatory Notes to La Sainte Famille, Karl Marx: Morceaux Choisis, [Paris: Gallimard, 1934], p. 229). The “true end of the quarrel between existence and essence” is aseitas, the perfection of an essence which is the very act of existing. When we use this word, and when we say that in the perspectives of Marxism the movement of history and of revolution tends to confer on collective man and on his dynamism the attributes, and in particular the aseity, which religion used to confer on God, it is clear that such a manner of speaking relates to that which

the ideas of Marx signify for us. No one will be surprised that in order to conduct our philosophical work we have had recourse to our own philosophical language, and not, even when it was a question of criticizing Marxism, to that of Karl Marx. It is in virtue of the same right that apropos of historical

materialism we had recourse to the Aristotelian concept of material causality. But moreover it is the very genesis of the ideas of Marx starting from those of Feuerbach, i.e., starting from Christianity denied and turned over, which authorizes us to employ here the vocabulary of Christian philosophy.

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nomic factor plays the significant and primarily determining** role with regard to the various superstructures in reciprocal action with it.12 And how could it be otherwise, once there is

eliminated, together with all transcendence in general, the 11] say “primarily determining” not, of course, with respect to the intrinsic content of the superstructures—unlike Freud, Marx was not preoccupied with providing an explanation of the content of art or of religion (by a natural and inevitable bent, more or less orthodox Marxists were to show themselves less

discreet )—but with respect to their existence and their historical energy, and their real significance for human life. As concerns religion, Marx presupposed, moreover, that Feuerbach’s criticism was decisive, as is clear in Das Capital. (Cf. Capital [New York: The Modern Library, 1936], pp. 91-92. See also above, p. 36, n. 1.) 12 Cf. Morceaux Choisis, pp. 67; 89-92; 117; 125-128. As early as 1842, the young Marx was already afhrming that every philosophy, before acting on its epoch, is engendered by the needs and the tendencies of the latter, which it expresses in its manner (A. Cornu, of. cit., p. 175). This idea, which as such can be understood in an exact sense, will become progressively duller until the discovery of historical materialism, which consists precisely in attributing to the dialectic of economics the primarily determining role. Let it not be said that by the very nature of the dialectical process, which is action and reaction, there cannot be a primary determination of the superstructure by the infrastructure. The dialectical process concerns above all the contradictions and the antagonisms engendered by the regime of production; and if there is reciprocal action between the infrastructure and the superstructure, the latter, from the moment that all transcendent reality and all tran-

scendent value from which it could hold an autonomous consistency is eliminated, has its first principle of existential determination only in the infrastructure on which it reacts, and finds only in it its real significance for human life.

“Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’ (The German Ideol-

ogy, Parts I and IH, pp. 14-15). “Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, as foundation, there is built a superstructure

of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships.

The individual, in whom

they arise through tradition and education, may

fancy them to be the true determinants, the real origin, of his activities” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, translated from the

German by Eden and Cedar Paul [New York: International Publishers, 1926], p. 55). The Communist Manifesto restates summarily the same doctrine (cf. The Communist Manifesto, edited by Samuel H. Beer [New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts, 1955], pp. 27-31).

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transcendence of the proper object which gives them their stability?’ These superstructures thus lose their proper autonomy. In order to exist in history and in order to act in it, they are not only conditioned by the economic and the social, but from these they have their primary determination, and it is from them that they get their meaning, their real significance for human life. It is quite true that economic conditions, like all conditions generally of the material order, are of basic importance in the destiny of spiritual activities among men, that they have a

constant tendency to enfeoff them, and that in the history of culture they make one body with them. From this point of view, the cynicism of Marx, like that of Freud, has brought

many truths to light.* But it is nonsense to take material conditioning, no matter how real it may be, as the prime determining reason—were it only as regards its historical ex-

istence—of a spiritual activity, and as that which above everything else discloses its significance for human life.’°

Of course, it is necessary to take into account Marx’s po13 In the cases of religion, of metaphysics, and of the arts of the beautiful, this transcendence is manifest; and even in the case of science it exists also,

insofar as even in science in the modern sense of the word there is found still the ordination of the mind to intelligibles whose necessity, according to that part of Platonism which Aristotle has saved, is as such superior to time. 14One can thus say with M. Henri de Man that “applied to the social comportment of the capitalist bourgeoisie, the doctrine of ‘ideologies’ formulated by Marx is true without any doubt”; but it is necessary to add with the same author that the same is not the case “if one ceases to consider the social

comportment of a class in order to envisage the ‘spiritual superstructure’ of an epoch, or again when from the ideologies of camouflage and escape proper

to the capitalist epoch one wishes to conclude to the existence of analogous phenomena in a previous epoch” (Henri de Man, L’idée socialiste (Paris: Grasset, 1935], p. 125). At the time this book was written, M. Henri de Man passed for a respectable author and it was not indecent to cite his name. Addendum, 1946. Bi: 1 ;

15 “This mode of production (capitalism) is in essence cosmopolitan, like Christianity. Christianity is consequently the special religion of Capitalism” (Karl Marx, Theorien iiber den Mehrwert [Stuttgart, 1919], Vol. III, p. 519). Such a sentence is a remarkable test of the possibilities of nonsense contained

in historical materialism (cf. Capital, p. 91).

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lemical position, which of itself involves a provocative overstatement. In his ardent polemic against idealism, Marx doubtless called “materialism” what would often have been better called “realism,”’ but this does not matter much as re-

gards the doctrinal characteristics I have pointed out; the really important thing is that the problem itself of a possible distinction between realism and materialism did not for a

moment come to Marx’s mind. Since his whole philosophy is essentially polemical, polemical overstatement

is not an

accident in it. The fact remains that, taken not in isolation but with all the superstructures which, while acting on it, are first deter-

mined by it, economics—I mean that tissue of human relations and energies which constitute for Marx, and with good reason, the misunderstood reality of the economic process—

was made by him into the determining cause of history. “The materialistic conception of history, according to which the conditions and forms of production determine the formation and evolution of human societies, is the basic element in the

doctrine of Karl Marx.”?® What distinguishes Marxism is not

simply that it teaches that economics is preponderant—other schools have committed and are now committing this same error—but that it makes all the forms of life, with all their

values and all their efficacy, dependent on—they are not denied, but subordinated to—this human

material absolute in

dialectic movement. T’o use Aristotle’s language again, let us say that material causality thus becomes purely and simply

the primary causality. 16 A. Cornu, op. cit., Introduction, p. 1.

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Second and Third Moments of the Process of

Substitution: The Dynamism of Matter and the Redemptive Mission of the Proletariat

In the second place, it is from this material causality that Marxism expects salvation and the realization, as it were, of the kingdom of God. With the dynamism of the Hegelian dialectic thrust back into matter, its proponents would think that the economic process—not automatically, but with all the energies which it engenders and which react on it, and especially with the energies of the revolutionary mind—must lead to the rule of reason, to the elimination of man’s en-

slavement to irrational forces, to man’s victory over necessity, to his mastery of his history. At the end of this development,

social man will be absolute master of history and of the universe. The meeting of the messianism of Marx, which is at

once Jewish and Hegelian, with Russian messianism was to appear from this point of view as singularly significant.

Finally, the third moment: Through what mediator will this redemption take place? Through the proletariat. The theory of class war seemed to Marx like a revelation because, in his view, it essentially implies this messianism. Not only are the proletariat’s hands unstained by the original sin of the exploitation of man by man, but precisely because the prole-

tariat is stripped of everything and occupies the lowest place in history, it is the bearer of human liberation, it is the messianic victim whose triumph will be the definitive victory over all that oppresses humanity and, as it were, a resurrection from the dead. Berdyaev likes to stress the presence of this eschatological element in the thought of revolutionary Communism: in the very womb of history will take place a total

and definitive deliverance which will cut time in two. The

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leap will be made, from the kingdom of necessity to the king-

dom of freedom. The substitutional process of which I have spoken is thus

complete in these three stages. Anything which would have reference to a Christian value or even, in the sense I have

indicated, to any token of the Platonism natural to our minds is henceforth replaced.

God is absolutely rejected on principle and in virtue of an absolute metaphysical dogmatism, not in the name of the human person, as was the case in rationalist or deist human-

ism, but along with the person as a spiritual being made in the image of God. This is done in the name of the historical

dynamism of the social collectivity, in the name of collective or collectivized man, in whom and through whom human nature is to find its fulfillment. And at the same stroke and as a necessary consequence, a social conception is imposed which—no matter how multiform and varied may be its inte-

gration of the individual with the group—can be nothing but a monism of collective humanity. ‘This gives Communism the value not of a relative economic solution, but of an absolute

historical exigency, necessary with a metaphysical necessity. And by reason of this exigency man, fully raised to social and political life, collective man, who is man restored to truth and in whom freedom finally comes to flower, is to integrate in an absolute way the individual man-person, up to now a transient moment of the dialectic and even yet subject to heteronomous forces.

In this way the social themes of Communism appear as the conclusion of an initial atheism posed on principle, or of a humanism

essentially conceived as an atheistic humanism.

This Marxist humanism should be regarded as the perfect fruit of Hegelian immanentism, once the “turned over” Hegelian dialectic has passed from the ideal to the real, that is

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to say, to social and historical man. In the last analysis it consists in claiming for man, once he is freed by the abolition of private property, that sovereign independence in the mastery

of nature and the government of history which, formerly, in

the times of “alienated” consciousness, religion attributed to God.

A Contradiction in Historical Materialism?

And so we are confronted here with an apparent contradiction in Marxist materialism, which regards every metaphysical or religious idea as an expression (which is itself

active) of the economic factor: Marxist economy, Marxist sociology are themselves subject to the primacy and the determination of a certain metaphysic—an atheistic, dialecticrealist, absolute immanentist metaphysic. I say an “apparent” contradiction, for in reality this ideology, this metaphysic, if one considers what is deepest in the

doctrine of Marxism, cannot be “made relative” by economics. And it is indeed, rather, the setting aside, the contemptu-

ous rejection of any metaphysical ideology as the expression or transitory reflection of an economic moment, which, in a

sense, and despite the insistence with which popular Marxism exploits this theme, is an illusory theoretical appearance, or, like the arguments of the old Greek skeptics, a drastic theme intended to purge adverse thought. I think that in good Marxist doctrine, it holds true for a certain metaphysic, a certain ideology: bourgeois ideology. When the bourgeois

invokes metaphysical values, one has there but an empty superstructure. But the Marxist metaphysic itself is not a momentary

superstructure, since it exists, in the immanent

and lived state, incarnate in the proletariat and in its move-

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ment. And it is thus that after the great day of the universal revolution (and already in the countries which will have inaugurated it), one will see metaphysical and “mystical” values, those which the words “justice” and “liberty” express, and which were heretofore regarded as a petit-bourgeois ideology—one will see these values reappear with an in some way

infinite plenitude of reality and legitimacy: because then they will not be signified in philosophical systems or opinions, but will be lived in a complete, an integral immanence through and in humanity, in the practice of humanity delivered by the proletariat. The key, here again, is the presupposition of an absolute immanentist metaphysic.

The Kingdom of God in History The preceding analyses have also made clear a contradic-

tion which is often pointed out in Marxism: on the one hand, the fundamental process which it recognizes, the dialectic process, must necessarily be a movement which is endless;

yet, on the other hand, the revolutionary dynamism has for its object and term a Communist society which will mark the end of “the quarrel between man and nature and between

man and man” (see above, p. 47, n. 10) and the definitive triumph of man over his destiny—in other words, and to employ a terminology more appropriate as to its intrinsic significance and as to the historical derivation of ideas, it has for

term the kingdom of God in history. I think that this second aspect corresponds in reality to an

impulse anterior to Marxism and which is stronger than the logic of the Hegelian Becoming (to which Hegel himself was

not always faithful), to an impulse which springs from deep

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spiritual tendencies that are immanent in Socialism in general. Grant to a Socialist all that he wishes concerning the regime of the future society; but add that, in the Socialist society organized in the most human and the most just manner,

man will still be at grips with evil and misfortune, because they are in man. The law of conflict to be surmounted and of crucifying tension, the law of sacrifice for the sake of victory will still stimulate and rend man, because it is the law of

creative life in man. The insatiable desire for beatitude and

the pain of this earthly existence will still inhabit man, because man is made to enter into the joy of God. You run the risk of wounding your Socialist friend without the least in-

tention. He will listen with impatience to what you say. And I know that he has many reasons to detest a certain pessimism and a certain tranquil and resigned acceptance of human misery which so often console the comfortable and excuse

them from any effort to transform the world. In one sense he is right, he will always be right in his ob-

jection to the Christian, for the Christian will never be at the level of his Christianity, will always have a tendency to take his ease too soon—as if, poor fellow, he could ever rest any-

where except where his God is nailed. Human weakness is always trying to go to sleep; if it is not the doubt of the old humanist

Stoic, it is the eternal truths it will take for its

pillow. If he is not kept awake by a sorrowing communion

with all the suffering and the outcasts of mortal life, the Christian is apt to take for his pillow the very love which he has received. But in fact, Christianity is just the opposite of such a sleep.

Genuine Christianity abhors the pessimism of inertia. It is pessimistic—profoundly pessimistic—in the sense that it knows that the creature comes from nothingness and that

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everything that comes from nothingness tends of itself toward nothingness. But its optimism is incomparably more profound than its pessimism, because it knows that the creature comes

from God, and that everything that comes from God toward God. A truly Christian humanism does not bilize man, either for good or for evil, at any moment evolution. It knows that not only in his social being,

tends immoof his but in

his inward and spiritual being, man is still but a nocturnal sketch of himself, and that before attaining to his true linea-

ments—at the end of time—he will have to pass through many moltings and renewals. For there is a human nature which as such is immutable, but it is precisely a nature in

movement, the nature of a being of flesh made in the image of God, i.e., astonishingly progressive both in good and in evil. And

there are eternal truths immutable

as such, but

which in fact constrain history to cause new climates to surge up endlessly, so that these truths can realize under di-

verse forms their potentialities in time and in the things of time. If it is true that evil and suffering will always be at grips

with man, it is under new forms and in revealing new profundities; for death itself changes its countenance with time.

And goodness and joy will also go on revealing new depths to the end. If it is true that the law of creative conflict will always impose itself on man, it is in order that he may pass to higher forms of active peace and of transfiguring integration. If it is

true that the heart of man will always suffer the anguish of beatitude, it is not because man would be condemned always to stagnate here below; it is because the largest and most abounding life will always be something very small, compared with the dimensions of his heart. These explanations will perhaps seem reasonable to our Socialist friend; they will not appease his inquietude; he will

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continue always to fear lest they may not conceal a betrayal of humanism or of the revolution. This is because (as the

history of his philosophic origins indeed makes clear) his idea of humanism still envelops—reduced at times to a simple affective connotation—a certain messianic claim, and his idea

of the revolution includes a secularized transposition of the idea of the last judgment and the kingdom of God. It was so

for Socialism long before the discovery of historical materialism; even when it nourished itself on Christian sentiments,

it mingled with its temporal social claims the instinct of a psyche which in actual fact ousted Christianity, since it misappropriated, so as to make of them things of time and of history, realities which for the Christian faith are essentially

beyond history and time. In this, socialist humanism followed in the steps of bourgeois humanism. In what manner? For bourgeois humanism, as we saw in the preceding chapter, God is no more than the guarantor of the demiurgic power of man working out his prosperity; finally, He becomes an idea, and all the reality

that was previously acknowledged as His passes to man. That it pass to man really, and not merely in idea, in hfe and not merely in philosophical speculation—here is a “turning over” that Socialism had in fact achieved long before the Marxist

“turning over” of the Hegelian dialectic. ‘This is why it has always held in suspicion the notion which I call “peregrinal”

of the temporal community, or the idea that the terrestrial history of humanity, although having its proper finalities, is a

way toward an accomplishment which will take place beyond history. Socialist humanism equally objects to Christian asceticism.

And it is doubtless because of a misunderstanding, for it errs concerning the essence of this asceticism, and imagines that it proceeds from a Manichaean hatred of nature; but it is also

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due to a double contradiction.

On the one hand, socialist

humanism knows very well in practice that nothing great is done without suffering and sacrifice; but it recognizes this law only with regard to large collective works; for, ignorant

of the universe of personality, it sees as search for an egotistic perfection that which is love and essential generosity. On the

other hand, what it knows very well in practice it rejects in theory, and here again it shows itself to be the heir of bourgeois humanism: not “turned over” this time, but simply continued. Bourgeois humanism rejects the ascetic principle

and claims to replace it by the technical or technological principle, since it lays claim to a peace without conflict, progressing indefinitely in a perpetual harmony and satisfaction, in the likeness of the nonexistential man of rationalism.

In the degree to which, in spite of everything, it remains at-

tached to such an optimism—at least for the age which will follow the revolution—socialist humanism also forms a view of man that is weak and shallow, rationalist and bourgeois.

In restoring against this idyllic utopianism the value of conflict and warfare as an integral condition of the very movement of history, the Marxian dialectic has given Socialism a hold on existence and a force that it lacked before, while

at the same time transmitting to it a brutally univocal con-

ception of this conflict and this war which are immanent in history.

But Marxism remains at the same time tributary of the utopian messianism which has been inherent since the beginning in the Socialist tradition. And this is why, despite the theoretical exigencies of its dialectic, it sees as finally issuing

from the conflicts of history a Communist humanity which appears indeed as the term of history, and in which everything will be reconciled, as in the Word

of God. Against

what will man delivered from the fatalities and the limita-

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tions which oppress him today have to struggle then, if not against death? And in order to conquer it, too? It is in a

kingdom of God that the dialectic process ends: because this dialectic obeys the inner law of the Socialist psyche, not that

of the dialectic. But it is a secularized kingdom of God which, though terminating history, remains in history and in the time of this world. This question of the kingdom of God will be the principal

theme of the next chapter. To my mind, it is to betray both God and man not to understand that history is in movement

toward the kingdom of God, and not to wish that this kingdom come about. But it is absurd to think that it will come about in history, which is invincibly made up of good and evil. Prepared by the growth of history, and by the mixing and progressive exhaustion of the human being that are accomplished there, it will come at the end of history; I mean in the time of the resurrected into which history will open.

II. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM

OF ATHEISM

Atheism Is Unlivable Let us consider now the problem of atheism from the philosophical and doctrinal point of view. It is a problem of capital importance. What is it that an authentically philosophical conception of the human will tells us? That atheism is unlivable in its metaphysical root, in its absolute radicalism—if, at least, one

can reach this limit.

For the will goes by nature to the good as such, to pure goodness. From the moment it acts, it acts for a final end

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which can only be a good that fulfills it absolutely. Now, where is this good in reality, if not in the being which is by itself the infinite plenitude of Goodness? Such, briefly, is the teaching of an authentic philosophy of the will. Thus every will, even the most perverse, desires God without knowing it. Although a will can choose other final ends, opt for other loves, it is still and always God that it desires under aberrant forms and contrary to its own choice.

Atheism, if it could be lived down to the very roots of the will, would disorganize, would kill metaphysically the will. It is not by accident, it is by an effect strictly necessary, inscribed in the nature of things, that every absolute experience

of atheism, if it is consciously and rigorously conducted, provokes in the end psychic dissolution.

One may cite here in witness the heroic and tragic experience of Nietzsche; one could also invoke the profound intuition of Dostoevski, as manifested in the personage of Kirilov. Kirilov precisely incarnates in Dostoevski’s eyes the effort of man to live atheism in its metaphysical roots, in its deepest ontological roots. Let us recall, in The Possessed, Kirilov’s dialogue with Peter Stepanovitch, a few minutes before his suicide. “If God exists,” says Kirilov, “all things depend on Him and I can do nothing outside His will. If He does not exist, all depends on me and I am bound to display my independence. .. . For three years I have been seeking for the at-

tribute of my divinity and I’ve found it; the attribute of my divinity is independence. ‘That is all I can do to prove in the highest point my autonomy and my new and terrible freedom. For it is very terrible. I shall kill myself to prove my

independence and my terrible new freedom.’ Without haying read St. Thomas Aquinas, Dostoevski knew well that the profoundest metaphysical attribute of divinity is aseitas. And

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it is this attribute that Kirilov, because he is existentially an atheist, must manifest in himself—submitting his own existence to his absolute independence.

Can Marxist Atheism Be Lived? And yet the religious atheism of Soviet Communism is there before us as a fact. Does it furnish a contradiction of the law I have just enunciated; unless indeed it shall one day break before that law, and unless Russian Communism

one day awake—transfigured—as morning?

Soviet Communism

shall

from a nightmare in the

has understood the gravity of the

problem; and this is exactly the reason why it has undertaken to create a new humanity. As I pointed out above, it is a question (I am speaking of the ideal exigencies of the system, however it may be with the attenuations and accommodations that concrete life will be able or has already been able to introduce)—it is a question of changing man so as to oust the transcendent God of whom he is the image; it is a question

of creating a human being who will himself be the God, without any supratemporal attribute, of history and of its

titanic dynamism, a human being who must first of all be deindividualized, and whose joy will be to devote himself to

the whole, to be an organ of the revolutionary community, while awaiting the day when he will find in the tnumph of the collective man over nature a transfigured personality.

(This need to transform man, which made a large part of the greatness of Lenin’s revolution, seems today [1936] to have grown lukewarm.

I hold that, more

or less thrust into the

background, it nevertheless subsists, while coming to terms

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in the concrete with the unforeseeable and spontaneous resurgences of human nature, which are themselves at once exploited by the literature of official propaganda.*’) However, note this well, there is no question here, there

has never been a question here, of living atheism in its metaphysical radicalism, at the depths at which a Dostoevski perceived it in Kirilov (although one sees men capable of

going as it were by divination to these depths, one sees poets, poets like the great Alexander Block—one sees such men dying of inanition under this spiritual climate; and since then, at certain times, how many suicides of young people!). To the extent, moreover, that the Marxist theoreticians of

the U.S.S.R. elaborate a metaphysic, it is to a kind of hylozoism that they return; their general philosophical cast of mind

requires that one attribute to matter something like the soul and liberty. They dare not yet declare, like the old Ionian

physicists: Everything is full of soul and of diffused divinity— panta pléré thé6n; but it is indeed in this direction that they seem to tend. And how could it be otherwise, from the

moment one puts the dialectic in matter? The metaphysical atheism which came out of the Hegelian Left is thus return-

ing little by little to its origins, to the old Hegelian pantheism. In reality, the question for Marxist atheism, despite the pseudo-scientific appearances it gives itself, remains of the

ethical and moral rather than of the metaphysical order: it is to live atheism in its ethical translation, i.e., to refuse God

as end and as rule of human life. This refusal is in the eyes of Russian Communists the first principle of a moral life truly free, creative, and worthy of man, since they are ignorant of God and do not know that He is the source of the human ™ Cf, Héléne Iswolsky, L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936 [Eng. trans., Soviet Man—Now, translated by E. F. Peeler; New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936].

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and of the creative liberty in man. And more profoundly, in its most typically Russian (and human) subconscious connections, it signifies also a resentment against God and a revenge against God, whom man refuses to put at the head of

his moral life because he will not forgive Him the world and evil—I mean the existence of evil in the world—that is to say, in short, and if we know indeed what we are saying, the creation of the world. But, to refuse God in the ethical order,

and for whatever motive this may be; to choose another final end than God—is this not in the eyes of the Christian the simple case of every sinner? That really presents no great

metaphysical difficulty for the latter, except that of implementing the mystery of the deficiencies of freedom.

The Resources of Grace Still, the interferences of the speculative and the practical, in the ethical order itself, must not lead us into confusion, and

the speculative refusal of God as end and as supreme rule of human life is not necessarily, for a mind thus blinded, the

practical refusal to order its own life to this same God whose name it no longer knows. The Christian knows that God has

resources; and that the possibilities of good faith go further than one imagines. Under whatever names, names which are not those of God, it may happen (no one knows but God

himself) that the interior act of voluntary adhesion produced by a soul bears on a reality which in fact is truly God. For, as

a result of our spiritual weakness, there can be a discordance between what we in actual fact believe and the ideas through which we express to ourselves what we believe and through

which we take cognizance of our belief. To every soul, even to one ignorant of the name of God, even one reared in

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atheism, grace proposes, at the moment when this soul delib-

erates about itself and chooses its ultimate end—grace, by the medium of the moral good, proposes as supreme reality to be loved above everything, even if this soul represents this reality to itself under a name which is not its true name—but then

(and this is the whole question, and only God knows whether it is so) in thinking under this name something other than what it signifies, in going beyond this idol’s name—grace proposes the subsistent Good which merits all love and through which and in which our life is saved. And if this grace is not refused, the soul in question, in opting for this reality, believes obscurely in the true God and chooses really the true God, even though, being “in good

faith” in error and adhering not by its fault, but by that of the education it has received, to an atheistic philosophical system, it masks this faith-unconscious-of-itself in the true God under

formulas which contradict it. An atheist of good faith—a pseudo-atheist, in reality—will in that case have, against his

own apparent choice, really chosen God as end of his life.18 On the other hand, whatever be the forces of education

and propaganda, a day will come when the fundamental problems will present themselves anew. Must we think that this

day is already approaching? Next after the black coat and the military ranks, the old pedagogical marking schemes and the Christmas trees, the family hearth and the “pleasures of life,” is God about to make His return in Soviet Russia? It is less easy to dispose thus of Him, although He is humble enough to accept even this road. In any case, when the fundamental problems will present themselves anew, Russian Communism will be able to make a place for them—in order to conserve

in existence the regime and the social results already achieved #8 Cf. our study “The Immanent Dialectic of the First Act of Freedom,” The Range of Reason (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), pp. 66-85.

A NEW HUMANISM

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—only by renouncing an original spiritual error: it is the lesson of history. Criticizing the so-called “naturism” professed by some of his partisans in matters of sexual morals, Lenin said to Clara Zetkin: “Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, is

a phenomenon of decay.”"® A day will come, perhaps, when a successor of Lenin will proclaim, and with yet more justification, that atheism is a product of bourgeois decadence. But

then Soviet Russia will have accomplished a new revolution

and, in order to save the first one, will have transmuted its

values.

For the original atheism which conditions at the outset the Communist conception of social and political life finds ex-

pression in the practical domain in a certain scale of values.

At present, it is industrial production which seems to be the most urgent value of civilization for Soviet Communism. More generally, as long as it will not recognize in man realities necessary to his happiness, and which are of an order

superior to the temporal order, it will inevitably see in the common work to be effected here below the supreme means of the happiness of man; and all that which imposes a measure on this common work will seem to it as a betrayal of man. Hence God must not reserve anything for himself in man, and a totalitarian requisitioning of the energies of man will be found at the end, as a fruit of the atheism affirmed at the

beginning. If the experience of human realities and the resistances of nature and the prise de conscience of fundamental problems little by little eliminate the atheism, this scale of 19 Clara Zetkin, Reminiscences

of Lenin

(New York:

International

Pub-

lishers, 1934), p. 50. With regard to atheism, one knows that the atheism of Lenin was even more virulent, if possible, than that of Marx. “Every religious idea is an abomination,” he declared. The most resolute antireligious dogmatism, the affirmation that all religion is nothing but superstition and that all

knowledge whatsoever of that which surpasses the sphere of scientific experience is impossible, were for him absolutely fundamental themes. Cf. his book

Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909).

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values founded on atheism will be eliminated at the same time and the most loftily personal values recognized: and this will be accompanied not by a regression toward a bygone world, but by a progressive renewal of the morals and the structures of civilization.

III. THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RUSSIAN ATHEISM

A Resentment against God Let us turn to the third question concerning contemporary Russian atheism, considered not doctrinally but historically,

culturally. From this point of view, what is its significance? It is not linked in Russia (I am speaking of the Russian people, not of the theoreticians) with a rationalist tradition, with the long-drawn combats of the Aufkldérung, as would be the case in the West. Its popular historical base in Russia is the very religion of the people, which, like an immense, dynamic, and irrational force can abruptly turn wholly in one

direction or in the other, and hurl itself into the abyss of atheism by a mystical vertigo, by a resentment against God, as it can also turn again and plunge into a belief in God in

other respects more or less pure. Can a “scientific” atheism be built upon this popular historical base? This is doubtless a somewhat disturbing question for the theoreticians of the “without-God” people. It seems, however, that for the moment, a very large part of the youth has arrived at a state of

complete religious indifference, due perhaps, in part, precisely to a transfer of religious feeling to other aims.

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67

A Purification by Fire But what I would like to point out is that this brutal atheism of which I have been speaking (this antihumanism) represents in some way the humanist phase of the history of the Russian people. To give to these words their complete cultural significance, let us not forget that Russia has had neither a Middle Ages nor a Renaissance.

Without implying any insult to the Orthodox Church (there have been saints in this Church; and many souls today

suffer heroically there for their faith), one must observe that culturally, psychologically, an aberrant religious development has occurred in vast regions of Russian thought and in large sectors of the Russian people. On the one hand, nature and reason have never taken their

respective places there. The natural order as such has never

been recognized; the rational has always been held in suspicion. On the other hand, a religious feeling which is in origin earthly and pagan, a messianism holding in it many mixed

elements, a cult of “the holy Russian earth,” a mysticism which

developed especially in the innumerable

sects and

which tapped all sorts of impurities—all this invaded the notional and visible structures of the Christian tradition, thus paganized from within. Christian concepts were thus, so to

speak, disorganized on the spot in virtue of an interior and hidden process. In short, an extremist supernaturalism— whose tendency was to despise reason, and to regard nature,

as Soloviev himself said, as a “process of corruption”—and a paganism which preyed on it from within, formed an indissoluble complex which invited catastrophe.

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HUMANISM

As a result of a revolution at the base of which powerful

irrational currents are in play, and which lives on an irrational heroism and a mysticism d rebours, but which gives itself as aim to rationalize life to the point of eliminating from it the smallest element of mystery, reason and nature have perhaps a chance of recovering their place in the cultural structure of the Russian world, at the most aberrant limit of anthropocentric humanism and under the most deceiving kinds of

materialism and scientism.*° But finally there is here, as it were, a sort of cleansing, a sort of purification by fire; and the opening of a possibility for the Russian people of a prise

de conscience of the proper values of nature and of reason. Thence a historical development which, after having launched

itself under the climate of violent errors and of perfectly naive illusions—and after having (which is very Russian)

passed

20 It is notable that the most recent Communist watchword is at this date “humanism”—a “socialist humanism” which is asked to choose in the Westerm humanist tradition a certain part, that which is orientated toward the glorification of man “emancipated” from God. By this very fact Communism remains faithful to its atheistic postulate, but this new watchword, in obliging it to the choice in question, condemns

it to an attitude

more

“sectarian”

to

tell the truth than “humanist” and to a dogmatic misunderstanding of the profoundest historical sources of humanism and of an essential part of its riches. Moreover, in linking expressly, as was the case for Marx himself, the prole-

tarian conception of the world to a tradition finally bourgeois (there is nothing more bourgeois than rationalistic and atheistic humanism), this new watchword implies a denial or in any case a considerable weakening of the original pretension of the Communist revolution to engender a radically new man. When

one sees what have been the fruits of anthropocentric humanism

for

bourgeois civilization, one can ask himself what advantage the proletariat would have in absorbing the same

philosophy, and if it is to honor it very

much to wish to make of it the heir of the most ridiculous thing in the world, i.e., bourgeois free-thought. And yet, from another point of view, one can find in this élan toward a

socialist humanism an obscure premise of a historical chain which will conclude perhaps quite otherwise than one thinks. For the anthropocentric humanism of modern times is vitally linked to a more profound and more ancient humanist

tradition, and to religious sources,

without

which

it can

absolutely not be understood. And when one day in Russia men will again study these sources, they will run the risk then of recognizing their value.

[July, 1935]

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69

through the worst catastrophes—will doubtless be obliged, if not in the entire mass, at least in a part of it, to lead to a redressing which will re-establish authentic cultural values.

The Postrevolutionary Point of View One can thus understand the “postrevolutionary” point of view which is at present that of a certain number of Russian

Christians. These men take their point of departure in the historical fact of the October Revolution, and they think that germinations altogether new with respect to this revolution will emerge from it; and they even sometimes hope (it is good to hope against hope) that having pressed on without stopping, Russia will perhaps see more quickly than other nations

the lineaments of a new Christendom take shape. What one can, however, think with more probability is that unexpected possibilities of expansion and of heroic spiritual struggle will

open there for a Christian renaissance—conscious of its human and divine integralism—if it has representatives sufhciently enlightened, and free of everything except God.

IV. TWO

CHRISTIAN

POSITIONS

The Barthian Position

I have said that the other pure position to which the dialec-

tic of modern humanism leads is the pure Christian position: in which not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob is recognized; in which man is known as the man of sin and of the Incarnation, having his

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center not in himself but in God; man as he is regenerated by grace.

Two positions may be distinguished here: a position above all reactionist, a will to purification by a return to what is

past; and a position integralist and progressive. The first, the “archaic” position, we find in a certain con-

temporary Protestant school, marked by the return to primitive Calvinism. It is a position of primordial antihumanism and, in a word, with all the theological repentances with which a dialectic very intelligent and very nourished on experience can decorate a doctrine, of annihilation of man before God. One can thus characterize summarily the doctrine of the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who, in part

under the influence of the ideas of Kierkegaard and by a violent renewal of the original Lutheran spirit armed with the sharp-drawn logic of Calvin, has completely reversed the attitudes of Protestantism in Germany. Schleiermacher, Harnack, the classical religious liberalism and rationalism of the nine-

teenth century—all of this is henceforth antiquated: what one now reproaches to Catholicism is that it gives too much place to the human. In short, one returns to the pure pessimism of primitive Protestantism. Hence what can be called the drama of Barth himself. He wishes to listen only to God, and he wishes only to listen to God; he rejects and misconstrues the instrumental character of the human in the Church. But then, when he speaks, and the more he speaks in order to proclaim

that man must only listen to God, it is he himself that speaks, he himself that is heard, and it is his personality which moves and stirs the people. His error, in short, is that of Luther and of Calvin: it is to

think that grace does not vivify. This is why, when he renders justice to the past, he returns to the past as such, to a past

that is stopped—to a past which is dead, as for the Calvinists human freedom remains dead under grace—not to the sub-

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71

stance at once eternal and progressive, to the internal principle of activity by which the past lived and by which we live also.

The Thomist Position

The other pure Christian position, the “integralist’” and “progressive” position, is that of Catholicism, and it finds its ‘

conceptual equipment in St. Thomas Aquinas. If it is true that there is a sort of blasphemy against God’s government in

history to wish to return to a past state, if it is true that there is an organic growth at once of the Church and of the world, then the task which imposes itself on the Christian is to save the “humanist” truths disfigured by four centuries of anthro-

pocentric humanism, at the very moment when humanist culture is becoming tainted, and when these truths are crum-

bling at the same time as the errors which vitiated and oppressed them. But in that case, one sees, it is a question of a total recasting of our cultural and temporal structures, formed under

the climate of anthropocentric dualism and anthropocentric rationalism,

and

of a substantial

transformation

of these

structures. It is a question of the passage to a new age of

civilization.

V.

A NEW

AGE

OF CHRISTIAN

CULTURE

The Creature Rehabilitated in God

I distinguished in my first chapter three problems particularly significant for the philosophy of culture, and I considered

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them first from the point of view of mediaeval Christendom,

then from the point of view of the classical humanism according to the Renaissance and the Reformation. Let us therefore consider now these three problems from

the point of view of a new age of civilization and Christendom, and let us speak first of the practical attitude of the creature in face of his destiny. At this new moment of the history of Christian culture, the creature would not be belittled or annihilated before God;

and neither would it be rehabilitated without God or against God; it would be rehabilitated in God. There is no longer but one solution for the history of the world, I mean in a Christian regime, however it may be otherwise. It is that the

creature be truly respected in its connection with God and because receiving everything from Him; humanism, but theocentric humanism, rooted where man has his roots, integral humanism, humanism of the Incarnation.”?

Here some observations could be proposed concerning the

“contempt of creatures” shown by the saints, and of which there is much mention in hagiographic literature. We must not misunderstand this expression, which discloses above all

the weakness of human language. The saint sees practically that creatures are nothing in comparison with Him whom he loves and with the End which he has chosen. This is a lover's contempt for that which is not his beloved. And the more he despises creatures as rivals of God, or as object of a possible option against God, the

more he cherishes them as loved by God, and truly made by Him good and worthy of being loved. For to love a being in God and for God, is not to treat it as a mere means or a mere

occasion for loving God; it is to love this being and to treat it as an end, because it merits to be loved, I mean according 21 Cf. Science et Sagesse, Ch. III.

A NEW HUMANISM

73

as this very merit and this dignity of end flow from the sov-

ereign Love and sovereign Lovableness of God. Thus is un-

derstandable the paradox that in the end the saint envelops with a universal love of friendship, and of piety—incompatably more free, but more tender also and more happy than

the love of concupiscence of the voluptuary or the miser— everything that passes in time and all the weakness and all the beauty of things, everything he has given up.2?

What I wish to suggest is that this attitude of the saint,

which, after all, properly speaking, is not an attitude of contempt toward things but, rather, of assumption and of transfiguration of things, in a love superior to things—it is this attitude which, supposed generalized, become common, rendered in its turn a commonplace of Christian psychology would correspond to that rehabilitation of the creature in God which I see as characterizing a new age of Christendom and a

new humanism—essentially different from humanism in the ordinary sense of the word, from anthropocentric humanism, which had its type in the Renaissance hero or in the classical “honest gentleman”; whereas theocentric humanism has its type in the saint, and can be realized only if saints set their hand to it. That is as much as to say that it can be realized

only with the help of the means which Christian spirituality calls the means of the cross, not of the cross as exterior mark

or symbol placed on the crown of Christian kings, or decorat-

ing honorable breasts, but the cross in the heart, the redemptive sufferings assumed into the very bosom of existence. The attitude of which I have just spoken can become general only if it is bound up with a progress in the consciousness which the creature has of itself, and at the same time of

the mystery of the Cross being accomplished within it. In the 22 Les Degrés du Savoir (4° édition; Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1946), pp. 664-666. See The Degrees of Knowledge, new Eng. translation (New York; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), p- 335-

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INTEGRAL

proper conditions

HUMANISM

of our age and after the experiences—

bitter, but after all they have taken place—which we have undergone, a certain wideawake reflectiveness appears as inherent in the manner in which the human being comports himself before God and before the mystery of his destiny.”* The injuries caused by the unhappy and divided conscience

can be repaired only by a more perfect and fully spiritual prise de conscience. Only an evangelical consciousness-of-self can conquer the tragedy of the naturalist consciousness-of-self. We understand in this way that if, for a naive Christian civilization, I mean to say a civilization which counted on the

native and naive unity of man, to progress toward God was above all to build a throne for Him on earth in accordance

with the rights of His majesty—on the other hand, for a Chnistian civilization which can no longer be naive, and in which man must regain his lost unity by taking himself in hand again under the instinct of grace, to progress toward God will be, it seems above all, to prepare for man the terrestrial conditions of a life into which sovereign love can descend and

make in man and with him a work divinely human.

Created Liberty For this new humanism, the speculative problems which command every great period of culture would doubtless re-

ceive a certain renewal. Have I not said that to each age of

civilization there corresponds a certain typical conception of the relations between grace and freedom? As concerns this problem of grace and freedom, the age of humanist theology —mitigated or absolute—appears definitely to have come to

an end. And then, as the Augustinian theology of grace and *3 Cf. Science et Sagesse, Ch. III.

A NEW HUMANISM

75

freedom dominates the Middle Ages, as that of Calvin and that of Molina

dominate

modern

times, I think that the

theology of St. Thomas will dominate a new Christendom.

If it is true that it will be completely freed of anthropocentric humanism, this new Christendom will understand

that, as St. Thomas teaches, it is not by disputing the terrain with divine causality that the philosopher can affirm and recognize in face of God created freedom, in the whole measure in which it comports being and goodness. It is by recognizing that in this whole measure created liberty receives from the divine causality; by recognizing that it is invaded, traversed,

imbued even to its slightest actualization by creative causality. All this has been fully elucidated by the Dominican school commenting on St. Thomas Aquinas, but there are in St. Thomas principles which, in my opinion, have not yet been

sufficiently exploited when it is a question of treating, no longer of created freedom in the case of good or meritorious acts, but of this same freedom in the case of evil acts, in the

line of evil.

St. Thomas explains that “the first cause of the absence of grace comes from us” (defectus gratiae causa prima est ex nobis),?* and this sentence goes singularly far. In the line of evil, it is the creature that is the first cause.

I think that if the theology of the future and Christian

philosophy apply themselves to disengaging that which is contained in the principles of St. Thomas on this subject, they will make important discoveries and will be led, in what concerns the failures of created freedom, to a deeper synthesis, a synthesis which will bring to light new aspects of the mystery

of the divine science and of the divine will in their relationship with man, and which will lead one to understand better

the degree to which God respects this fallible freedom that is 24 Sum. theol., I-II, 112, 3, ad 2.

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INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

human freedom. If the creature has truly and really the first initiative in the line of evil, it intervenes—negatively—in the

very molding of the designs of Providence. In His eternal instant to which all the moments of time are present, God,

in order to make and see with a single glance the whole of human history, waits, if one may speak in this manner, for

each of us to refuse or not the gifts of the sovereign influx from which every being and every action hold everything— everything except the nothingness which we put into them. And precisely because the new age of Chnstendom of which I am speaking will be an age not of sacred forgetfulness of the human, but of evangelical attention to the human, of theocentric humanism, I think that this new synthesis, these new

aspects of the problem of grace and freedom, as also the aspects which concern the proper and not only the instrumental value of human history, of the secular and temporal activity of the human being, will be typical for this new age.

An Evangelical Consciousness-of-Self In what concerns, finally, the problem of man, let us say that in this new age the gaze of the Christian would not be so to speak averted, as it was in the Middle Ages, from the

mystery of his created nature and of its irrational depths; it would scrutinize this mystery, but according to another mode of introspection than that of modern naturalism: with what I called a moment ago an evangelical consciousness-of-self. Such a consciousness comprises in my opinion these two principal characteristics: it knows itself without seeking itself; the judg-

ments of value which it posits are purely spiritual, free from

sociological preoccupations—that intervention of the social man in our judgments of souls and of our own soul to which

A NEW HUMANISM

Fig

Max Scheler has justly drawn attention has no place at all in it. Consequently it can attain to and scrutinize the human person in his value as person and without dissociating it, can

discover his spiritual texture as the image of God, which evil cannot corrupt radically, and which by its nature groans, not indeed toward grace as such, which nature by itself does not know, but toward a plenitude which in fact grace alone can give.

And this consciousness also attains and scrutinizes the obscure regions of man. It descends into the interior hell, it

explores the lower depths, not by repudiating the distinction between good and evil, as modern naturalism does, but by transcending the purely sociological censures to which [| alluded a moment ago, and by having of evil itself a properly Christian understanding, in application of this paradox of

Christianity: the sin which separates me from the just God is the same that attracts the merciful God. Have pity on me, says the Christian soul, because I have sinned. Finally, such a consciousness-of-self implies an evangelical respect for nature and reason, for those natural structures

which modern humanism has helped to discover and which it has not been able to preserve, and for the original greatness

of man which can never be wholly effaced by evil.

The Man of Bourgeois Liberalism But another feature of this integral humanism must also be

brought to light. It is the prise de conscience of the Gospel exigencies with regard to temporal and secular life, profane

life; exigencies which require the transfiguration of the temporal order, of social life itself (I mean a transformation per-

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INTEGRAL

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petually renewed and deepened, down to the final transfiguration, when the body will rise again). For too long during this modern age the Christian world wounded by dualism has obeyed two opposite rhythms, a religious rhythm for the time of the Church and of worship, a naturalist rhythm for the time of the world and of profane life. The Middle Ages had the sense of unity. But by reason of too difficult historical conditions—because they had to

work on a barbarian and pagan foundation not yet washed away by the purifications of great historic trials—the refraction of the Gospel exigencies in the socio-temporal sphere had remained in great part symbolic and figurative. Here again the case of the Soviet State can furnish matter

for useful considerations. It is remarkable how its philosophy turns back—against the ideological heritage of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau—to a certain pessimism.” For it, there is a man of sin, an “old man” to be destroyed. This is why it is necessary to change man. And what is this man of sin? It is petitbourgeois man, the man of bourgeois liberalism.

From our point of view, how shall we describe him? He appears as a Pharisaical and decadent product born of the Puritan or Jansenist spirit and of the rationalist spirit. This man prefers juridical fictions to love (as Sombart says, he is not “erotic”); and he prefers psychological figments to being

(this is why one can say that he is no longer “‘ontologic’”). A whole idealist and nominalist metaphysic underlies his

comportment. Hence, in the world created by him, the primacy of the sign: of opinion in political life, of money in economic life. 51 say to “a certain pessimism.” It continues with this to depend on a Rousseauistic root and on an optimist-absolute philosophy of man. See above, Pp. 57-59, and below, pp. 227-228.

A NEW HUMANISM

79

This bourgeois man has denied all the evil and the irrational in him, so that he may be able to enjoy the testimony of his conscience, be content with himself, just by himself. He thus

establishes himself in the illusion and dupery of a false nominalist consciousness-of-self. He makes, besides, great use of moralism and spiritualism; he is animated with a devotion, often sincere and ardent, to truths and to virtues of the natural

order: but which he empties of their most precious content and which he makes in some sort mythical, because he has

separated them from the living God and from love, for he is a deist or an atheist; it is he who has taught atheism to his Communist pupils and heirs. The effort of Marx (as later that of Freud) was to be to denounce the lie of this false conscience. This conscience, to

tell the truth, covers over and conceals profound unconscious currents—not only economic interests, the interests of class, as Marx affirms but, in general, all that world of concupiscence

and of egoistic love of self, and of the irrational and of the demonic, which one has wished to deny, and which no one will ever characterize better than St. Paul has done.

This bourgeois man, who is as displeasing to the Christian conscience as he is to the Communist

conscience, Commu-

nism hopes to change mechanically and from without, by technical and social means, and by the surgery and modeling

of pedagogy and propaganda. And to this end it attacks not only this bourgeois man, but man in his very nature, and in his essential dignity, insofar as image of God, insofar as de-

manding by his being-of-nature and by his being-of-grace the highest goods of the person: God and eternal life, a freedom and a spiritual life centered on realities interior to man but

suprahuman, and, as the first properly human social medium,

the family with its proper life—economic and spiritual—and

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INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

with its primordial exigencies of natural law, exigencies of which civil legislation fixes the modalities, but which it does not at all create. However it may be with the corrections produced in the theory by the necessities of life, the theory amounts to making of man a simple energy of the common life, since, for Marxist philosophy, every transcendental value whatsoever is bound up with the exploitation of man by man.

Marxism and Man The tragedy of Marxism is here that, rightly desiring—but without taking cognizance of the problems proper to the

person—to find an escape from that despair and that decomposition of the human person to which the dialectic of anthropocentric humanism leads, and of which I spoke above, it is itself tributary of bourgeois humanism in its most aberrant and most inhuman metaphysics, and carries the latter— atheism,

immanentism,

anthropocentrism—to

its

highest

point of exasperation. Lacking the indispensable metaphysical groundwork, its effort to restore the human being in the joyin-work and the joy of living can thus only lead—I say, considered in the proper logic and in the proper spirit of the system—to results more disappointing still than those of classical humanism. It is to propose to oneself a good end to wish

to elevate the mass of men to a life authentically social and political: but this end itself is missed if one refuses to understand that the social and political life of the terrestrial community is, indubitably, a high and difficult life, but one which is ordered to something better; and that it no doubt corresponds to primary aspirations of the human person, of the

person as person, but not to the highest or most radical aspira-

A NEW HUMANISM

81

tions, which seek to pass beyond to nobler forms of communion.?¢

It may very well be, moreover, that in actual fact—less by virtue of Marxism

than as a consequence

at once of the

violent destructions and purifications effected by it and of the deep resources of human nature thus brought into play—man, in an experience like that of Communist Russia, is discovering again certain elementary springs of his ontological reality and is thus beginning (at a terrible price, from which only Christians, if they understood and if they wanted to, could dispense

humanity) to surmount the final impossibilities and dissociations of the bourgeois phase of anthropocentrism. Marxism will always be ready to integrate, or claim to integrate, all

these human renewals—thanks to the facilities of dialectic thought, which everywhere keeps, and in Marx himself, that ambiguity, that quality of “mystification” so well denounced

by him in Hegel, and which enables it at any moment to open, supposedly in virtue of an internal development of the logic of the system, any door anywhere, opened in fact by the sole

irresistible pressure of the alien reality. The fact remains that in itself it only tends to restore the unity of the human being

by asking it to abdicate its most intimate exigencies for the benefit of the monism of collective life; and that, in the very

effort of integration of which I just spoke, it confesses a pro-

found inhumanity, for it accomplishes that only by claiming to bend man at the pleasure of its decrees. What matters to

what one bends him? The important thing is to keep mastery over him. We have beneath our eyes strange spectacles of

passive obedience, the human being becomes as supple as a glove. Let some day a successor of Stalin command his faith-

ful pupils to adore electrons or to genuflect before sacred 26 Cf, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, pp. 46-64 (Eng. trans.: Freedom in the Modern World, pp. 39-54).

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images—in both cases there will be equally ground for disquiet; whatever be the object of its good pleasure, Caesaropapism insults the human person and God.

The U.S.S.R. and Marxism

I hold that a just critique of Marxism, as I remarked above, must first of all endeavor to distinguish in it certain true

intuitions from the false principles and erroneous conceptualizations which have deformed them from the outset. Marx saw the essential importance of the system of production in evolution; there is in historical materialism a truth badly

formulated which a philosophy that would apply to the movement of history the principles of hylomorphism could save: but in Marx it is spoiled, as we have seen, by an atheistic

monism Hegelian in origin. Marx likewise saw the usurious

character which the capitalist spirit has imprinted on modern economics; he conceptualized this intuition in an erroneous

theory of surplus-value. He saw that the class war is the effective consequence of the capitalist system, and that the great historical task of modern times will be the social emancipation

of the proletariat; but he blocked this intuition with a messianism of inexpiable social conflict, and with a false philosophy of man and work, ending in the socialization of the entire human being. It is clear that it is necessary and that it will become more and more necessary to disjoin the judgment to be borne on

Marxism, which is a certain doctrinal essence abstractly considered, and the judgment to be borne on the developments of Soviet Russia, which concern concrete

human

activities,

placed under the sign of Marxism (itself interpreted according to certain of its potentialities—the most dynamic ones),

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but subject to the causal interferences proper to existential realities, and undergoing constantly the lessons of experience,

the resistances and the pressure of life, and the necessities particular to the historic state of Russia. Nevertheless, if there is in Marxism as doctrine the ambiguity which I just indicated, we must not be astonished that a similar ambiguity— augmented considerably, and increasingly, by the intervention of concrete historical factors—is to be found, on the plane of existence, in Russian Communism.??

We cannot reject the inquiries of good faith which show us the manner in which Soviet Russia has been able, not without

altering in face of the real many theoretical claims, to cause a backward economy to make astonishing steps forward within

the span of a few years, and which proclaim to us the germination in this country of a “new form of civilization” (the question is to know what is its value). This new form of civilization is born into existence after the sacrifice of millions

of human lives and of irreparable losses; let us say briefly that insofar as it is possible to make a judgment from a distance,

and on the basis of written documents, the positive elements that it contains are summed up, in my opinion, in the liquida-

tion of the “profit system” and of the subjection of the human 27 Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (London and New York, 1936). The good faith of the authors and their concern for exact information do not exclude moreover a certain naiveté, which

is quite easily discernible; Ernest Mercier, Réflexions sur L’U.R.S.S., January, 1936, Centre polytechnicien d’Etudes économiques; Waldemar Gurian, Der Bolschevismus, Einfiihrung in Geschichte und Lehre (Freiburg: Herder, 1931; Eng. trans., Bolshevism: Theory and Practice, trans. by E. I. Watkin [New

York: Sheed and Ward, 1934]); Arthur Rosenberg, Geschichte des Bolscheyismus

(Berlin: Rowohlt,

1932; Eng. trans., A History of Bolshevism, trans.

by Ian F. D. Morrow [New York: Russell & Russell, 1965]); Boris Souvarine, Staline (Paris: Plon, 1935; Eng. trans., Stalin, trans. by C. L. R. James [New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939]); and Mme. Héléne Iswolsky’s excellent little book, L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936; Eng. trans., Soviet Man—Now, trans. by E. F. Peeler [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936]). See also Victor Serge’s two letters to Magdaleine Paz and André Gide, Esprit, June, 1936.

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work-force to the fecundity of money”*® (a liquidation which is appreciable, especially in light of future developments, since

for the moment it has as ransom a heavy statism, but in the end it is this liquidation which explains the great hope roused in many sectors of the working world by the Russian experiment); and in the perpetually renewed effort to inaugurate,

at least in the sphere of the morphology of laws, a “multiform democracy’””® integrating the human multitude into the social, political, and cultural life of the community. However hard may be the life the human being lives there, however harshly he may be treated, he has at least the feeling, in this country

where serfdom and its resultant customs had so long endured, that an age-old social humiliation has ceased.*° Nor can we reject other witnesses of equal good faith, who insist more on the errors and barbarous methods which vitiate

the system, and who also show us the complete contempt for the human person, the implacable harshness, the means of

terror (more intense than ever after eighteen years of revolution) and the bureaucratic despotism with which it is carried into effect. It is an inhuman and sinister aspect which appears here. According to documents in which it seems reasonable to have confidence, let me say briefly that in my opinion the profound evils of the Russian “new civilization” are summed up in Communist totalitarianism itself, which carries to the 8 A certain form of “exploitation of man by man” thus finds itself abolished. It does not suffice however to abolish the capitalist regime (especially when one replaces it by Communism) to cause to cease all forms of exploitation of man by man: in particular, the exploitation of the individual man by

the collective man can assume great proportions. The fact remains that the abolition of the capitalist form of servitude of the work force is a necessity recognized as much by personalism as by Socialism.

*9 “Tt is, more than anything else, this almost universal personal participation, through an amazing variety of channels, that justifies the designation of it as a multiform democracy” (S. and B. Webb, of. cit., I, p. 427). °° Cf. Héléne Iswolsky, L’Homme 1936 en Russie soviétique, pp. 66-68, 105-106 (Eng. trans.: Soviet Man—Now, pp. 47-48, 74-75).

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maximum the terrible risks that any strong collective organization entails, destroys, as do the other forms of totalitarian-

ism, freedom of thought, and sceks to socialize the person and the mind; in the war against God, the work of extermination of religion,** the idolatry of technique and of the science of 81 While furnishing on the struggle against God a very objective documentation but one that is limited to official information, the Webbs

minimize

gravely the order of greatness and the significance of this antireligious effort. “Tt is very difficult to establish an exact figure as to the number of priests and religious who have been imprisoned or who are still in prisons and concentration-camps; for the servants of the Church are never persecuted directly by Soviet law; the latter is careful not to question their creed, and applies to them the articles of the penal code concerning counter-revolutionary action, spying, sabotage, and ‘the exploitation of the religious prejudices’ of the people. This voluntary confusion renders extremely difficult, as I have said, any

exact evaluation of the number of victims of the religious persecutions. It suffices to say that, of 100,000 monasteries which existed formerly in Russia, not a single one remains; it is therefore thousands of monks and religious who

have been decimated. Can one speak of humanism, so long as this situation persists, so long as terror continues to reign and so long as the concentration-

camps are packed with prisoners? I have cited at the beginning of this study the testimony of the correspondent of the Courrier Socialiste on the subject of a recrudescence of this terror. According to sources not less worthy of confdence, the number of those detained in prisons and camps and of those condemned to deportation has risen actually to seven million. How can one know how many, among these unfortunate ones, have suffered because of their religious convictions? Orthodox and Catholic priests, monks and nuns, pastors, rabbis, find themselves among these millions of imprisoned men and their martyrology is far from being exhausted” (Héléne Iswolsky, op. cit., pp. 112114). Meanwhile one can discuss academically on the progress that the religious persecution in Russia entails in relation to the great persecutions of the past. The truth is that it disguises itself. It is less a persecution properly so called than a work of spiritual destruction, which aims to destroy religious life rather than to strike believers, and which tries to avoid making martyrs publicly. The essential point is to imprison the word of God. Limiting ourselves to the legal dispositions, these latter, after having proclaimed in theory liberty of conscience, have secularized all the schools, they forbid the gathering together of children to teach them the catechism, and interdict all religious instruction except in the child’s own family and by it; they forbid the printing and publication (at least in Russian) or the importation of the Bible and religious books; they take away from priests the nght to speak anywhere else but in their church, and from every religious organization the right to undertake any work of education, recreation or charity. They have suppressed prac-

tically all the seminaries, they make of the priest a man disqualified from social and political life, deprived of the right to vote in a regime where the perpetual vote is a condition

of existence. While

they punish as a crime any public

propaganda of religion (with the exception of divine service and sermons

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phenomena, the activist dynamism and the new servitude— this time for the benefit of collective man—with which it menaces certain levels of the producing masses. Such is, for whoever attempts to judge in an objective and

impartial manner, the ambiguity presented by the present realizations of Russian Communism. Something whose importance is undeniable for the evolution of humanity’s conditions of existence is there in process; at the same time a delivered in Church), they give free rein, on the other hand, and consecrate

all the powers of the official teaching, and deliver over in practice the whole of education to the anti-religious effort; they permit and favor the direct propaganda of atheism by the Anti-God Society and the afhliated organisations; they make of this propaganda (and how, then, can we be astonished that so many communes have voted heavily for the suppression of their churches? Over the whole span of Russia almost a third of these have been closed) one of the tasks of the spiritual authority which guides and animates the great Soviet body, I mean of the Communist Party. It is to be observed

that in Russia adhesion to the Communist Party depends on an explicit profession of atheism and of negation of any form whatsoever of the supernatural.

“What the membership, no one who atheist, and

Communist Party maintains is a rigid rule for itself. Its own including probationary candidature for its membership, is open to does not whole-heartedly and outspokenly declare himself an a complete denier of the existence of every form or kind of the

supernatural” (S. and B. Webb, of. cit., II, p. 1012; cf. also I, p. 345). Does

this clause hold outside the U.S.S.R.? The question is especially interesting, from the fact that the Communist Party asserts itself to be an entity transcending all national boundaries, and which, in Russia itself, is not a part of

the organism of the Soviet Constitution itself and of its various legal powers.— At the date at which I am wnting (1936), the Anti-God journal has ceased to appear (perhaps because the readers have grown tired of it); there is a question of returning their bells to the churches; there is even a question of the possibility of a synod. These forced concessions do not signify that the atheist and antireligious zeal of the Communist directors would itself be relaxed. The new Constitution announced by the newspapers seems, however,

to include certain ameliorations in the conditions imposed on the clergy. [Since the time this note was written, war has accelerated the change in attitude of the Soviets toward religion. For political motives, but also and above all under the impulse of popular sentiment, the Russian State has offcially reconciled itself with the Orthodox Church. The latter has at its head a Patriarch; a theological Institute functions in Moscow. It appears that in pursuing its own ends, which are not those of the State but in which the idea of the mission of Slavism plays a great role, the Orthodox Church will find itself in fact the auxiliary of Russian politics. The future will tell who sees more accurately, atheists for whom the religious indifference of the youth is an acquired gain which renders without danger the concessions made to the Church, or Christians who hope that with time a vast religious renewal will take place in the mass of the Russian people. Addendum, 1946].

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profound spiritual evil rages there on men. It is the burden of error conveyed by Marxism along with captive truths that, joined to certain characteristics of the Russian temperament, renders so strong the negative part in the new civilization

which is being fashioned in Soviet Russia. By virtue of one of those knots of fortune and misfortune which are customary in history, the social adjustments and the new forms of life, of widely varying value, which are coming into existence there,

find themselves in fact dominated today by intellectual and spiritual forms which the angel of atheism has wrapped in darkness and rendered inhuman. What discoveries and what agonies, what resurrections are thus called for, and for what

future age?

Socialist Humanism and Integral Humanism However preponderant Marxism may be in Socialism today,

the expression “socialist humanism” is notably wider than the expression “Marxist humanism,” which, in spite of the ideas of the young Marx, seems, moreover, rather disconcerting. All Socialism is not necessarily atheistic, as is Marxism; but even

in its non-Marxist forms, or in those of its forms that go beyond Marxism, Socialism proceeds from a conception of man, of work, and of society encumbered with errors and deficiencies,*? which only new syntheses could remedy. 82] am thinking here, in what concerns man, of the anthropocentric humanist and naturalist or, more exactly, “Christian-laicized” conception of which it was a question above (pp. 22-24); in what concerns work, of a concep-

tion which, while constructing, and with good reason, an ethics of the dignity

of work, links in fact such an ethics to the eviction of the finalities of the

contemplative and immanent order (cf. Etienne Bore, Travail Humain et Esprit chrétien [Paris, 1932]; Le Travail et 1Homme [Paris, 1936], collection “Les Iles”); in what concerns society, of a conception which makes of the opus oeconomicum (“administration of things” and, especially, industrial production), the work par excellence of the body politic, and which neglects certain primary rights of the person and of domestic society.

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There is in socialist humanism a great élan toward truths which

one

cannot

neglect,

without

grave

detriment,

and

which matter greatly to human dignity; I think that the fundamental error of an atheistic philosophy, or at least the original deficiencies of which I spoke a moment ago, spoil this lan, and deform and dehumanize to this extent the various moral

and social conceptions elaborated by this humanism; so that it would be a great illusion to think that by simply juxtaposing the idea of God or religious beliefs and socialist humanism, one would make a viable synthesis founded on truth. No, it is a general recasting which is required. But I think also that that which I call integral humanism is capable of saving and of promoting, in a synthesis fundamentally different, all the truths affirmed or glimpsed by socialist humanism, by uniting them in an organic and vital manner with numerous other truths. It is for this reason that the name itself, integral humanism, seems to me particularly appropriate here.

The analyses contained in this chapter have, I believe, made obvious to what extent a recasting such as the one of which I have just spoken is desirable. However grave its errors and its illusions may have been, Socialism in the nineteenth century

was a protest of the human conscience and of its most generous instincts against evils which cried to heaven. It was a noble work to institute the trial of capitalist civilization, and to awaken, against powers which scarcely pardon, the sense of justice and the sense of the dignity of work; socialism has had the initiative in this task. It has fought a hard and difficult battle, in which have been expended innumerable devotions,

and the most moving human quality, devotion to the poor. It has loved the poor. One can only criticize it effectively while

remaining on many points in its debt. Yet the deceptions it has already caused among men are for all that only the more bitter. It is a great pity to note that the errors in “first philos-

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ophy” and in social philosophy on which it originally depends

have spoiled in it so many resources and have grown worse as it grew, and create, as long as they endure, so deep a separation between Christian thought and it. Will these always endure? They are primordial; they are all linked with the failure to recognize the eternal in man. The social and political philosophy implied in integral humanism

invokes, for our present regime of culture, radical

changes, let us say, to employ analogically the vocabulary of hylomorphism, a substantial transformation. And this trans-

formation does not require only the instauration of new social structures and of a new regime of social life succeeding that of capitalism, but also, and consubstantially, a rising of the

forces of faith, of intelligence and of love springing from the

interior depths of the soul, a progress in the discovery of the world of spiritual realities. On this condition only will man be able truly to penetrate more deeply into the depths of his nature without mutilating or disfiguring it. “For the first time in history,” wrote Maxim Gorky recently, “the true love of man has been organized as a creative force and takes as its task the emancipation of millions of

workers.’’** I believe in the profound sincerity of these words of Gorky, and of the sentiment which they express. And I consider as very important the fact that this theme of the love of the human being, of which nothing will ever prevent that in the deepest recesses of history the origins are Christian, should now rise up in a current of thought that under materialist influences has long wished to accord it but an inferior and sentimental value. But love is a savage force; and when it comes in the loved being to regions whose doors are closed to it, it turns to horror and to murderous hatred. The question is to know whether, 33 Prayda, May 23, 1934. Cited by H. Iswolsky, op. cit., p. 77-

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in order to have the key to these doors and to pass beyond, and in order to be the true love of man, it has no need of

loving also in man that which in man vivifies man, being Love itself and Gift. And when we also read in Pravda** that “the new man does

not himself form himself, it is the Party which directs the whole process of the socialist recasting and of the re-education of the masses,”’ we ask ourselves if socialist humanism would

not have the ambition to organize, in Gorky’s word, that is to say, to socialize love. Love is the spirit itself; one knows not

whence it comes nor whither it goes. Once in history the true love of man accomplished, by the initiative of one man and in the midst of the ignorance of the world, the work of delivering man from falsehood and from evil forces so as to open to him the joy which does not pass. And ever since then, it is

in the force of this love that every work of real emancipation of man, not only for eternal joy but for temporal life, has been and will be accomplished. “It is easy,” said Marx, “to be a saint when one has no wish to be human.”

Then, in fact, one is neither human

nor a

saint: it is the great lie of Pharisaism. But did Marx think

therefore that it is easy to be human when one does not wish to be a saint? This would be then the great lie of atheistic humanism: because we are born to tend to the perfection of love, of a love which really envelops the universality of men,

without leaving room for hatred against any of them, and which really transforms our being—that which is possible to no social technique and to no work of re-education, but solely to the Creator of being; and which is called “sanctity.” However generous an atheist may be, atheism turns to stone certain profound fibers of his substance; his love for his fellows is a violent demand for their well-being, which rises above all 54 Prayda, May 17, 1934.

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as a shattering force, because, springing from stone, it hurls itself against stone, against a universe of human beings who are impenetrable to it. The love of the saints is a unifying and vivifying force, and diffusive of good, because it makes of them, broken and consumed, a flame which triumphs over

the impenetrability of beings.

True Humanism Is Not Manichaean I shall add a further remark in regard to Marx’s humanism.

Bound up from the beginning, as I recalled a while ago, with the conceptions of Feuerbach and with atheism as the condition and means of the ceasing of the spiritual alienation of man (Communism being the condition and means of the ceasing of the alienation, more deep-seated still, of human work), Marx’s humanism

is pre-eminently a humanism

of

that Manichaean type of which I have already spoken in a previous book.* It asks that we reject into darkness, to the extent to which it has been religious, a whole part of the human heritage.

On the contrary, Christian humanism, integral humanism, is capable of assuming all, because it knows that God has no opposite and that everything is irresistibly carried along by the movement of the divine government.** It does not reject into darkness all that which, in the human heritage, relates to heresies and to schisms, to the aberrations of the heart and

of reason; oportet haereses esse. It knows that the historical

forces invaded by error have served God despite themselves, and that despite themselves there has passed through them all along modern history, at the same time as the surge of the 85]. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, pp. 100-102. 86 Cf. St. Thomas, Sum. theol., I, 103, 6 and 7.

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energies of illusion, the surge of Christian energies in temporal existence. In the scheme of Christian humanism there is a place not for the errors of Luther and Voltaire, but for Vol-

taire and Luther, according as in spite of the errors they have contributed in the history of men to certain advances (which belong to Christ, as does every good among us). I am content to owe something to Voltaire in what concerns civil tolerance, and to Luther in what concerns nonconformism, and to honor

them in this; they exist in my universe of culture, they have their part there and their function; I converse with them there; and when I strive against them, and when we battle

mercilessly, they are still alive for me. But in the scheme of Marx’s humanism there is no place for St. Augustine or St. Teresa of Avila, save in the measure in which they have been

a moment in a dialectic whose only advance is over the dead.

Integral Humanism and the Liquidation of the Bourgeois Man But let us return to the “bourgeois man’ whose counte-

nance I have sketched. What stand does the integral humanism which is the object of our present inquiry take in regard to him? What is its relation to this bourgeois man? From the point of view of integral humanism, it appears that this bourgeois type of humanity is seriously endangered and that its condemnation is deserved. Other types of hu-

manity, whose diversity with respect to this type can extend very far, will come to be within the bosom of the immutable limits of the human species, for this species is capable of being modeled or deformed.

The new man

can differ from the

bourgeois man as much as the bourgeois man himself differs from the Renaissance hero or from the believer of the time of

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St. Ferdinand of Castile or of St. Louis, nay more, as much, if one prefers, as the civilized man of Europe or China differs from the primitive nomad. However different his type may be, if he is formed outside the climate of God and love, and

by sheer means of social and external technique, one can be sure that after a certain expenditure of heroism as happens in

any revolutionary period, and in which an ancient treasure of Christian mysticism will be dissipated, one will end in a new Pharisaism in place of another: Pharisaism of collective pride or of pride of production replacing that of bourgeois honor and of individual profit. In the eyes of the new humanism of which I am speaking,

it is necessary to change bourgeois man, yes; and to do so it is even necessary also to change man, yes, and this alone at bot-

tom matters to us: I mean to say, in the Christian sense, to cause the “old man” to die and to give place to the “new

man,” who is formed slowly—in the history of the human race as in each of us—even to the plenitude of age, and in

whom are accomplished the deepest desires of our essence. But this transformation demands, on the one hand, that one

respect the essential exigencies of human nature, and that image of God, and that primacy of transcendent values which

precisely permit and excite a renewal; on the other hand, that one understand that such a change is not the work of man unaided, but of God first and of man with Him, and that it is not the result of extrinsic and mechanical

means,

but

of vital and internal principles: it is the unchanging Christian teaching. Nevertheless, if a new Christendom succeeds in coming into existence, its distinctive character will be, I think, that

this transfiguration—whereby man, consenting to be changed and knowing that he is changed by grace, works to become and to realize the new man that he is through God—that this

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transfiguration will have to attain, really and not only figuratively, the structures of the social life of humanity, and to

comprise thus—in the degree to which this is possible here on earth for such-and-such historical climate—a veritable sociotemporal realization of the Gospel. A new age of Christian culture will doubtless understand a little better than one has up to now (and never will the world have finished understanding this, i.e., rejecting from its bosom the “old leaven

of the Pharisees”) to what degree it is important to give preference everywhere to the real and the substantial over the apparent and the decorative, to the really and substantially Christian over the apparently and decoratively Christian; it

will understand also that it is in vain that one affirms the dignity and vocation of the human person if one does not work to transform conditions which oppress him, and to bring

it about that he can eat his bread with dignity.

II] THE CHRISTIAN AND THE WORLD

Divisions of This Chapter In the first part, I shall recall some essential notions con-

cerning the distinction between the spiritual and the temporal. In the second part, I shall treat of the problem of the

kingdom of God. In the third part, I shall consider the problem of the temporal mission of the Christian.

I.

THE

SPIRITUAL AND

THE

TEMPORAL

Concerning Civilization Let us ask, first, in what

consists

that which

one

calls

culture or civilization. It is known that Russian and German authors are accustomed to oppose these two notions. For our present study, we can employ them as synonyms. I shall say

that culture or civilization is the expansion of the properly human life, including not only whatever material develop-

ment may be necessary and sufficient to enable us to lead an upright life on this earth, but also and above all moral development, that development of speculative activities and of 95

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practical (artistic and ethical) activities which is properly worthy of being called a human development.’ It appears

thus that culture is natural in the same sense as the labor of reason and virtue, of which it is the fruit and earthly fulfillment. It answers the fundamental aspiration of human nature,

but it is the work of the spirit and liberty adding their effort to the effort of nature. Because this development is not only material, but also and principally moral, it goes without saying that the religious element plays a principal part in it—civiliza-

tion developing thus between two poles: the economic pole on the side of the most urgent human

necessities of the

ethico-biological order, the religious pole on the side of the most urgent human necessities as regards the life of the soul. Is this to say that religion would be a part (be it the principal part), a constitutive element of the civilization or culture of a people? It was so in the whole of antiquity, I mean in the whole of pagan antiquity, for the case of the religion of Israel is a case apart: national religion in one sense, but the prophets were there to remind that it was universal by right and that the God of Israel is also the God of all the earth.

If it is a question of the pagan religions, they each appear to us as particularized to one determinate culture hostile to other cultures. They are differentiated like languages or social groups. Religion is then the soul of the city, as in Aristotelian

biology the vegetative soul is the substantial form of the plant; in this case, a distinction between the spiritual and the temporal as between two orders specifically distinct is strictly speaking inconceivable, and the more the religion be-

comes earthly and socio-political the more this is so. The militant atheism of our day in a way imitates the catholicity

of the religion of Christ, but the universality to which it tends 1Cf. J. Maritain, Religion et Culture, op. cit.

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97

aims at imposing on the whole world a certain temporal order;

this atheistic religion is no longer a purely private affair as was

religion for liberalism, but it is incorporated in the earthly development of certain social energies, and in a certain par-

ticular form of temporal community. Well, what is here the position of Christianity? For the Christian, the true religion is essentially supernatural and, because it is supernatural, it is not of man, nor of the world, nor of a race, nor of a nation, nor of a civilization, nor of a culture, nor of civilization, nor of culture—it is

of the intimate life of God. It transcends every civilization

and every culture; it is strictly universal. And it is a fact quite remarkable that if reason has failed

to maintain among men the universality of what the philosophers call natural religion, the universality of a religion which invokes supernatural and superior-to-reason titles has until now withstood all and every assault.

Religion and Civilization But, if this is so, the distinction between religion and culture or civilization is going to take on a new and particularly potent meaning. In the eyes of the Christian, culture and civilization, being ordered to a terrestrial end, must be referred and subordinated to the eternal life which is the end of religion, and must procure the terrestrial good and the develop-

ment of the diverse natural activities of man according to an efficacious attention to the eternal interests of the person and in such a manner as to facilitate the access of the latter to his supernatural ultimate end: all of which thus supcrelevates civilization in its own proper order. But it remains that cul-

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ture and civilization have a specifying object—the earthly and perishable good of our life here below—whose proper order is the natural order (superelevated as I just said”). In them-

selves and by their own end, they are engaged in time and in the vicissitudes of time. Moreover, it can be said that none of them has clean hands. The order of culture or civilization

appears then as the order of the things of time, as the temporal order.

Whereas the order of faith and the gifts of grace, being concerned with an eternal life which is a participation in the intimate life of God, constitutes by opposition an order to

which the name spiritual most rightly belongs and which, as such, transcends the temporal sphere.

And if, for the Christian, this spiritual order must vivify and superelevate the temporal order, it is not as constituting part of it; it is on the contrary as transcending it, as being of

its own nature absolutely free and independent of it. In a word, the spiritual order enjoys as regards the temporal order the very freedom of God as regards the world.

Thus, the distinction between the temporal and the spiritual appears as a distinction essentially Christian. It arose at a

crucial moment, at a moment truly crucial, as a sort of mutation of capital importance for temporal history and civiliza-

tion themselves. But it is an acquisition specifically Christian, and which has its full meaning and full efficacy only for the Christian, in accordance with the Gospel words: “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God

the things that are God’s.” Yet, if this distinction of the two orders represents a major gain for the liberty of the spirit, it does not fail to pose by this very fact great and redoubtable problems in the theoretical order and in the historical and concrete order. Cf. J. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, op. cit., pp. 346 ff.

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Il. THE PROBLEM OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Statement of the Problem The chief of these problems in the theoretical sphere is

what may be called the problem of the kingdom of God. There is a kingdom of God to be realized, according to the

second petition of the Lord’s Prayer. What role, in relation to this realization of the kingdom of God, must one recognize

for this spiritual and this temporal which we have distinguished?

I shall here have to define the problem more accurately, to point out three typical errors with regard to it, and then to indicate the Christian solution.

“Politische Theologie” and Political Theology It may be remarked that the theoretical elucidation of this question of the kingdom of God has recently taken on new actuality in Germany, in the theological discussions concerning the “Holy Empire” and politische Theologie. Several works have been devoted to these discussions; let me cite in

particular that of Aloys Dempf: Sacrum Imperium, Geschichte und Staatsphilosophie des Mittelalters und der po-

litischen Renaissance (1929). I shall permit myself here a short digression in order to

avoid ambiguity and in order to indicate that the German meaning of the words politische Theologie is altogether different from that of the French words théologie politique.

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The French meaning of the expression théologie politique is that politics, like everything that relates to the moral order,

is a subject for the theologian as well as for the philosopher, because of the primacy of the moral and spiritual values engaged in the political order itself, and because these moral

and spiritual values imply, in the state of fallen and redeemed nature, a reference to the supernatural order and to the order of revelation, which is the proper object of the theologian. Thus there is a political theology as well as a political philosophy—a science of an object secular and temporal, which judges and knows this object in the light of revealed principles.

On the contrary, the German meaning of the expression politische Theologie is that the object itself of which it is a

question is not really secular and temporal; the object itself is “holy” (heilig). Carl Schmitt, who was one of the intellectual inspirers and counselors of the Nazi regime, once tried to show in the major political and juridical ideas of modern

times a transposition of essentially theological themes. Wherefore, if one places himself, in order to speculate, at a practical and concrete point of view, without taking into account the distinction between the formal objects, one will very easily come to say that the political realities are themselves of the divine and sacred order. Such is the meaning that the contemporary German theorists of the Sacrum Imperium give to the phrase politische Theologie. They refer thus to the messianic and evangelical idea of the kingdom of God, of

which they seek to find a realization in time and in history. It is thus that the Protestant theologian Stapel writes that for the fulfillment of the redemption there is required not only the unification of men in the Church, but also in the Empire, which must be guided by the Germans, that is to say, by Prussia, because of the higher degree of humanity which it represents. Authors much more profound than Stapel, such as Eschmann, Hermann Keller, Robert Grosche, and Erik

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Peterson, have also touched on these questions, either to treat

in a sometimes questionable manner the great ecclesiological

problems, or to criticize the theology of the Sacrum Imperium

in the most penetrating and remarkable way.

Kingdom, Church, and World But let us leave this digression and return to our subject; and first let us try to state the problem clearly. We are faced with three notions. The first notion is that of the kingdom of God. City at once earthly and holy, of which God is the king and in which He will be all-in-all. The

Jews looked for this kingdom in time. For the Christian, it will be outside time; it is an eternal kingdom, which will have

as its place the land of the resurrected. Insofar, therefore, as this idea is rightly that of a kingdom, of a political city of which God is the king, and insofar as it is distinct in this

respect from the idea of the Church, as Erik Peterson has shown in a remarkable little book written before his conversion to Catholicism,* this idea of the kingdom of God is an 8E. Peterson, Die Kirche

(Munich,

1929). The

distinction drawn

by

Peterson in this essay, in a manner which today he would doubtless modify

somewhat (he pushed it then to the point of making of it an opposition, which cannot be reconciled with the Catholic thesis of the immediate institution of the Church by Jesus), this distinction between the Church and the kingdom of God must clearly not be forced. The Church is the kingdom of God begun, the kingdom of God in the “peregrinal, militant, crucified” state (Ch. Journet). But it is not the kingdom of God in its state of definitive realization, and as applying to the entire life that humanity (risen) will lead on the “new earth”—the

kingdom

of God

in the “paradisaic, triumphant,

glorified” state. To simplify my exposition, it is this wholly eschatological notion that I designate here by the words “kingdom of God” understood in the strictest sense. The present chapter was already written, and had appeared in the Revue de Philosophie, when a very important theological study by Abbé Charles Journet on “Les Destinées du Royaume de Dieu” and on “Le Royaume de Dieu sur terre” appeared in Nova et Vetera (January-March, and April-June, 1935). This study clarifies many points and brings precious light; one will find there in

a footnote the outline of an important discussion of Barthian positions.

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eschatological idea, an idea which concerns the end of time. It does not refer to the time of this earth, but to what will come after this time.

But what will come after time is prepared by time; the kingdom of God constitutes the final term which the movement of history prepares and to which it leads, and toward

which converge, on the one hand, the history of the Church and the spiritual world and, on the other, the history of the

secular world and the political city: with this difference, that the history of the Church is already the history of the kingdom

of God

begun in time, of the “crucified

kingdom,”

which at the end will be revealed; whereas the history of the secular world will come to its final term only by means of a substantial “mutation,” which is designated as the conflagration of the world, and which will engender it to the kingdom. The second notion is that of the Church, chrysalis of this kingdom; it is already substantially that latter, existing and

living, but veiled and in a state of pilgrimage; its end is eternal life itself, it is in time but it is not of time. Insofar precisely as Church, it is true for the Christian to say of her as of her Master: the prince of this world has no part in her.

The third notion is that of the world, of the secular city. Its end is the temporal life of the human multitude. The world is in time and it is of time; the devil has his part in it.

What are we to think of the world and of the earthly city in regard to the kingdom of God? That is the problem.

The First Error

Here it is fitting to point out three typical errors. I shall mention in the first place an error which existed in the state

of tendency in certain extremists of the first Christian cen-

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turies. It consists in making of the world and of the earthly

city purely and simply the kingdom of Satan, the domain solely of the devil. Their whole history is turned in a direction opposite to that of the Church and tends to the kingdom of

perdition. It is what we may call a satanocratic conception of the world and of the political city. This conception acquired a certain doctrinal force at the time of the Protestant Reformation; in our day it tends to reappear, together with a very delicately wrought theological

elaboration which attenuates as much as possible its excesses,‘ in Protestant theologians of the school of Karl Barth; in fact,

it amounts finally to thinking that the world is not saved, just as man is not intrinsically justified, it amounts finally to regarding nature and its external structures as abandoned by God to the principate of the devil, against whom we can only

bear witness in the midst of perdition. A certain Catholic naturalism or rationalism (I am thinking of Machiavelli, for instance, or of Descartes) ends in the same result by a different path, by the way of separatism, of scission between nature and grace. Nature appears then as a

world absolutely closed, abandoned accordingly to its own forces. In the two cases, one refuses to the world its destination to

grace and to the coming of the kingdom of God. One restricts redemption to the invisible empire of souls and to the moral order. It would be the extreme error of Western Christen-

dom (when it loses the Catholic sense). It is condemned by 4 However profound this theological elaboration may sometimes be, it doubtless succeeds in attenuating, in its conclusions concerning the world and culture, the excesses of the radical pessimism regarded by Karl Barth as inherent

in the Christian faith; I do not think that it succeeds in this without dialectical artifices. Cf. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man; Denis

de Rougemont, Politique de la Personne. M. de Rougemont holds as I do for a “heresy” the absolute pessimism which “abandons the world to itself.” But he regards also as a heresy (“heresy of synthesis”) the Catholic solution, which he calls rationalist and the true sense of which he does not grasp.

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the most fundamental and most simple formula by which the Christian faith expresses itself, when it gives to Christ the name of Savior of the world, Salvator mundi (John 4:42).

The Second Error

Another error, whose seeds are also very old in the West and in the East, we could call theophanic in the latter case or theocratic in the former. Not only is the world saved in hope,

but one believes that it is necessary—to the extent that the work of redemption takes place in it—that in its temporal

existence itself it appear as already really and fully saved—as the kingdom of God: and either, in the one case, one despairs

entirely of it because it is not so; or, in the other, one expects

too much of it because one strives to make that it be so. In the East these ideas have taken on a form somewhat

mystical (hence the appropriateness of the word “theophanic”’ I proposed just now): in the end, the thought of many heret-

ical mystics would be that the divinization of life must even now release us from the servitudes of the law, from the regulations of reason, and from the conditions

of nature. I most

certainly do not impute

error

this excessive

to Russian

Orthodoxy, but I think that it illustrates and uncovers what has been a temptation for Eastern Christendom. Let heaven descend here and now upon the earth—in the meantime the

earth is capable of receiving but a single dewfall of redemption: pity, a cosmic pity, tender and torn. By too much impatience and supernaturalism, one would thus arrive at an attitude analogous to that of Calvinism; one would abandon

to the devil the world under its present form, but not in order to take possession of this world: rather, in order to rid oneself of it, and in order to deliver it—while awaiting the great

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day of God—at least within ourselves by the pity which casts us into its miseries and which transfigures them in us. However “theocratic” he may otherwise be, Dostoevski will reproach the Catholic Church for incarnating itself too much, for endeavoring too much to realize a Christian order here below, to the point of contracting the blemishes of the earth. In the West the error of which I am speaking has taken a form primarily political, and has undergone developments much more complex. It is then what we may call the theocratic utopia, in giving to this word “theocratic” its strongest sense. It asks of the world itself and of the political city the

effective realization of the kingdom of God—at least in the appearances and in the pomp of social life. Even here below, the entire universe must pass under the politscal government of God. Consequently the world and the Church occupy (and dispute) the same terrain: the history of the world is a holy history. This error goes against the Gospel words: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” It goes against the fact that Christ did not

come to change the kingdoms of the earth or to accomplish a temporal

revolution:

non

eripit mortalia,

qui regna

dat

caelestia.© This theocratic error is exhibited in Dostoevski’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, who seeks to bring about

the absolute happiness of the world by political means and then, as this is to ask of these means more than they are

normally capable of giving, by a universal constraint and servitude. This error never imposed its form on mediaeval Christendom; the mediaeval idea of the Empire was never identified with this view, and when it tended toward such a confusion,

then Rome broke it at Canossa. The distinction between the 5 These words from the Hymn for the Epiphany are quoted by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical on Christ the King.

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two powers was always affirmed by mediaeval Catholicism. Indeed, the idea of making of this world purely and simply the kingdom of God is a heresy for the Christian. But it was the temptation, the tempting angel of mediaeval

Christendom. Theoretically we find it professed by certain extremist theologians of the Middle Ages, particularly of the

dying Middle Ages, who have never been followed by the Church, and in whose eyes all power, temporal as well as spiritual, belongs to the Pope, who delegates to the emperor and by him to the kings (potestas directa in temporalibus)

temporal power for the perfect unification of the world under the reign of Christ. This is what may be termed a clerical theocratism or a hierocratism.® In the order of culture, Spain knows well whether something of this theocratic temptation did not enter into the Castilian ideal at the time of Charles V and Philip II. In any case, in practice, certain excesses in the use of human

and

political means, on the Protestant side with the Geneva of Calvin, on the Catholic side at the time of the Counter-

Reformation and the ancien régime (in these excesses, the Church as such was not engaged, but they took place within

the Church), caused the shadow and the chill of this error to pass over men, who have long remembered them. Nevertheless, it is in becoming progressively more secular

that this error has taken on a more and more heavy historical weight. The sacred mission which it implies thus passes first to the emperor—this is imperial theocratism; then, in a minor degree, to the kings (I am thinking here of Henry VIII, or ®On the history of “hierocratic” ideas let us mention in particular the works of M. Arquilliére, Saint Grégoire VII (Paris, 1934); of M. Jean Riviere, Le probleme de l’Eglise et de [Etat au temps de Philippe le Bel (Louvain and Paris, 1926); and of Msgr. Grabmann, Studien iiber den Einfluss der aristot. Phil. auf die mittelalt. Theorien iiber das Verhdltnis von Kirche und Staat

(Munich, 1934).

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even of Gallicanism and Josephism); then, with a return to the major degree, it passes to the State (I am thinking of the philosophy of Hegel). A rudimentary Hegelianism will make it pass to the nation or the race; a more profound Hegelianism, to the class, and we meet again here the mes-

sianism of Karl Marx. The proletariat will be regarded as

having the sacred mission of saving the world. In these perspectives, in order to characterize culturally contemporary

Communism, it would be necessary to regard it as an atheist theocratic imperialism.

The Third Error The third error expressed itself in modern times starting with the Renaissance. It consists in seeing in the world and in the terrestrial city purely and simply the domain of man

and of pure nature, without any relationship either to the sacred or a supernatural destiny, or to God or the devil. This is what may be called separated or anthropocentric humanism, or even liberalism (I am taking this word in the sense which

it has in theological vocabulary, where it designates the doctrine according to which human freedom has no other rule or measure

than itself). The history of the world is conse-

quently directed toward a kingdom of pure humanity which is, as is easily seen in Auguste Comte, a secularization of the

kingdom of God. This error is condemned by the Gospel words: Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word

that comes forth from the mouth of God; Non in solo pane yivit homo, sed in omni verbo quod procedit ex ore Dei. It is, moreover, an unstable error, for it has an abstract and fictitious end. It belongs to the species of utopias properly so

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called, of unrealizable utopias, if 1 may so put it, for in a

certain sense there are utopias which can be realized. It had thus to end in the erroneous historical ideal, erroneous but

yet in a way realizable (for it appeals not to a fiction but to force) of which I spoke under the second head—in the error of atheistic theocratism.

The Ambivalence of the World Let us try to indicate now the Christian solution. For Christianity, the true doctrine about the world and

the temporal city is that they are the kingdom at once of man, of God, and of the devil. Thus appears the essential

ambiguity of the world and its history; it is a field common to the three. The world is a closed field which belongs to God by right of creation; to the devil by right of conquest, because of sin; to Christ by right of victory over the conqueror, because of the Passion. The task of the Christian in the world is to dispute with the devil his domain, to wrest it from him;

he must strive to this end, he will succeed in it only in part as long as time will endure. ‘The world is saved, yes, it is de-

livered in hope, it is on the march toward the kingdom of God; but it is not holy, it is the Church which is holy; it is on the march toward the kingdom of God, and this is why it is a treason

toward

this kingdom

not to seek with all one’s

forces—proportionate to the conditions of earthly history, but as effective as possible, quantum potes, tantum aude—a realization or, more exactly, a refraction in the world of the

Gospel exigencies; nevertheless this realization, even though relative, will always be, in one manner or another, deficient

and disputed in the world. And at the same time that the history of the world is on the march (it is the growth of the

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wheat) toward the kingdom of God, it is also on the march (it is the growth of the tares, inextricably mingled with the wheat) toward the kingdom of reprobation. On the world, the Christian can thus gather contrasting Gospel texts which are explained by this fundamental ambivalence of history and of the world that I have already pointed out elsewhere.’ The Christian reads, for example, that “God so loved the world as to give His only begotten son,” that “Christ came to save the world,” that He “takes away the sin of the world”; and he reads, on the other hand,

that Jesus does not pray for the world, that the world “cannot receive the spirit of truth,” that “ ... the whole world is seated in wickedness,” and that the devil is the prince of this world, that the world is already judged.

The texts I have just cited amount to saying that the world is sanctified insofar as it is not only the world but is assumed

into the universe of the Incarnation; and that it is reprobate insofar as it shuts itself up in itself, insofar (in the words of Claudel) as it shuts itself up in its essential difference, and as it remains only the world, separated from the universe of the Incarnation. Whereas the history of the Church, which is as Pascal says the history of the truth, leads as such toward the kingdom of God definitively revealed and has no other end than that kingdom—on the contrary, divided between two opposing ultimate ends, the history of the temporal city leads at one

and the same time toward the kingdom of perdition and toward the kingdom of God.

Be it pointed out that it would be to disfigure completely and to pervert this idea of the ambivalence of the world and of temporal history, this idea that the devil will always have his part in this world as long as history endures, to seek there 7J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit.

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a motive for accepting tranquilly, especially when one profits from it, the iniquities of this world; it is in this same perverse way that some who think themselves the defenders of order understand the Gospel text: “The poor ® you will always have with you.” This text means on the contrary: Christ himself will not always be among you, but you will recognize Him in the poor, whom you must love and serve as Him. It is not a social class

that is designated here; it is the men who have need of others in order to subsist, whatever may be the nature, the origin,

and the cause of their indigence. So long as there are op-

pressed castes or classes, there love will go first to seek them; if one day there are no longer any of these, it will find them

still wherever they may appear. And because it loves them, it wishes that one day there will be no more oppressed classes or castes.

And similarly, what I have said about the inevitable ambivalence of temporal history implies that the Christian must strive all the more to realize in this world (perfectly and absolutely if it is a question of his own life as a person; in a relative mode and according to the concrete ideal which befits the diverse ages of history, if it is a question of the world itself) the truths of the Gospel; he will never strive enough

to this end, he will never devote himself enough to improving the conditions of earthly life and to transfiguring this life.

This state of tension and of war is necessary to the growth of history; it is on this condition only that temporal history pre-

pares enigmatically its final consummation in the kingdom of God. 8 The Gospel text (Matthew 26:11) does not say “some poor” (there will always be some poor among you); it says “the poor” (tous ptdkhous). The sense is clear: “the poor, in whom I am, you will find always among you, in order to serve me in them; but I myself am going, and that is why Magdalene has acted well in pouring on my head perfumes of great price. . . .”

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But, if what I have just said is correct, the aim the Christian sets himself in his temporal activity is not to make of this world itself the kingdom of God, it is to make of this world, according to the historical ideal required by the different

ages and, if I may so speak, by the moltings of this ideal, the place of a truly and fully human earthly life, i.e., one which is assuredly full of defects, but is also full of love, whose social structures have as their measure justice, the dignity of the human person, and fraternal love,® and which to this extent

prepares the coming of the kingdom of God in a filial, not servile, manner—I mean by the good which fructifies in good, not by the evil which, while going toward its own place, serves the good as if by violence.’ ® Because of the weakness of our species, evil is more frequent than good among men; and in the growth of history, it grows and deepens at the same time as the good mingled with it: these statistical laws concern the comportment of men. Social structures, on the other hand, institutions, laws and cus-

toms, economic and political organizations are human things, they are not men; insofar precisely as they are things and not men, they can be purified of certain miseries of human life; and like many of the works of man they issue from man and they are better than man, in their own order and under a certain relationship. They can be measured by justice and fraternal love, whereas

the acts of men are on the whole rarely measured by that measure; they can be more just than the men who employ them and apply them. But they remain things, and by that very fact realities of a degree essentially inferior to that of persons whose communications and life they serve to regulate. 10 The criticism which M. Denis de Rougemont, in a book otherwise rich in true and penetrating remarks (Politique de la Personne [Paris: Grasset, 1934]), makes of any Christendom as such and of the very notion (which, moreover, he has singularly misunderstood) of a Christian order of the world, rests, it seems to me, on the principle, erroneous according to the Catholic faith, that all human and natural activity being corrupt in its source, and therefore without possible vital unity with interior grace, any effort to institute

a “Christian temporal order’ aims necessarily at doing—in the name of Christianity—the will of man without any concern at all for the “justice” of God, and therefore envelops necessarily a hypocrisy. Moreover, in the Barthian

conception, the history of the secular world can in nowise prepare by a positive growth the coming of the kingdom of God—even in an enigmatic manner and by means of the essential discontinuity marked by the final mutation

and which separates the “penultimate” from the ultimate.

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III. THE

HUMANISM

TEMPORAL MISSION THE CHRISTIAN

OF

The Temporal Deficiencies of a Once Christian W orld We come thus to a formidable problem, one no longer theoretic but practical, that of the temporal mission of the Christian. I shall divide this study into three parts, and I

shall try first to characterize what can be called the temporal deficiencies of a Christian world which had become more and more a Christian world only in appearance in the course of

the modern age, and especially of the nineteenth century. I shall try then (referring to what I have already said on this point"') to indicate briefly the causes of this phenomenon, and I shall pass then to considerations which concern the temporal role of the Christian, I mean particularly as regards

the instauration of a new Christian life of the world. I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter that the spiritual must vivify the temporal. Christianity must inform or, rather, transpenetrate the world, not that this is its princi-

pal aim (although it is an indispensable secondary end), and not in order that the world become right now the kingdom

of God, but in order that the refraction of the world of grace may be more and more effective in it, and in order that man may better live there his temporal life. This is what happened in a large measure at the time of

mediaeval Christendom. Everyone knows the capital role played by the Church in building up the Christian world of the Middle Ages; this world was full of defects, but it was

livable. 11]. Mantain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté.

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With the decline of mediaeval Christendom and the coming of modern times, one sees, on the one hand, the world de-

tach itself progressively from Christ; and, on one observes that in the history of the world plays a very great role, by striving to maintain been won with regard to the realization of the

the other hand, the Church still that which had principles of na-

tural law in the temporal order, and with regard to the subordination of the latter to the ends of the spiritual order. It was

there a necessary but ungrateful position of defense, because it ran the risk in some measure of linking, ostensibly, Christi-

anity with the structures of a world which in other respects was becoming more and more inhuman.

Nevertheless the play of historical forces had yet remained normal for quite some time; and, if the world of the ancien

régime ended by becoming unlivable, its politico-social structure, with its three qualitative orders (nobility, clergy, third

estate), had remained for long an organic structure adapted

to the needs of life. The situation became tragic when, after the fall of the

ancien régime by that time inevitable, after the French Revolution and after Napoleon, the industrial and mercantile world came into being, when society found itself divided into two classes: one which lives exclusively by its work, the other

which lives (or rather, which lived) on the revenues of its capital—classes which no longer had between them any other economic relation than the wage-contract, work itself

becoming thus a mere commodity. While all the time preserving vestiges of Christendom in its ethical and cultural bases, and while making great use, in its conservative sectors and for interested political ends, of the Christian name and

the vocabulary of morality, a civilization which in its entirety was turning from Christianity under the pressure of adverse energies, and in which the Christian sap itself was weak, came,

even in its Christian elements, to accept the inhuman situa-

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tion created for the proletariat by an uncontrolled capitalism, and came to be wholly carried along in the blind movement of a social materialism which in practice, in existence, proclaimed for that which is of it the ruin of the Christian spirit.” Capitalism needs no longer to be brought to trial; its condemnation has even become a commonplace to which minds

who dread platitude fear to return. I shall content myself with recalling in a few words that if, considered in itself, the ideal mechanism of the capitalist economy” is not essentially

evil and unjust, as Marx held it to be; yet, when we consider the spirit which makes concrete use of that mechanism and which determines its concrete forms and its particular realizations, it must be said that a radical disorder is hidden there.

The energy which stimulates and maintains this economy has been progressively spoiled by a “capital” sin; not, certainly, by a sin which inflicts death on the souls of the individuals

compelled to live in the midst of this world and to utilize its machinery, but by a sin which little by little inflicts temporal death on the social body: the cult of earthly enrichment be12 “Compromise is as impossible between the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion was between the Church and the State idolatry of is that whole system of appetites and values, with

Church of Christ and the of capitalist societies, as it the Roman Empire... . It its deification of the life of

snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its

triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself” (R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926], pp. 286-287). #87 am thinking here above all of the mechanism, considered in itself, of

the contract of partnership, with the remuneration for the capital involved that it implies. In fact, by reason of the spirit of adventure

for mercantile

profit and the accumulation of goods characteristic of the capitalist age, and by reason of the special instruments which it has created for itself (e.g., the anonymous society) the contract of partnership was to operate in reality as a contract of loan (mutuum), and the economy was thereby to pass under the law of usury. Cf. J. Maritain, Religion et Culture, n. 2.

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coming the form of civilization. The objective spirit of capitalism is a spirit of exaltation of the active and inventive powers, of the dynamism of man and of the initiatives of the individual, but it is a spirit of hatred of poverty and of scorn of the poor man; the poor man exists only as an instrument of a production that yields profits, not as a person. The rich

man, on the other hand, exists only as a consumer (for the benefit of the capital that this same production serves), not as a person; and the tragedy of such a world is that, in order to maintain and develop the monster of a usurious economy, it will inevitably be necessary to tend to make of all men

consumers, or rich men; but then, if there are no longer any poor men, or instruments, this whole economy stops and dies;

and it also dies, as we see in our day, if there are not enough consumers (in act)** to necessitate the instruments having to work. But then, if such a regime has been able to develop freely its

most inhuman virtualities, is this not a singularly grave sign of the decadence of the world which issued from the dissolution of Christendom, and which for a long time had repudiated its own principles and had denied its own God?

And in this decadence of a world which sociologically and culturally one must still call Christian because of its historical

bases (despite the power and variety of the energies of infidelity which are deployed there)—is not the responsibility of Christians themselves engaged therein? Is there not implied here a failure of the “Christian world” in the narrower sense of the term, that is to say, of the social elements and the so-

cial formations

gathered together under the Christian

ligious denomination?

re-

I am well aware that it would be

14 The unemployed are consumers in potency. In the face of this human mass in state of privation, the existence of a mass of products in apparent overproduction, because the current cannot be established from the one to the

other, is the condemnation of an economy founded on capitalist profit.

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unjust to reproach Christians for not having prevented the development of the new economic structures and the new

forms of life that the errors and the evils proper to the capitalist age have deflected and deformed, but which in their

essence abstractly considered were not evil and corresponded to a normal progress. But in the purely ethical order itself of the personal use which they made of the new economic structures (in other words, in the order of the social as envisaged from the point of view of private virtues), there is ample room to deplore the indifference shown by so many

Christians, in the barbarous and victorious days of early capitalism,

to the laws

of Christian

conduct

in their

social

comportment: a social regime which, concretely taken, was not good, was thus to grow worse to the point of becoming

intolerable. And one must deplore also the fact that in the order of the social as envisaged from the point of view of social life itself and of the activities of earthly civilization, the place which Socialism found vacant, and occupied, erecting great errors, had not been occupied, invoking a social philosophy founded in truth, by forces of Christian inspiration giving the signal for the movement of emancipation of work. The question which presents itself is to explain this double failure.

Some Causes of These Failures Many causes can be cited: first of all, the dualism of the modern age, of which the extreme result will here be one of the forms of that division of labor between God and Mammon, of which I have already spoken. In the second place it may be pointed out that, speaking generally, it is natural that there be more “bad Christians” than “good Christians” in a Christian civilization; it is thus that there was to appear too often a sociological naturization

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of religion, and utilizations of Christianity for wholly tempo-

ral ends. There is yet a third cause, which belongs, rather, to the

intellectual order, and which makes apparent to what an extent modern civilization, even when it still called itself Chris-

tian, has suffered from the absence of a Christian philosophy. In mediaeval Christendom, it was as it were in an unreflective manner, and by the spontaneous instinct of faith, that civili-

zation was oriented despite enormous obstacles toward a realization of Christianity not only in the life of souls, but also in the socio-temporal order. When, with the “reflex age,” the internal differentiation of culture became the preponderant process, and when art, science, the State, began each to be conscious (with what an

awesome conscience!) of itself, it is perhaps not inaccurate to say that there was no similar growth in awareness bearing on the social as such and on the proper reality which it con-

stitutes; and how would this have been possible in a world which was to grow up under the Cartesian sign? . . . It is not

the Gospel spirit that during this time was lacking in the living and saintly parts of the Christian world, but a sufficiently explicit awareness of one of the fields of reality to which this spirit must be applied. However excessive may be the claim of Auguste Comte to have invented the science of the social, one can think from

this point of view that the “scientific” illusions of sociologism, and likewise those of socialism, have worked for Chnistian thought by compelling it to make the reflective “dis-

covery” of this field of reality.1®

These considerations can contribute to making clear to us that the transformation which little by little substituted the regime of lending at interest and of capitalism for the regime of the mediaeval economy—if it has, from the beginning and 15], Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 143-144.

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at its different stages, more particularly in the eighteenth century, provoked, as B. Groethuysen has reminded us,*® the hostility of the Church, and raised for the intelligence of Christian people many questions concerning individual conscience and the confessional—this transformation, I say, has not during all this time been thought and judged by that

intelligence from the point of view of its properly social significance and value; so that the capitalist regime has been able to install itself in the world while meeting the passive resistance and secret hostility of Catholic social formations, but

without provoking any efficacious effort of redressment, nor of active and deliberate opposition in the midst of the Chnistian world

or of the “Christian

temporal,”

even

of the

“Catholic temporal.” It is important, however, to observe that the protest of the Catholic conscience did not fail to make itself heard. In the

nineteenth century in particular, at the very time when capitalism was coming to maturity and was taking possession of the world, men like Ozanam and Toniolo raised their voices.

And above all the Catholic Church, by the teaching of the Popes, made up for the deficiencies of the Christian world by formulating the principles which govern the whole field of

economics and which the regime of modern peoples largely fails to recognize.

The Temporal Role of the Christian with Regard to the Transformation of the Social Regime I would like to propose here some considerations concern-

ing the temporal role of the Christian in the work of trans16 Bernard Groethuysen, Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France. Vol. I: L’Eglise et la Bourgeoisie (Paris: N.R.F., 1927).

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formation of the social regime. Let us remark, first of all, that it seems, at least for Christian thought, that the dualism of

the preceding age is at an end. For the Christian, separatism

and dualism have had their day, whether they be of the Machiavellian or the Cartesian type. An important process of integration is taking place in our time, by a return to a

wisdom at once theological and philosophical, a return to a vital synthesis. The things of the political and economic realm must thus be—in conformity with their natures—integrated to ethics. On the other hand, that consciousness of the social which

was more or less lacking in the Christian or so-called Christian world of the modern age is finally beginning to come about for the Christian. This is a phenomenon of considerable

importance, all the more so as this growth in consciousness is taking place, it seems, and will more and more take place, in a just understanding of modern history and of its normal processes, processes which were vitiated yesterday by capitalist materialism and are vitiated today by the Communist materialism which is succeeding it.

At the same time there appears what can be called the proper mission of Christian secular activity with regard to the

world and culture; one would say from this point of view that, whereas the Church itself, anxious above all not to be bound

to any particular temporal form, is more and more delivered not from the responsibility of judging from above, but from the responsibility of administering and directing the temporal and the world—the Christian, on the other hand, finds him-

self engaged more and more not as Christian or as member of

the Church, but as member of the temporal city, I mean as Christian member of this city, conscious of the task which is incumbent on him of working for the instauration of a new temporal order of the world.

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But if this is the case, one sees immediately what problems will arise for the Christian in this order of ideas. It will be necessary to elaborate a social, political, and economic philosophy which does not simply stop at universal principles, but which is capable of descending to concrete realizations—all of which presupposes a vast amount of delicate work. This work has already been begun; the encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI have established the principles of it. I may remark that this is a work of reason enlightened by faith, but a work of reason on which, at least when one leaves the principles in order to descend to the applications, it would be vain to look for a unanimous accord. If there is

diversity of schools in dogmatic theology, there will also inevitably be diversity of schools in Christian sociology, and in Christian politics—and this, the more so the closer one approaches the concrete. Nevertheless a common doctrine can doubtless be formulated, at least in what concerns the most

general truths; and for the rest, what is important is that a

general plan which is truly precise and practical should be elucidated for a sufficient number of minds. But the Christian conscious of these things will also have

to enter upon social and political action, not only in order to put at the service of his country, as has always been the case,

the professional capacities which he may have in this domain, but also and further in order to work, as I have said, toward

a transformation of the temporal order. But, it is clear that, since the “Christian-social” is insepa-

rable from the “Christian-spiritual,” it is impossible for a

vitally Christian transformation of the temporal order to come about in the same manner and by the same means as

other temporal transformations and revolutions. If it is to come about, it will be as a result of Christian heroism. “The social revolution will be ethical or it will not be at

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all.” This famous saying of Charles Péguy can be interpreted in a wrong way. It does not mean: before transforming the social regime, it is first of all necessary that all men have been converted to virtue. Interpreted in that way, it would merely be a Pharisaical pretext for avoiding any effort of social transformation.

Revolutions are the work of comparatively small groups of men who devote to them all of their energies; it is to these

men that the words of Péguy are addressed. The meaning is: you can only transform the social regime of the world by effecting at the same time, and first of all within yourselves,

a renewal of spiritual life and of moral life, by digging to the spiritual and moral foundations of human life, newing the moral ideas which govern the life of the group as such, and by awakening in the depths of the anew élan....

down by resocial latter

Well, the truest and most perfect heroism, the heroism of love—has it nothing to say here? Once recognized at last by the Christian conscience the proper domain of the social, with its realities, its techniques, its characteristic “ontology,” will not Christian sanctity have to work there also where the

particular heroism of the sickle and the hammer, or of the fasces, or of the swastika pursue their task? Is it not time that from the heaven of the sacred which four centuries of baroque style had reserved for it, sanctity descend into the things of the secular world and of culture, work to transform

the earthly regime of humanity, perform a social and political task? Yes, most certainly, on condition that it remain sanctity, and that it does not become spoiled on the way. There is the rub. There is for the Christian community, at a time like ours,

two opposite dangers: the danger of seeking sanctity only in the desert, and the danger of forgetting the necessity of the desert for sanctity; the danger of shutting up solely in the

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cloister of the interior life and of private virtues the heroism which it ought to dispense to the world, and the danger of conceiving this heroism, when it spills over to social life and endeavors to transform it, in the fashion of its materialist adversaries and according to a type wholly exterior, which is to pervert and dissipate it. Christian heroism has not the

same sources as other heroisms; it proceeds from the heart of a God scourged and ridiculed, crucified outside the gates of the city.

It is time for it again to put, as formerly in the mediaeval centuries, its hand to the things of the earthly city, but in knowing well that its strength and its grandeur are from elsewhere, and of another order.!7

Thus a vitally Christian social renewal will be a work of sanctity or it will be nothing: a sanctity, that is, turned toward the temporal, the secular, the profane. Has not the world known leaders of the people who were saints? If a new Christendom arises in history, it will be the work of such a kind of sanctity.

A New Style of Sanctity We have thus come to a new and final problem on which I will here say only a few words. If my remarks are correct, we

have the right to look for an impulse of sanctity of a new style.

Let us not speak of a new type of sanctity; this word would be equivocal; the Christian recognizes but one type of sanctity

eternally manifested in Christ. But the changing historical conditions can be the occasion for new modes, new styles of

sanctity. The sanctity of St. Francis has another countenance than that of St. Simeon Stylites; Jesuit spirituality, Domini-

can spirituality, Benedictine spirituality correspond to differ“J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 166, 167, 169-170.

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ent styles. We are thus justified in thinking that the growth in awareness of the temporal office of the Christian calls for a new style of sanctity, which one can characterize above all as the sanctity and sanctification of secular life. To tell the truth, this new style is new with regard above all to certain erroneous and materialized conceptions. It is

thus that, when they undergo a sociological collapse—and this happened often in the classical humanist age—the well-

known distinction of the states of life (the religious state and the secular state) taken in a material sense is understood in an incorrect manner; the religious state, i.e., the state of

those who vow themselves to seek perfection, is then regarded as the state of the perfect, and the secular state as that of the imperfect, so that the metaphysical duty and function of the

imperfect is to be imperfect and to remain so: to lead a good worldly life not too pious and solidly planted in social natutalism (particularly in that of family ambitions). One would be scandalized that lay people should try to live in any other way; let them simply cause to prosper, by means

of pious

foundations, the religious who in exchange will win heaven

for them; in this way, the proper order will be maintained.

This manner of conceiving the humility of laymen seems to have been quite widespread in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is thus that the Catechism explained to the faithful of the Dominican

Carranza, at the time Arch-

bishop of Toledo, was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition on the report of the celebrated theologian Melchior Cano.

The latter declared “entirely condemnable the claim to give to the faithful a religious instruction which is fitting only for priests... . He also came out vigorously against the reading of Holy Scripture in the common tongue, and against those who make it a point to hear confessions all day long. ‘The zeal

which spirituals put forth in order to have the faithful go to Confession and Communion often, was for him very suspect,

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and one attributes to him having said in a sermon that in his opinion one of the signs of the coming of Antichrist was the great frequenting of the sacraments.”*® More profoundly, and we come here to a very important

question in the philosophy of culture, one can remark that there is a manner not Christian, but pagan, of understanding

the distinction between the sacred and the profane.

For pagan antiquity, “holy” was synonymous with “sacred,” ie., with that which is physically, visibly, socially in the service of God. And it was only in the degree to which sacred functions penetrated it that human life could have a value before God. The Gospel profoundly changed this by interiorizing in the heart of man—in the secret of the invisible relations between the divine personality and the human personality—the moral life and the life of sanctity. Consequently

the secular is no longer opposed

to the

sacred as the impure to the pure, but as a certain order of human activities, those whose specifying end is temporal, is opposed to another order of human activities socially constituted in view of a spiritual specifying end and consecrated

to the preaching of the word of God and the distribution of the Sacraments. And the man engaged in this secular or temporal order of activities can and must, like the man en-

gaged in the sacred order, tend toward sanctity—both in order himself to attain to divine union and in order to draw toward the accomplishment of the divine intentions the entire order to which he belongs. In actual fact, this secular order, as collective, will always be deficient,’® but we must

nevertheless will and strive—we must will and strive all the 18 A. Saudreau, “Le mouvement antimystique en Espagne au XVIme siécle,”

Reyue du Clergé francais, August 1, 1917. 19 And

the order of sacred

activities

will also, insofar as collective

human

form, always be deficient here on earth. It is insofar as assisted specially by the Spirit of God and insofar as ruled by its invisible Head

(and by its visible

head when he acts in the very title of his universal authority) that the Church is indefectible.

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more—to ensure that it be that which it ought to be. For Gospel justice demands of its very nature to penetrate every-

thing, to take possession of everything, to make its way into the innermost recesses of the world. Well! One can remark that this evangelical principle has only gradually translated and manifested itself in deeds, and that its process of realization is not yet at an end. These observations enable us to understand better the significance of this new style of sanctity, of this new stage in the

sanctification of the secular of which I spoke a moment ago. Let us add that this style, which has an effect on spirituality itself, will doubtless entail specifically spiritual, particular characteristics—for example, an insistence on simplicity, on the

value of ordinary ways, on this specific trait of Christian perfection of being the perfection not of a Stoic athleticism of virtue, but of a love between two persons, the created person and the divine Person, finally on that law of descent of Uncreated Love into the depths of the human in order to transfigure it without annihilating it, of which it was a question in the preceding chapter—and certain saints of contemporary

times seem entrusted with making us feel the importance of these characteristics. It is, moreover, in the order of things that it not be in secular life itself, but in certain souls hidden from the world, some living in the world, others at the summit

of the highest towers of Christendom, I mean in the most

highly contemplative Orders, that this new style and this new impulse of spirituality begin to appear, in order to spread from

there into secular and temporal life.

The Mystery of the World I reserve until later this question of the world and of its

meaning, which is a capital one for Christian philosophy, and

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whose multiple problems call for a thorough study. In this chapter I have only been able to touch upon the most external parts of the question, and to indicate certain general positions which seem to me important in principle.

Let us summarize these positions: I hold that while awaiting the “beyond-of-history” in which the kingdom of God will be accomplished in the glory of full manifestation, the Church is already the kingdom of God in the order called spiritual and in the state of pilgrimage and crucifixion; and that the world, itself, the order called temporal, this world enclosed in

history, is a divided and ambiguous domain—at once of God, of man, and of “the Prince of this world.”

The Church is holy, the world is not holy; but the world is saved in hope, and the blood of Christ, the vivifying principle of the redemption, acts already within it; a divine and

hidden work is being pursued in history, and in each age of civilization, under each “historic sky,’ the Christian must work for a proportionate realization (while awaiting the defini-

tive realization of the Gospel, which is for beyond time), for a realization of the Gospel exigencies and of Christian practical wisdom in the socio-temporal order—a realization which is itself thwarted, in fact, and more or less masked and de-

formed by sin: but that is another matter.

Since men taken collectively live most often “‘in the senses,” and not according to reason, the work of which I am speaking (when Christians themselves do not fail to do it—otherwise,

it is adverse forces which undertake it, under the sign of destruction) is, according to the ordinary course of things, all the more combated and all the more betrayed the more it succeeds in passing into existence: hence a necessity of recom-

mencement, of renewal of effort at the lowest point, obliging

history to surmount itself perpetually—“from fall to fall”— until it comes to its goal.

IV THE HISTORICAL IDEAL OF A NEW CHRISTENDOM |

Divisions of the Chapter After some preliminary remarks, I shall examine in this chapter, first of all, the general aspects of the problem; second, I shall try to characterize the historical ideal of mediaeval Christendom; and third, I shall ask what became of this ideal

during the age which followed, more particularly in the effort of the ancien régime to enable certain elements of this ideal to survive in a world which was rejecting it more and more.

I. PRELIMINARIES

The Notion of “Concrete Historical Ideal” I must first of all delimit my subject and make precise my aim. It is the concrete historical ideal of a new Christendom that I shall have to discuss.

What do I mean by “concrete historical ideal”? It is a prospective image signifying the particular type, the specific type of civilization to which a certain historical age tends.’ 1See on this question J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 120-131. 127

128 When

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a Thomas More or a Fénelon, a Saint-Simon or a

Fourrier construct a utopia, they construct an ens rationis (a “being of reason’), isolated from existence at any particular time and from any particular historical climate, and expressing an absolute maximum of social and political perfection; and this construct has an architecture whose imaginary detail is

pushed as far as possible, since what is in question is a fictitious model proposed to the mind in place of reality. On the contrary, what I call a concrete historical ideal is not an ens rationis, but an ideal essence which is realizable—with

more or less difficulty, more or less imperfection, but that is

another matter—and realizable not as something made, but as something on the way to being made, an essence capable of existing and calling for existence in a given historical climate, and as a result corresponding to a relative maximum of social and political perfection, a maximum relative to that

historical climate; and precisely because this essence implies a real relating to concrete existence, it merely presents a frame-

work and a rough draft which may later be determinative of a future reality.

In thus opposing concrete historical ideal and utopia, I still am appreciative of the historical role played by utopias and especially of the importance which the so-called utopian

phase of Socialism has had for its subsequent development. I feel, nevertheless, that the notion of concrete historical ideal

and a just use of the notion would enable a Christian philosophy of culture to prepare future temporal realizations by

exempting it from the need to pass through a utopian phase or to have recourse to any utopia.

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Historical Ideal and Liberty Marx envelops in a single criticism the notion of ideal and hat of utopia; he is unable to distinguish between them; this is a consequence of his “turned over” Hegelianism.

Like every man, especially like every great man of action, Marx believed practically in free will, i.e., in that mastery of

the will over its own motives by which it dominates interiorly the whole conditioning of its acts; speculatively, his philosophy

forbade him this “spiritualist’”” and “Christian” belief, and reduced the freedom of man to the spontaneity of a vital energy which, by becoming conscious of the movement of history, was made into a most efficacious and most profound

force in history. But if the revolutionary thinker is thus like a prophet and titan of history, it is insofar as he reveals history to itself, discovers the preordained direction of its movement, and guides in this preordained direction the effort of human wills; it is there that the whole issue lies, and not in the ques-

tion of knowing whether Marx was a partisan of fatalism or of mechanistic determinism, a question to which it is evident that one must give a negative answer.

Man, in Marx’s eyes, is not a passive product of the milieu; he is active, he acts on the milieu in order to transform it, but

‘in the direction fixed by the economic and social evolution.” That is the important point here. This assertion is very true, and it is tantamount to the idea often expressed here of the succession of “historical skies’’ if

it signifies that history has a direction—determined with regard to certain fundamental characteristics by the immense dynamic mass of the past pushing it forward, but yet undetermined with regard to specific orientations which actualize 2Cf. A. Cornu, of. cit., p. 392.

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themselves in it in proportion as the present flows on, and which translate the attraction exercised on it by such-and-such forms of the concrete future, according as the physical field of the thought of man and of his desires makes of them more and more efficacious hearths. The Marxist formulas give nevertheless a very different meaning, and Marx, because he did

not disengage clearly the notion of the virtual or that of freedom, seems to fail to appreciate the zone of indetermination of which I just spoke.

He saw very strongly, almost tragically, that history fashions man instead of being fashioned by him. But if he had had a just metaphysical idea of human freedom, and had understood that man is endowed with a freedom by means of which, as a

person, he can, with more or less difficulty, but really, triumph over the necessity in his heart—Marx would have understood

that man, without being able to bend history arbitrarily according to his desire or fancy, can cause new currents to surge

up in history, currents which will struggle and compound with pre-existent currents, forces, and conditions so as to bring to

final determination the direction of history, which is not fixed in advance by evolution: it depends on an enormous mass of accumulated necessities and inevitabilities, but in which the interventions of freedom can take effect; it is fixed in advance

only to the degree (very great, it is true) to which man renounces his freedom. If, in fact, human freedom plays so small a part in the history of the world, it is because man collectively considered lives little of the properly human life of reason and freedom. It is not surprising, in view of this fact, that he should be “in

submission to the stars’ in a very large measure. He can, nevertheless, escape from them. And if we consider things from a sufficiently long perspective of centuries, it seems that

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one of the deepest trends of human history is precisely to escape more and more from fate. While in the midst of the

falls and disasters brought on periodically by the growing extension of the field of consciousness and of reason (too weak

not to trouble at first that which they try to regulate), normal progress is pursued through which human nature manifests and realizes itself, history shakes off the yoke of inevitabilities and in the same instant feels this yoke weigh all the more cruelly on it, and seems to be harshly subjected to it; it advances nevertheless mysteriously toward deliverance. Deliverance from fate, yes! But this will be real only in the degree to which the life of reason grows truly and effectively, and insofar, therefore, as grace and the influx of creative Freedom will

nourish it secretly. ‘The terrible mistake of Marx is to have thought that in order to escape from fate it was necessary to

escape from God. At the expense of the real and thwarted freedom which I have just tried to characterize, he seeks an illusory freedom infinitely more ambitious; since, for him, the human will is indeed the unique spirit of history, of a history which no transcendent God governs from on high; and when the human will,

will have left its state of “alienation,” the whole of history will go wherever that will pleases; it will be the God of history; it

will make history as an absolute sovereign. Marxism only rejects the notion of ideal at the price of a contradiction (and, in fact, its propaganda does without either the notion or the term, “Communist ideal”). It claims expressly to be a philosophy of action, of action that will transform the world: and how can man act upon the world without

proposing to himself a goal which is not fixed solely by economic and social evolution, but also by his own choice, and by his own loves? A goal in which is inscribed not only the

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of the real, but also his own

creative freedom

directing the latter? Such a goal is precisely a concrete historical ideal. The notion of ideal soundly understood has no idealist savor, no more than the notion of reason has a rationalist savor, or that of matter a materialist savor. The notion of

concrete historical ideal corresponds to a realist philosophy, which understands that the human mind presupposes things and works on things, but knows them only by laying hold of them in order to transfer them into its own immaterial life

and activity, and that it transcends them in order to disengage from them, either intelligible natures that are objects of speculative knowledge, or intelligible themes that are practical and directive of action, to which category belongs what I call a concrete historical ideal.

The Notion of Christendom Furthermore, it is the historical ideal of a new Christendom

that I wish to discuss in this chapter. Let us recall that this word “Christendom” (as I understand it) designates a certain temporal common regime whose structures bear, in highly

varying degrees and in highly varying ways, the imprint of the Christian conception of life. There is but one integral religious truth; there is but one Catholic Church; there can be Christian civilizations, diverse Christendoms.

In speaking of a new Christendom, I am therefore speaking of a temporal regime or of an age of civilization whose

animating form would be Christian and which would correspond to the historical climate of the epoch into which we are entering.

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Tet HE TEMPORAL,.GITY ABSTRACTLY CONSIDERED

The

Communal and Personalist Aspects

Let us say at once—this is, so to speak, an indispensable preface—what general idea, at a sufficiently elevated and sufficiently abstract doctrinal level, it is necessary, in my opinion, to form of such a temporal order, considered in its typical features, under whatever historical climate it may be.

The conception of the regime of civilization or of the temporal order which seems to me to be founded in reason

has three typical characteristics: first of all, it is communal; I mean by this that, for it, the proper and specifying end of

the city and of civilization is a common good which is different from the simple sum of the individual goods and superior to the interests of the individual insofar as the latter is part of the social whole. This common good is essentially the

right earthly life of the assembled multitude, of a whole composed of human persons: this is to say that it is at once material and moral. But moreover, and for this very reason, this temporal com-

mon good is not the ultimate end. It is ordered to something better: the intemporal good of the person, the conquest of his perfection and of his spiritual freedom.

This is why the just conception of the temporal regime has a second characteristic: it is personalist. 1 mean by this that it is essential to the temporal common good to respect and serve the supratemporal ends of the human person. In other words, the temporal common good is an inter-

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mediate or infravalent end: it has its own proper specification, by which it is distinguished from the final end and the eternal interests of the human person; but in its very specification is enveloped its subordination to this end and to these interests, from which it receives its main measures. It has its own con-

sistency and its own goodness, but precisely on condition that it recognize this subordination and that it not make of itself the absolute good.

The absolute center of fixity to which it refers is not within it, but outside it; it is therefore essential to it to undergo the attraction of a higher order of life, which it prepares from a greater or less distance according to the diverse types of political society, and to carry within it the beginnings of that which surpasses it. The end of political society is not to lead the human person

to his spiritual perfection and to his full freedom of autonomy,* that is to say, to sanctity, to a state of freedom which

is properly divine because it is the very life of God living then in man. Nevertheless, political society is essentially destined, by reason of the earthly end itself which specifies it, to the development of those environmental conditions which will so raise men in general to a level of material, intellectual,

and moral life in accord with the good and peace of the whole, that each person will be positively aided in the pro-

gressive conquest of his full life as a person and of his spiritual freedom. I would like to recall here two texts of St. Thomas which,

in their very contrast and in their complementarity, seem to 3 More precisely still one may say that the “good of civil life” is an ultimate end in a given order (finis ultimus secundum quid), relative itself and subordinated (and, by this title, intermediate or infravalent) to the absolute ultimate end (finis ultimus simpliciter). Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, De Virt. card., a. 4, ad 3; Sum theol., I-II, 65, 2; and also J. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, op. cit.,

PP- 245, 299-304, 346-356.

* Cf. J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., Ch. I.

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me to contain the whole political problem: the first one being directed against individualism and against every extremist personalism, the other one against every totalitarian® conception of the State.

Every individual person, St. Thomas tells us, each human person himself is in regard to the community as the part is in regard to the whole, and is thereby subordinate to the whole: quaelibet persona singularis comparatur ad totam communitatem sicut pars ad totum.® It is so because man is not a pure person, a divine person;

he is even at the lowest rung of personality as of intellectuality. Man is not only a person, i.e., spiritually subsistent, he

is also individual, an individuated fragment of a species. And this is why he is a member of society as a part of it, and has need of the constraints of social life in order to be led to his very life as person and in order to be sustained in this life. But here is what immediately balances things and indispen-

sably completes the first text: man, St. Thomas also says, has in him a life and goods which surpass the ordination to political society; homo non ordinatur ad communitatem politicam secundum se totum et secundum omnia sua." And why? Because he is a person.

The human person as a member of society is a part of the latter as of a whole that is greater, but not by reason of himself as a whole and by reason of all that is in him! The core 5 We may call “totalitarian” every conception in which the political community—whether it be the State in the strict sense of the word or the organized collectivity—claims

for itself the entire man,

either in order to

form him or in order to be the end of all his activities or in order to constitute

the essence of his personality and of his dignity. Thus, according to M. Musso-

lini, the State is “the true reality of the individual’; the Fascist State is “the highest and most potent form of personality”; “nothing human or spiritual, insofar as it has any value, exists outside the State”; “its principle, the directing inspiration of human personality joined in one society, penetrates into the soul .. .: soul in the soul” (B. Mussolini, La dottrina del Fascismo). 6 Sum. theol., II-II, 64, 2. Ibid., [-11, 21, 4, ad 3.

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of his life as a person draws him beyond the temporal city, of which this life has nevertheless need. Thus appears the antimony which creates the state of tension proper to the temporal life of the human being: there is

a common work to be accomplished by the social whole as such, by that whole of which human persons are parts; and thus these persons are subordinate to this common work. And nevertheless what is most profound in the person, his eternal vocation, together with the goods linked with this vocation, is superior to this common work and gives direction to it. I shall return later to this paradox, which I only wished to indicate in passing, before noting the third typical characteristic of my conception of the temporal regime.

The Peregrinal Aspect The orientation which draws the earthly city beyond itself and removes from it the character of ultimate end, which makes of it a moment, the earthly moment, in our destiny, but not the term, must indeed be stressed as another essential

characteristic: this city is a society not of men installed in definitive dwellings, but of men en route. This is what can be called a “peregrinal’”’ conception of the city. The paradoxical necessity of a being lured by nothingness, to progress to the

superhuman, causes man to have no static equilibrium, but only an equilibrium of tension and movement. It is also the reason why political life, which should tend to raise as high as possible, relative to given conditions, the level of existence of the multitude, must also tend to a certain heroism and

must ask much of man in order to give him much. It follows that the condition of life of members in the temporal city should not be confounded with either an earthly beatitude or

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with a felicity of ease and repose. But it certainly does not follow that temporal civilization is nothing more than a mere means to eternal life and has not in itself the dignity of an

end (infravalent), or, on the pretext that the present life is a vale of tears, that the Christian should resign himself to injustice or to the servile condition and misery of his brothers. The Christian is in fact never resigned. His conception of

the body politic has within it the aim to adjust the vale of tears so as to secure for the assembled multitude a relative though real earthly happiness, a good and livable structure of

existence for the whole, a state of justice, of friendship, and of prosperity making possible for each person the fulfillment of his destiny. He asks that the earthly city be ordered so as effectively to recognize the nght of its members to existence, to work, and to the growth of their life as persons. And his condemnation of modern civilization is really more serious

and better based than is the Socialist or Communist condemnation, because it is not only the earthly happiness of the community, it is also the life of the soul, the spiritual destiny of the person that is menaced by this civilization.

Analogous Nature of This Conception This conception of the earthly city was that of mediaeval Christendom. But mediaeval Christendom was only one of

its possible realizations. In other words, it is not in a univocal manner that such a

conception can be realized in the different epochs of the world’s history, but in an analogous manner. Here we see the primary importance of the idea of analogy for a sane philosophy of culture. It is from this principle of analogy, which dominates the whole of Thomistic metaphysics and according

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to which the highest ideas are realized in existence in a manner essentially diverse, while keeping intact their proper formality, that it is important for us to draw inspiration here. St. Thomas and Aristotle made use of this principle in their political philosophy, and in the most profound manner, apropos the diverse political regimes and the specifically different types of common good which correspond to each of them. “The diversity of cities,” St. Thomas writes in his Commentary on the Politics,’ “stems from the diversity of ends, or from different ways of tending to a same end. From the fact that they choose different ends or different ways of proceeding to a same end, men create varying forms of common life and in consequence diverse cities, diversas vitas faciunt, et per consequens diversas respublicas.” It is a similar analogical diversity that it seems to me valuable to bring to light with regard, no longer to political re-

gimes, but to types of culture or of Christian civilization. The philosophy of culture must, in my opinion, avoid two opposed errors—one which brings all things together as if univocal, and the other which separates all things as if equivo-

cal. A philosophy of equivocity will imagine that with a change in time historical conditions become so different that they depend on supreme principles which are themselves heterogeneous: as though truth and right, the supreme rules of human action, were mutable. A philosophy of univocity

would lead us to believe that these supreme rules and principles always apply in the same way, and that in particular the way in which Christian principles are proportioned to the con-

ditions of each age and are realized in time should not vary at all.

The true solution is found in the philosophy of analogy. The principles do not change, nor the supreme practical rules of human life. But they are applied in ways essentially diverse, 8 Bk. VII, lect. 6; cf. Sum. theol., IT-II, 61, 2.

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ways answering to the same concept only according to a

similitude of proportion. And this supposes that one has not merely an empirical and, we might say, a blind notion, but a truly rational and philosophical notion of the diverse phases of history. A simple empirical ascertainment of factual circumstances could give rise only to a certain opportunism in

the application of principles, and leave us poles apart from wisdom. A historical climate or sky is not determined in this way. It can be done only by making rational judgments of

values, and discerning the form and significance of the intelligible constellations dominating the diverse phases of human history.

Statement of the Problem: Mediaeval Christendom and a New Christendom

Hence the particular problem which I wish to treat now and which can be formulated in the following way: Should a new Christendom, in the conditions of the historic age we are

entering, while incarnating the same principles (analogical), be conceived according to a type essentially (specifically) dis-

tinct from that of the mediaeval world? To this question I reply in the affirmative. I think that a new age of the world will allow the principles of any vitally Christian civilization to be realized in terms of a new concrete analogue. In fact, not only do I recognize the radical irreversibility of historical movement, as against pagan conceptions of eternal recurrence, but I further believe that this movement

is the

stage of a human and divine drama of which visible events are only signs; I believe that humanity, borne on by this irresistible movement, passes underneath various historical constellations, typically different constellations that create

for the principles of culture specifically different conditions of

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realization; and I believe that the moral physiognomy of these historical constellations is far more profoundly different than is ordinarily believed. For what reasons in general is this so? First, in virtue of a law dominating the temporal as such,

and concerned, if it may be so expressed, with the junction of

Man and Time. This law is that a fully lived experience cannot be begun again. By the simple fact that man has lived, and lived to its depths, a certain form of life, has experienced to their depths the good and evil which the pursuit of a certain historic ideal has brought to pass in his flesh, those things are ended; it is impossible to return to them, it is a law of the temporal as such, of history. Only things of the suprahistorical and supratemporal order, the things of eternal life, escape this law. The Church does not die, but civilizations do.

“Suffering passes,” Léon Bloy used to say, “to have suffered does not pass.” All the past which man has suffered remains;

it has its place, but it has it as something past, already lived, defunct: it is not possible for man to live it again, to suffer it again. Do we not say, in the grand manner, “He has lived,” meaning “He is dead’? So it is with mediaeval civilization, it has borne its fruit.

Second, it is impossible—it would be contrary to the mental make-up of humanity, since every great experience, even one accomplished in error, is orientated by the attraction of a

certain good, however badly this is sought, and consequently unearths new areas and new riches to be exploited—it is impossible to conceive that the sufferings and experiences of the modern world have been useless. This world, I have said, has

sought the rehabilitation of the creature; and if it has sought it by wrong roads, still we ought to recognize and to save the

truth which was there hidden and captive. Finally, if it is true, and a Christian cannot fail to think it

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true, that God governs history, that, whatever the obstacles,

He pursues in history certain designs and that thus in time and through time a divine work and divine preparations are achieved, it would be to go against God himself and to wrestle with the supreme government of history to claim to immobilize in a past form, in a univocal form, the ideal of a

culture worthy to be the end of our action.

Two Preliminary Remarks I shall attempt to characterize at the outset the historical ideal of mediaeval Christendom, and then, in relation to the

points of comparison thus determined, try to characterize what I have called the prospective image of a new Christen-

dom. Regarding this prospective image or this historical ideal of a new Christendom, I make two preliminary remarks. The first is that it goes without saying—apart from the more specific indications which I will give in the final chapter —that it refers to a concrete, particular future, to the future

of our time, but it does not greatly matter whether this future be at hand or far off. In contradistinction to the ideals of immediate application invoked by the practitioner of politics

or revolution, it is a universe of possibilities seen by the philosopher on the level of a (practical) knowledge still speculative in its mode. And moreover, being given the partticular conditions in which the problem presents itself today,

being given that in the whole anthropocentric humanist period from which we are emerging, the style of civilization

has been, finally, a tragic style, in which the new truths and new values that history was engendering were congenitally

vitiated by the false metaphysics itself, by the instinct of

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anarchic dissociation which stimulated the pursuit of them, it appears from the outset that in trying to trace today the prospective image of a new Christendom, it is necessary for

us to work to save these values and these truths which have been at once acquired and compromised by the modern age, at the very moment when the errors which have been their

parasites have brought them into peril. From this point of view, the immediate future, if it touches our hearts more

closely, appears as less interesting for our philosophical investigation—given over as it is in too large a degree to the

inevitable consequences of a choice which has already been made, and of the antimonies of a dialectic long ago started on

its course. On the contrary, it is the distant future which interests me, because the margin of duration that separates us from it is vast enough to permit the necessary processes of

assimilation and of redistribution, and to procure for human freedom the delays it needs when it endeavors to imprint

new directions on the heavy mass of social life. My second remark is that, viewing things, not with Marxist Hegelianism or with historical materialism—those who criti-

cize these often accept their way of posing the problem—but with a Christian philosophy of culture, I shall envisage from another angle than do most socialist or antisocialist theorists

the same socio-temporal matter. The very posing of the questions, the problematic itself, will consequently be different. However great (and I in no way want to diminish it) may be the part played by economics in history, it is not

principally in economics, it is also in more human and more profound cultural aspects, and above all in the implications of the spiritual and of the temporal in culture, that I shall seek my objective light. Thus the perspective from which I view things is irreducible to any other and is typically distinct from the perspective of the majority of Marxist or anti-Marxist controversies,

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which, on the one hand, put economics first (when they do not have it occupy the whole scene) and, on the other hand, however great may be in Marx the part of eschatology, in reality look to an immediate future, to the zone of utilizable

future, if I may so put it, to immediate tactical ends: for Marxist ideology indeed, the essential is doubtless what will come

later (after the dictatorship of the proletariat, after

the necessary and transitory phase of State socialism, after humanity’s leap to freedom and its control over its history),

but of this essential we are never told anything; and one cannot tell us anything about it, for to do so would be to fall into

the ideal.

Ill. THE HISTORICAL IDEAL A NEW CHRISTENDOM

OF

The Idea of the Holy Empire or the Christian Sacral Conception of the Temporal In a very general way, one can say that the historical ideal

of the Middle Ages was controlled by two dominants: on the one hand, the idea or myth (in the sense given this word by

Georges Sorel) of fortitude in the service of God; on the

other, this concrete fact that temporal civilization itself was

in some manner a function of the sacred, and imperiously de-

manded unity of religion.

To sum up in a word, let us say that the historical ideal of the Middle Ages could be expressed in the idea of the Holy Empire. I do not refer here to the Holy Empire as historical fact; strictly speaking, we may say that this fact never truly existed. The idea of the Sacrum Imperium was preceded by an

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event: the empire of Charlemagne, the aims of which, it seems, were not exempt from Caesaro-papism; and the idea, arising after this event, was capable of only precarious, partial, and contradictory realizations. It was hindered and thwarted, on the one hand, by the actual opposition between Pope and emperor, “those two halves of God,” as Victor Hugo said,

and on the other by the opposition between the Empire and the French monarchy, which never did admit that it was dependent in temporalities on a higher authority.

Nor do I speak of the Holy Empire as a theocratic utopia (this question has been examined in the preceding chapter).

I speak of the Holy Empire as a concrete historic ideal or historic myth, that is to say as the lyrical image which orientated and upheld a civilization. Taken in this sense, it must be said that the Middle Ages lived on the ideal of the Holy

Empire (and died of it). If we understand this myth in a sufficiently broad manner, in all its representative and sym-

bolic value, it dominates ideally all mediaeval temporal forms and even the conflicts, the contradictory realizations which kept the Sacrum Imperium from truly existing as a fact.

It is by this title of concrete historic ideal that the Holy Empire still impregnates our imaginations, and on this point we need to submit our more or less unconscious images to a drastic revision. In countries of Latin culture, this ideal exer-

cises a secret influence (under various cultural aspects, for example those of the conflicts between clericalism and anticlericalism) on the conceptions which certain Catholics, and perhaps still more their opponents, have of a Christian restora-

tion. In countries of Germanic culture, the image of the Holy Empire survives in its properly imperial form. In an interesting study, a Benedictine theologian, Father Hermann

Keller

of Beuron, calls the Sacrum Imperium the secular dream of

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the German nation and points out that “the political distress of these last years in Germany has revived the old nostalgia for the Holy Empire of the German nation.” Father Keller is moreover himself a determined adversary of the theological theories to which this old dream has given rise, and which seek in the Holy Empire the unity of the political city and the Church. He condemns these theories, and on the whole

would even sympathize, it seems, with positions almost Barthian. I have already given, in the preceding chapter, some indications on the state of the question in contemporary German thought. It should be added that at this date (1936) the extreme partisans of racism in Germany, those who wish to return to a national and racial (Nordic) religion anterior

to Christianity, harbor for the Holy Empire the same aversion as for Christianity itself. But on the other hand, nevertheless,

it is indeed by the notion of the Holy Empire, materialized

and become the privilege of a naturally chosen people, that the political ideal of Germanic racism has a chance of penetrating today other areas of the German

population, areas

which, on the contrary, have remained attached to Christian culture. Just before writing these pages I received a copy of a magazine published by a group of young German Catholics, dis-

ciples of Carl Schmitt and partisans of the new regime, the Kreuzfeuer: it contained a study of one of my books, and the

only criticism made was my having said that the ideal of the Holy Empire is an out-of-date ideal which it is important to expel from our imaginations

(not, certainly, because it was

bad in itself—quite the contrary! but because it is a thing finished). “Is it because he is a Frenchman that Maritain speaks in this way,” asked these young people, “or is it for

some other reason?” If I speak in this way, it is because I know the dangers of a

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univocal conception of the Christian temporal order, which would tie the latter to dead forms instead of assuring the living tradition of the work of the past.

Tendency to a Maximal Organic Unity This digression had no other aim than to bring home to

the reader that the problem of the Holy Empire has a living significance for our time. Let us return now to our theme, to the historical ideal of the Middle Ages.

The concrete historical ideal of the Middle Ages, the myth or symbol of the Holy Empire, corresponds to what may be called a Christian sacral conception of the temporal. Let us try to disengage the typical features of this conception, features organically bound to each other. In my view, five points above all are characteristic and typical of it.

I will note in the first place the tendency to an organic unity qualitatively maximal. This unity does not exclude either diversity or pluralism, since without them it would not be organic; and its demand is to center the unity of the temporal city as high as possible in the life of the person, in

other words to found it on spiritual unity. This movement toward unity is evident at the heart of each of the political unities which composed Christendom. A typical instance of it is the work accomplished by the French monarchy and people, or by the people and kings of Castile.

And when this impulse toward national unity ceased to be kept balanced by the more spiritual impulse, of a religious origin, toward the unity of Chnstendom, when at the decline

of the Middle Ages it swept everything before it, then it passed into absolutism and into a type of unity more me-

chanical than organic, in which the political really had primacy over the spiritual.

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Again, is anything more evidently characteristic of the Middle Ages than the effort toward this organic unity in the order of civilization itself and the community of Christian

peoples? The effort was to unify the world in temporal matters under the emperor as in spiritual matters the Church is one under the Pope. Without question this historic ideal failed in its highest ambitions, mainly due to the pride and cupidity of princes. Nevertheless, in as precarious a fashion as you wish, there was a Christendom then, a Christian temporal community in which national quarrels were quarrels

within a family and did not shatter the unity of culture. There was a Christian Europe.

Whether it is a question of each Christian nation or of Christendom in its higher unity, the temporal unity aimed at by the Middle Ages was a maximal unity, a unity of the most exacting and the most completely monarchical sort. ‘The center of its formation and consistency was set very high in the life of the person, above the temporal, in that spiritual

order itself to which the temporal order and the temporal common good are subordinated; its source was thus in men’s hearts, and the unity of national or imperial political struc-

tures only manifested this primordial unity. But this temporal unity of Christian Europe had not merely religious unity as its source. It included (and this was indispensable from the moment that it was a question of a maximal temporal unity) a power-

ful unity—a unity that was quite general, and compatible with extremely sharp divisions and particular rivalries—of a certain common basis of thought and of doctrinal principles

(in the diversity of philosophical schools human intelligence had a common tongue). It included a really remarkable and tremendously vigorous effort aiming at—it was not reached—

a high and perfect unity of the intellectual structure and the political structure. Such was the grand and sublime, too grand

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and sublime, conception of the Popes at the most vigorous time of the Middle Ages. In order to form a Christian world,

a Christian Europe according to a type of perfect unity, in order to form, in other words, that figurative but so powerful

and energetic refraction of God’s kingdom in the socio-temporal realm of which I have already spoken, the Popes knew it was necessary to have, and they wanted, a high doctrinal,

theological and philosophical, unity, a unity of wisdom of minds under the light of faith. From this point of view the center of Christendom, a supranational scientific center, was the University of Paris.

They also knew that it was necessary to have, and they wanted, a high degree of political unity among the different peoples, an imperial unity over and above the various king-

doms, as the unity of wisdom is over and above the various sorts of sciences. The supranational political center of Christendom was the Roman Germanic emperor.

Effective Predominance of the Ministerial

Role of the Temporal So high a unity was conceivable only because it was a unity

of sacral type. To say that the center of its formation was very high in the human person is to say that the chief thing in the temporal order was its subordination to the spiritual order. ‘This brings us to the second typical trait of the mediaeval historical ideal, namely, the predominance of the minis-

terial role of the temporal in relation to the spiritual. The Scholastics, as is well known, distinguish between the

infravalent end—e.g., the professional activity of the philosopher or the artisan, which has a proper value as end though

it is subordinated to a higher end such as moral rectitude of life—and the means, which, as such, is purely ad finem, and

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is specified by the end, as reasoning is for the sake of knowledge. Again, they distinguish in the line of efficient causality between the secondary principal cause—for example, the vegetative energies of the plant—which, though inferior to a higher cause such as solar energy, nevertheless produces an effect proportioned to its specific degree of being; and the instrumental cause—such as the brush in the hands of the artist— which, exercising its proper causality only so far as a higher agent makes use of it for this agent’s own end, produces an effect higher than its specific degree of being. Granting these notions, one must remark that in mediaeval

civilization the things that are Caesar’s, though clearly distinguished from the things that are God’s, had in great measure

a ministerial function in regard to them. To that extent, they were instrumental causes in regard to the sacred. Their own

end had the rank of means, a simple means in regard to eternal life. Need I give examples? Need I recall the notion and role of

the secular arm, or the name “extcrior bishop” often given to kings, or cite typical occurrences such as the Crusades? There is no question of theocratic order here; the proper finalities of the temporal were quite clearly recognized, as also the proper domain of civil socicty. But, accidental as it may have remained in itself and as judged relatively to the political

order, the observed ministerial function of the political in relation to the spiritual order was often exercised in a normal and quite typical way.

The Use of Temporal Means for Spiritual Ends The third typical mark of the mediaeval historical ideal,

correlative to this ministerial function of political life, is the

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use made of means proper to the temporal and political order (visible and external means in which social constraint takes a big part, constraint of opinion, coercion, etc.), the use of the

institutional set-up of the State, for the spiritual good of men and for the spiritual unity of the social body itself—for that spiritual unity by reason of which the heretic was not only a heretic, but indeed a man who attacked the socio-temporal community at its living sources. I have no mind to condemn this regime in principle. In a

sense, an earthly city capable of the death sentence for the crime of heresy showed a greater care for the good of souls and a higher idea of the nobility of the human community,

thus centered on truth, than a city which only knows how to mete out punishment for crimes against the body. Nevertheless, it was precisely here that human nature was inevitably to introduce the worst abuses, and these became more and more

intolerable (in fact, the situation was monstrous) when after the ruin of mediaeval Christendom the State, ceasing to act

as instrument of a legitimate spiritual authority superior to it, arrogated to itself and in its own name the mnght to act in

matters spiritual. The absolutism of a Henry VIII and of a Philip II, Gallicanism, Josephism, the enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century, and Jacobinism form in this regard

a highly significant series which is continued by the totalitarian States of our day.

Diversity of “Social Races” The fourth trait of the mediaeval historical ideal I find in

the fact that a certain disparity as of essence between leader and led, I mean a certain essential disparity of hereditary social

categories, or to use the amplifications of meaning of which

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the word “race” is susceptible, a diversity of social races, was

then recognized at the base of the hierarchy of social functions and the relations of authority, whether it was a question of political authority in the body politic or of other kinds of authority which occur in the social and economic life of the

country. One can say that in the Middle Ages temporal authority was primarily conceived according to the type of paternal

authority found in the conceptions, themselves sacral, of the family—conceptions of which we have an example in the Roman notion of the paterfamilias, a notion which Christian faith was able to sublimate by allying it with the notion of God’s universal fatherhood. I used the phrase “disparity as of essence,” though father and children are evidently of the same kind and of the same trace! Yet the child as such is in a position of natural inferiority to his father who seems to him as of a higher essence, and this

situation is further confirmed where, according to the conception held of the family, the father exercises his authority as a

sacred function, invested, we may say, with the personality of God. The consecration of a king makes him father of the people, and confirms in the order of grace his natural authority as head of the body politic by witnessing that he governs the temporal in the name

of the Sovereign King. The whole political

thought of the Middle Ages blazed up with its last splendor in Joan of Arc when Joan put such energy and such obstinacy into her demand for the king’s consecration, and when she

persuaded Charles VII to give up his Christ, then solemnly returned it to him that he should hold it in commendam. received the unction of consecration he his people, but also of God

“holy kingdom” to in Christ’s name, so When the king has is vicar not only of

(in the age of monarchical abso-

lutism he was God’s vicar, but no longer the people’s).

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For the Middle Ages the community of work was an extension of domestic society. Workers were parts and organs of this community, and the guild was like a family at second remove, a family of workers which brought together masters and workers in such a way that, although there undoubtedly were tich and poor, and mountains of misery, yet the existence of a class reduced to the level of tools or of marketable work, of

a proletariat in the strict sense, was then inconceivable. Rigorous hierarchies were at the base of the relations of authority

in this family or quasi-family organization and in the feudal economic system.

Such a heterogeneity in the social structure was, however, compensated for in the Middle Ages (and precisely by reason of this family conception of authority) by an organic suppleness and a familiarity (sometimes brutal, but anything is better than indifference and contempt)

in the relations of

authority, and by a spontaneous and progressive springing up —more lived than conscious, yet real and efficacious—of freedoms and popular immunities. If the sketch I draw were not

designedly reduced to a mere schematic line, it would be apropos to insist here on popular movements economic and social importance.

and on their

Let me add in parenthesis that, like the first and the third traits which I pointed out—the movement toward organic unity, and the use of temporal means for spiritual ends—this

fourth trait gave way in the age immediately following the Middle Ages, I mean under the ancien régime, to its opposite

not by defect, but by excess and by petrification.

If we want a representative example of the mediaeval conception of authority, we find it in the religious order which,

founded before the Middle Ages properly speaking, was one of the most typical agents of its culture and, we may say, is the key to it. In the Benedictine Order and the Benedictine con-

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ception of authority, a father, the abbot, the paterfamilias was invested with an evangelical and sacred character, and the other monks were as children, his children.

The Common Work: To Build Up an Empire for Christ The fifth mark of the mediaeval historical ideal has to do with the common end for which the body politic labors. It is the establishment of a social and juridical structure dedicated

to the service of the Redeemer, by the power of baptized man and a baptized political life.

As I said in the first chapter, with childhood’s absolute ambition

and simple courage,

Christendom

then built an

immense fortress on the summit of which God reigned. Without ignoring the temporal order, its limits, its miseries, and

the conflicts proper to it, without falling into a theocratic

utopia, believing humanity attempted to build up a figurative and symbolic image, as it were, of the kingdom of God.

IV. DISSOLUTION AND PSEUDO-MORPHOSIS OF THE MEDIAEVAL IDEAL IN THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC HUMANIST WORLD

The Regime of the Baroque Age All this came to an end, little by little wore itself out. A

long historical analysis would here be necessary: let me simply recall that the development of national aspirations, the germination of new forms of social and economic life, and their

conflict with feudalism, as well as corresponding changes in

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the order of thought, were to remove from the sacral ideal of

the Christendom of the Middle Ages its hold on existence. The spiritual and intellectual unity began manifestly to break up starting with the Renaissance and the Reformation. The

reign of Alexander VI is no less symptomatic from this point of view than the campaigns and violences of Luther and Calvin. And one witnessed then an absolutist reaction to try

to save this spiritual and intellectual unity, the base of the whole cultural edifice, and together with it political unity,

which had become the principal end of States more and more jealous of their sovereignty.

A single flock, a single pastor on earth: One monarch, one empire and one sword,

sings still Hernando de Acuna, the poet of Charles V. As a matter of fact, the unity of which I am speaking is moreover less and less that of Europe; it shuts itself up more and more within the frontiers of States. In truth, this absolutist effort suffered from a vice, which gives too often an air of majestic hypocrisy to an age characterized in general, we have seen, by dualism, by dissociation. The primacy of the spiritual order continues to be affirmed in

theory, and in practice it is the primacy of the political which affirms itself everywhere, the political tends to become in fact a technique to which everything is good—even virtue or its

appearances, even the law of nations and the respect that one

manifests it by turning it as one can—for the final success of the Prince or of the State. The age of the saint kings is indeed over. Whether it be Catholic or Protestant, the temporal is

dominated in actual fact by the thought of Machiavelli; this

thought appears in the practical order as the most generalized

and most accepted heresy of modern times. The ancient conviction that the unity of religion condi-

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tioned from above the unity of civilization, turning now to the benefit of the political, gives rise to the cynical adage: Cujus regio ejus religio. The treaties of Westphalia will mark the political ruin of the Christendom of former times.

Grave as may have been the evils which I have just recalled, the general character of the absolutist reaction of which I am

speaking has been to employ—not exclusively, doubtless, but in a predominant manner—human means, means of State, political means, in order to try to save the unity at once spir-

itual and political of the social body. This trait appears everywhere in the epoch of the Counter-Reformation. In the face of furious attacks from without, that which subsists of Chris-

tendom defends itself by extremely harsh measures of constraint (which, however, keeping a certain moderation,

and

not being able to make themselves as furious as the attack,

could only delay the moment of collapse). To a powerful unleashing of passionate and willful forces, one responds by a supreme tension of the combative energies of the human will drawn up for the defense of the good. ‘This is understandable,

even in the order of spiritual life and of sanctity. The Company of Jesus is the type-formation of the spiritual militia in that epoch. In a recent book, René Fulop-Miller suggests that at the beginning and at the decline of the modern age there

stand, like two giant figures of comparable psychic tension, St. Ignatius and Lenin.? The one worked for God, the other for the Revolution. Whatever may be the difference of the ends pursued, and consequently of the methods, there is, in the two cases, a very significant exaltation of the heroic will.

No doubt it was necessary that the experience be made of what man is able to accomplish, in the domain itself of the defense of the Christian order, with his human means and his 9R. Fulop-Miller, The Power and Secret of the Jesuits (New York: The Viking Press, 1930).

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human energies placed in the foreground of the action—with his human initiative, applied, in the saints, to the effort to

have charity triumph in themselves and in others, and to make more brilliant, to augment the glory of God—His accidental glory (God’s essential glory is himself and cannot be aug-

mented). To pray as if everything depended on God alone and to act as if everything depended on man alone, is a maxim which is equally very significant. He who would truly act as if everything depended on man alone would employ, it is clear, if he were logical, human means solely, even to uphold the cause of God.

In any case, the regime of the time of the Counter-Reformation, or, to borrow a word from the history of art, the regime

of the “baroque” age, appears in general as singularly more severe—for this reason precisely that human force turns back upon itself in the defense of the divine order—than the

regime of the Middle Ages. It suffices, in order to realize this, to compare from this point of view certain typical figures: Philip II and St. Louis, for example, or St. Pius V and St.

Gregory VII. At the same time a human, too human deformation in the

direction of grandeur and ambition attacks the social struc-

tures which the Middle Ages had held in more humility and poverty. A certain absolutism, which was sometimes fierce and often proud, develops in the family (when we see today the deplorable weakening of family society, perhaps we do not

consider enough that a blind “judgment of history” is at work there against age-old abuses). The monarch is no longer vices gerens multitudinis, and no longer possesses merely the power to rule and to govern; he holds directly from God a right *° Let us recall here the Thomist notion of kingship: “Unlike the Sovereign

Pontiff who is not the vicar of the Church, but who is the vicar of Christ, the

king is vicar of the multitude, vices gerens multitudinis. The constituent power

remains the prerogative of the multitude, the king possesses but a power of

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to submit to himself this multitude which has been given to him, which is his, and to which all constituting power (exercised at least in the beginning) is, as a result, denied. The guild, too rich, will become

oppressive,

despotic,

and

re-

gressive. Nevertheless, so long as the spiritual unity was not completely abolished as first foundation of the social body, and so long as the goods of the spirit remained engaged there in spite of everything, and their transcendent value recognized, there was still an incontestable grandeur and a justification in

the absolutist effort to defend in a too human manner these goods and this unity. And the epoch of which I am speaking remains, especially at the time of the Renaissance, an epoch which is humanly great, rich in beauty, in intelligence, in genuine force, in virtue, and one whose glaring faults must not make us forget the admirably generous spiritual undercurrents. It will produce the flower of classical civilization, and even when it will be—very quickly—decomposed, the eighteenth

century will preserve of it a charm and beauties that embalm with their sweetness a dark and tragic sky. regency

(cf. Sum.

theol., I-I], 90,

3, together with

the commentary

that

Father Billot gives of it in his De ecclesia Christi, q. 12, n. III, Rome, 1921, Pp. 493).” Charles Journet, Preface to the French translation of De Regimine principum, Gouvernement royal (Paris: Libr. du Dauphin, 1931). [In his discourse of October 2, 1945, to the Tribunal of the Rota, His Holiness Pope Pius XII has insisted on this fundamental difference between the Church and the State with regard to the origin of power. In the case of the State, “the people themselves are the original bearer of the civil power which derives from God” and in this sense the civil society is constituted “from below upwards.” On the contrary the establishment of the Church as a society came about “not from below upwards, but from above downwards.” Unlike the political community, the community of the faithful does not possess originally the social power, for the magisterium, the priesthood, the pastoral authority were granted to a college of apostles chosen by Christ. While the civil power rests on “natural right” and finds its foundations in the “social character”

of man,

that of the Church

does not derive from

either, but from a “positive act of God,” “from a manifestation of the will of Christ.”]

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The Vanishing Victory of Liberalism The absolutist barrage which I have tried to characterize did not last very long. After the triumph of rationalism and of liberalism, ie., of

a philosophy of freedom which makes of each abstract individual and of his opinions the source of every right and every truth, spiritual unity has come to an end, and we have been

able to experience the benefits of this dispersion.

One notices then that individualistic liberalism was a purely negative energy: it lived by its opposite and because of it. Once the obstacle has fallen it lacks any support. One notices likewise that a more profound process manifests itself, due to the internal conflicts of the industrial and capitalist regime, and whose order of greatness is that not merely of a displace-

ment of property, but of a “substantial transformation” of social life.

Contemporary Antiliberal Reactions At such a moment it is natural that there occur not only revolutionary explosions threatening the essence of individualist liberal civilization, but also defense-reflexes and antiliberal

reactions of a so to speak biological order. It is the final stage of the process of degradation of which I have just spoken. For these reactions have no other interior source in the life of souls

than physical and moral distress and too intense suffering. And, certainly, they are able to arouse heroism, faith, and a devotion as it were religious, but these are reserves of accumulated spirituality which they thus spend; they are incapable

of creating from them. The political unity of the community

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will then be able to be sought only by means of external adjustment, of political pedagogy or of constraint—by means of State, quite similar, as regards technique, to those which Soviet Communism employs for its own dictatorship. And since it is well understood that an inner accord of minds and wills is necessary for the solidarity of political unity, an intellectual and spiritual pseudo-unity will be sought and imposed by the same means. ‘The whole machinery of ruse and violence of political Machiavellianism thus flows back on the universe itself of conscience, and claims to force this spiritual retreat in order to snatch an assent and a love of which it imperiously

has need. This is a highly characteristic form of violation of invisible sanctuaries. If my remarks are correct, these antiliberal reactions have less chances of showing themselves durable than the efforts a great deal more noble and a great deal more rich in humanity

of the time of the Counter-Reformation and of absolutist politics. Nevertheless, a period quite short with regard to history can appear quite long to those who carry the burden of it. The world will not soon be done with the ultimate phase of

materialistic imperialism, which invokes the dictatorship of the proletariat or reacts against it, and there will be necessary

perhaps upheavals of world dimensions, if it is true that it is a question of liquidating a whole age of civilization. Howsoever this may be, by a remarkable dialectical process,

the Christian absolutism (at least Christian in appearance) which succeeded the mediaeval world has been ejected by an anti-Christian liberalism, and the latter having been evacuated in its turn by the sole fact of its success, the place is ready for

a new absolutism, this time materialistic (with an avowed materialism or with a disguised materialism) and more enemy than ever of Christianity.

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All along the course of this evolution, even and especially

during the liberal and individualist democratic period, something has constantly increased and magnified its claims: the State, the sovereign machine in which political power takes flesh, and which imprints its anonymous countenance on the social community and on the obeying multitude. While awaiting the results of this full ascension of prom-

ises, and without taking account of its own responsibilities, rationalism laments that the youth of the entire world manifests for the moment a lively appetite for collective forms and spiritual standardization, in despair of the unity which is lost.

It sees with astonishment a romantic distress which could find no reason for living succeeded by a joy in command and the fascinations of a bravado which satisfy themselves with the most superficial reasons for living. It realizes too late that only

a faith superior to reason, vivifying the intellectual and effective activities, can assure among men a unity founded not on constraint, but on interior assent, and make of joy in existence,

which is certainly natural, but which nature by itself alone cannot safeguard (pagan wisdom held that the best fortune

were never to have been born), an intelligent delight. It is very remarkable that at the present time Christianity appears in several vital points of Western civilization as alone capable of defending the freedom of the person, and also, in

the degree to which it can radiate on the temporal order, the positive liberties which correspond on the social and political level to that spiritual freedom. Thus we meet once more historical positions apparently the

most logical, and also the ancient combats of Christian faith against the despotism of the powers of this world. Many misunderstandings arose in the time of Gregory XVI

and Pius IX on the theme of the attitude of the Catholic

Church. The latter found itself then in a paradoxical historical

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situation—the necessity to defend against a certain number of fundamental errors which claimed to represent the modern

mind and which were primarily the fruits of naturalism and liberalism, truths which a decaying temporal order, where the

remains of the Christian-absolutist period were in final dissolution, sought to treat as a shield for its defence.

We see clearly today that what the Church was then defending was these truths essential to a Christian conception

of the world and of life, not that perishable and perishing order. Recently men have recalled Charles Péguy’s words: “When distress appears, it is then that Christendom returns.” It is returning, but in what manner, according to what rhythm,

and for a historical work of what dimensions—that is what is so difficult to know.

Whether it is a question of a simple ideal perspective or of partial preparations, or of the rough draft of something much greater and more hidden, the preceding considerations show

in any case what interest there is for us in imagining a type of Christendom specifically distinct from the mediaeval type and directed by another historical ideal than that of the Holy Empire. We come thus to what will be the object of the next chapter, in which I shall endeavor to characterize, in its very contrast with the mediaeval cultural ideal, the ideal of a new

Christendom conceivable today.

V THE HISTORICAL IDEAL OF A NEW CHRISTENDOM

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I, PLURALISM

A Christian Secular Conception of the Temporal I hold that the historical ideal of a new Christendom,

of

a new Christian temporal order, though founded on the same principles, analogically applied, as the order of mediaeval

Christendom, would entail a Christian “lay” conception and not a Christian “sacral” conception of the temporal. Its characteristic features would thus be at once opposed to those of the liberalism and inhumanism of the anthropocentric age and the reverse of the features I have noted in the mediaeval historical ideal of the Sacrum Imperium; they would answer to what we might call an integral or theocentric humanism henceforth disengaged for itself. ‘The supernatural idea and guiding star of this new humanism—not that it claims to bring this star down to earth as if it were something

of this world and could be the basis here below for men’s common life, but that it would be refracted in the earthly and sinful sphere of the socio-temporal and orient this latter from on high—the supernatural idea of this humanism would 162

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no longer be that of God’s sacred empire over all things, but the idea of the holy freedom of the creature whom

grace

unites to God. The freedom of liberalism, in the anthropocentric and materialistic sense which prevailed in the nineteenth century, was only the caricature and sometimes the mockery of this freedom.

Pluralist Structure of the Body Politic The first characteristic of a new Christendom would be that in place of the predominance of the movement toward unity, so typical, it seems to me, of the Middle Ages—after it there came, together with a progressive spiritual dispersion, a more and more mechanical and quantitative idea of political unity—there would be a return to an organic structure

implying a certain pluralism, much more developed than that of the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages this pluralism was manifested chiefly by the multiplicity, sometimes by the overlapping, of juris-

dictions, and by the diversities of customary law. Today, I believe, it is proper to conceive it in another fashion. I have in mind not merely the just degree of administrative and

political autonomy which should belong to regional units, without,

of course,

sacrificing

to region

or to nationality

higher political ideas and values: it is evident that problems

concerning

national

minorities

call of themselves

for a

pluralist solution. I have in mind above all an organic heter-

ogeneity in the very structure of civil society, whether it is a question, for example, of certain economic structures or of certain juridical and institutional structures. As opposed to the various totalitarian conceptions of po1J, Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 71-86.

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litical society in vogue today, the conception here is of a pluralist body politic bringing together in its organic unity a diversity of social groupings and structures, each of them embodying positive liberties. “It is an injustice, a grave evil

and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher or-

ganization to arrogate to itself functions which can be per-

formed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.”? Civil society is made up not only of individuals, but of particular societies formed by them, and a pluralist body politic would allow to these societies the greatest autonomy possible and would diversify its own internal structure in keeping with what is

typically required by their nature.

Economic Pluralism Thus, so it seems to me, in a society consonant with the

concrete historic ideal with which we are dealing, and if one takes into account the conditions created by economic evolu-

tion and modern technology, the status of industrial economy, which the machine inevitably takes beyond the limits of family economy, and the status of agricultural economy, a type much more closely linked to family economy, would be fundamentally different. In an industrial economy the very interests of the person demand some collectivization of ownership. In the “capitalistic” regime, is not an industrial enter-

prise a hive made up, on the one hand, of salaried workers and, on the other, of corporation capital—a society not of

men but of money and paper, of symbols of wealth, a society whose soul is the desire to produce more titles of possession? The more

the enterprise is perfected by machinery,

the

rationalization of labor and ways of mobilizing finance, the 2 Pius XI, encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno.

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stronger becomes this tendency to collectivization. In place of the capitalistic regime, let us suppose a future regime whose spirit and economic structure would be in line with

the personalist and communal conception of social life: the status of the industrial economy would not suppress this collectivization but would organize it on quite other lines

and this time for the benefit of the human person. I shall return to this point in a moment. On the other hand, the status of rural economy—the rural economy is, in any case, more fundamental than industrial economy, and indeed the economy whose good should be the first assured in a normal society—would tend toward a renewal and a vivification of family economy and family owner-

ship, under modern forms and with the use of the facilities of mechanization and cooperation. Cooperative services, no matter how much developed, and a trade-union organization, no matter what new forms it might take, would have to re-

spect this fundamental direction. On this point I shall repeat the saying of a peasant as told by Proudhon: “When I turn my furrows it seems to me that I am a king.” The basic re-

lation between property and the work of the person, and between property and the affective tone of the person—this is evident here with an original simplicity that the industrial

economy, once it has passed under the law of the machine, cannot know.

Juridical Pluralism But it is in the field of the relations between the spiritual and the temporal that the pluralist principle which I believe to be characteristic of a new Christendom would have its

most meaningful application. The first, central and concrete

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fact which imposes itself as characteristic of modern civilizations, as opposed to mediaeval civilization, is that the self-

same civilization, the selfsame temporal regime of men admits into its bosom religious diversity. In mediaeval times, unbelievers were

outside the walls of the Christian body

politic. In the body politic of modern times, believers and unbelievers intermingle. Today, of course,

the totalitarian

body politic seeks anew to impose a single rule of faith on all, in the name,

nevertheless,

of the State and the temporal

power; but this solution is unacceptable to a Christian. A Christian body politic in the conditions of modern times

can only be a Christian body politic within whose walls unbelievers and believers live together and share in the same temporal common good. This is to say that, short of limiting ourselves to simple empirical expedients, we must invoke the pluralist principle of which I just now spoke and apply it to the institutional structure of the body politic. In matters in which civil law is most typically related to a conception of the world and of life, legislation would then grant a different juridical status to the various spiritual families within the same body politic. For a sane philosophy it is evident that the only morality is the true morality. But for the legislator who must aim at the common good and the peace of such and such a given people, is it not necessary to

take into account the existential conditions of this people and the condition of the moral ideal, the more or less defec-

tive, yet a de facto existing ideal, of the various spiritual families or lineages which make up this people, and conse-

quently must he not use the principle of the lesser evil?

There is a way of understanding this pluralist solution which would fall into the error of theological liberalism and of which one would find perhaps an example in Hindu legis-

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lation. One would then think that human opinions of whatever kind have a right to be taught and propagated, and that, as a result, the body politic is bound to recognize as the proper juridical status of each spiritual family the law worked

out by that family in conformity with its own principles. That is not the way I understand this solution. To me this solution means that, in order to avoid greater evils (that is, the ruin of society’s peace and the petrification or the disinte-

gration of consciences), the body politic could and should tolerate within it—to tolerate is not to approve—ways

of

worship more or less removed from the true one: the practices of unbelievers are to be tolerated, St. Thomas taught;*? ways of worship and also ways of conceiving the meaning of life and modes of behavior; in consequence, the solution means

that the various spiritual groups living within the body politic should be granted a particular juridical status. ‘The legislative power of the commonwealth itself in its political wisdom would adapt this juridical status, on the one hand, to the condition of the groups and, on the other hand, to the general

line of legislation leading toward the virtuous life, and to the prescriptions of moral law, to the full realization of which it should endeavor to direct as far as possible this diversity of forms.

Thus it is toward the perfection of natural law and Christian law that the pluriform juridic structure of the body politic would be oriented, even at those stages of it which would be

the most imperfect and the farthest removed from the Christian ethical ideal. The body politic would be directed toward a positive pole that would be integrally Christian, and its different structures would deviate more or less from this pole, according to a measure determined by political wisdom. 3 Sum theol., I-II, 10, 11.

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In this way the body politic would be vitally Christian’ and the non-Christian spiritual families within it would enjoy

a just liberty.

The Political Animation of the City The unity of such a civilization would no longer be a unity of essence or of constitution assured from above by the pro-

fession of the same faith and the same dogmas. Less perfect, and more material than formal yet nevertheless real, it is rather, as I have just suggested, a unity of orientation, which

proceeds from a common aspiration (traversing heterogeneous levels of culture, some of which can perhaps be very deficient) to the form of common life that is best in accord with the supratemporal interests of the person; and the role of agent of unity and formation which the Christian monarch played in regard to the city of yesterday—it is, whatever may be in

other respects the form of the regime, the most evolved politically and the most devoted part of the Christian laity which would play this same role in regard to the new temporal order in question. * The phrase la cité chrétienne must be rightly understood. The true Christian city in the absolute sense of the word is the Church; it is no temporal city whatsoever. Here, however, I am speaking of the temporal city. Like philosophy, the political order has its own proper specification. But like philosophy, it can receive the influences of Christianity and find itself thus in a Christian state; and moreover, just as there is, so I hold, a practical

philosophy, an “ethics adequately considered” which is subalternated to theology, and which for this reason has in its very specification a Christian impregnation (cf. my book Science et Sagesse), so the political order by the fact that it depends intrinsically upon ethics, can have and should have, the while

it remains in its own order, a Christian impregnation in its properly political specification. A Christian city is a temporal city intrinsically vivified and impregnated by Christianity. Is it necessary to add that the “Christian State” which the Prussia of the time of Hegel and of the young Hegelians claimed kinship with, and with which certain contemporary political conceptions could be tempted likewise to claim kinship, in invoking one knows not what “positive” or nationalized Christianity, is but a bitter derision of such a city?

©

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Permit me here a parenthesis. What St. Thomas says of the prince, i.e., that he must be purely and simply bonus vir, in order to direct as he ought the multitude toward the temporal

common good, which is a genuinely human good, it is necessary, it seems, to say also of the cives praeclari, of the enlight-

ened political elements to which belongs the animating and formative role of which I just spoke. But to be a man purely and simply good and virtuous, constituted firmly in a state of

moral rectitude, this presupposes in fact the gifts of grace and of charity,° those “infused virtues” which properly merit, because they come from Christ and are in union with Him, the name of Christian virtues, even when as a consequence of some obstacle for which he is not responsible the subject in whom they exist does not know or fails to recognize the

Christian profession. It follows from this that a city animated and guided by such elements is in reality and to this extent

(and in that wholly relative sense in which this must be understood in the temporal order) under the regime of Christ: the universal principle of Chnist’s royalty, the axiom that without Christ nothing firm or excellent can be built, even in the

political order, applies here in all truth, not in the externally manifested and highly symbolized fashion which was that of mediaeval civilization, nor in the apparent and decorative

fashion which was that of the classical age, but in a way which is real and vital, though less manifestly declared in the structures and the symbols of social life. Another question presents itself apropos of these political elements to which I attribute, to borrow a phrase from the Webbs, the vocation of leadership. How could they effectively

fulfill this role if they were not organized? Each from its own point of view—Communism, Fascism and National Socialism—has already given its answer to such 5 Cf. J. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, op. cit., pp. 241-254.

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a question. After explaining that political unity implies the triple essence of the State, the Movement

and the People,

Herr Carl Schmitt declares that the proper organ of the Movement is the National Socialist Party (der staat = und volktragende Fiihrungsk6rper), and that the connection between the Party and the State consists in a personal union, primarily realized in the man who is at once Fiihrer and Reich Chan-

cellor.® Similarly the Fascist Party was, after the law of December 29, 1929, an “organ of the State” (un organo dello Stato), without being at the same time a part of the State (organo statale) or a part of the constitutional structure; but an organ of the Party, the Fascist Grand Council, was a part of this sort,

and thus assured the connection. Differing from both the Italian and the German conceptions, the Soviet conception is more radical and more significant. ‘The Communist Party occupies no place in the constitutional structure of the Soviet

Republics, and the link between the Party and the State depends neither on the unity of a same supreme ruler,’ nor on a

special apparatus of connection, but solely on the political, intellectual, and moral influence which the Party exercises in every way, and on the resulting penetration of its trusted servants into the machinery of the State: the Communist Party is a sort of atheistic secular order, comparable to an inverted image of the Company of Jesus. Considered in its

worldwide organization (the Communist International) it is international or supranational. And in the countries where

the State is Communist, it claims to assure its ruling power over the State all the more effectively in the degree to which it animates the latter in the manner of a spiritualis auctoritas.® ®Cf. Carl Schmitt, Staat, Bewegung und Volk, die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit (Hamburg, 1933). "Stalin is secretary of the Party; he has only secondary functions in the hierarchy of the structures of the State (1936). ° Cf. S. and B. Webb, Soviet Communism, op. cit., Vol. 1, Ch. 5.

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It is in none of these three ways that I envisage the organization of the animating elements we are considering here.

I think that the idea of an organized political fraternity or a political order is very probably assured important historical destinies. But in a pluralist and personalist body politic it would be realized in a novel way. Not only would the spirit and methods of the political formations in question be entirely different from the methods and the spirit of the Communist Party and of similar parties, but these formations would

be founded on freedom, and they would be multiple—that is the capital point. They would differ nevertheless from the parliamentary “parties” of today by their essential structure and their moral discipline, as by the personal and spiritual

effort which they would demand of their members (and because, on the other hand, in a representative regime soundly conceived, in which

the executive would be rendered

sufh-

ciently independent of the deliberative assemblies, the very possibility of using power to satisfy coalitions of interests and of cupidities would disappear). Finally, the civic fraternities

of which I am speaking would be, in the secular domain, to the State and to its constitutive structure as, in the sacred

domain, the diverse regular Orders are to the Church and to its hierarchic structure: with this difference that in the latter instance it is a case of a “mixed regime” principally monarch-

ical, in which the religious Orders are bound to the Hierarchy (at least to the head of the Hierarchy) by a strict dependence, whereas in the former instance it would be a case of a “mixed regime” principally democratic, in which the political frater-

nities would constitute formations that would be independent of the State and subject only to the general dispositions concerning the right of free association.

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Minimal Unity and Civil Tolerance But let us return to our considerations on the unity of the

pluralist body politic. Such a temporal unity would not be, as was the sacral unity of the Christendom of the Middle Ages, a maximal unity: it would be, on the contrary, a minimal? unity, its center of formation and of organization being situ-

ated in the life of the person, not at the highest level of the supratemporal interests of the person, but at the level of the temporal plane itself. And it is because of this that this temporal or cultural unity does not require of itself the unity of

faith and of religion, and that it can be Christian while grouping non-Christians in its midst.

Supposing therefore that religious division should one day cease, this more perfect differentiation of the temporal would remain as an achieved gain; the distinction between dogmatic

tolerance, which holds the liberty to err to be a good in itself, and civil tolerance, which imposes on the State respect for consciences, would remain inscribed in the structure of the

body politic.

It is quite curious, let us remark in passing, to observe that when after having served as mask or as pretext for the energies of error which set up against Christianity captive truths, a progress in the growth of history was achieved, such as civil tolerance, for example, it is Christianity which

strives to

maintain this progress, which it was claimed had been won against it, while the energies of error, changing suddenly their direction, seek anxiously to destroy this same progress, in which

they had at first gloried. * This unity which I call “minimal” remains a true organic unity, and it is much superior to that of the liberal-individualist city, which is null to tell the truth insofar as organic and exists only as mechanical unity assured by the dominance of the State.

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The Unity of the Pluralist City It is important to insist on the bearing of the pluralist solution of which I am speaking: it is as distant from the liberal conception in favor in the nineteenth century—since it recog-

nizes for the temporal city the necessity of having an ethical and, in short, religious specification*’—as from the mediaeval conception, since this specification admits internal heterogeneities and is only based on a general sense or direction, a common orientation. The pluralist city multiplies liberties; the measure of these is not uniform, and varies according to a

principle of proportionality. This solution brings back, on the other hand, the unity of the temporal community to that which it is essentially and by nature: a simple unity of friendship. In the time of sacral Christendom this unity of the temporal community was superelevated; it participated in some

way in the perfect unity of the mystical body of Christ, and the unity of faith was its source. When it was lost in its organic and vital state, the Europe of the Baroque Age, as I was saying in the preceding chapter, sought to conserve it under an absolutist mode. But let us observe again here that throughout the whole modern period we have witnessed a very significant attempt of philosophy to fulfill the same cultural function as faith did in the Middle Ages; the philosophers, haunted by the memory of mediaeval unity, whether it be Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel or Auguste Comte, have called on reason to furnish temporal civilization with the supratemporal principle of perfect unity which it no

longer found in the faith. Their failure has been resounding. 10 Insofar as the religious element impregnates the political specification itself. Cf. supra, p. 168, n. 4.

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The lesson of this experience seems to me to be clear: nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum. However small, however modest, however tentative

this may be, it will always give rise to strifes and divisions. And this quest of a common denominator for contrasting con-

victions can only be a pathway to intellectual mediocrity and cowardice, weakening minds and betraying the rights of truth. But then it is necessary to renounce seeking in a common profession of faith, whether it is a question of the symbol of the apostles as in the Middle Ages, or of the natural religion

of Leibniz, or of the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, or of the minimum of Kantian morality invoked in France by the first theorists of secularity—it is necessary to renounce

seeking in a common profession of faith the source and the principle of the unity of the social body. Nevertheless the simple unity of friendship of which I have spoken does not suffice to give a form to this social body, that ethical specification without which the body politic has no truly human

common

good; or, rather, in order to exist as

unity of friendship, it presupposes such a form and such a specification.

If this form is Christian it is therefore because the Christian conception will have prevailed, according to the secular and pluralist mode which I have indicated.

But how? Because the bearers of this Christian conception will have had enough spiritual energy, enough force and political prudence to practically exhibit to men capable of comprehension that such a conception is in conformity with sound reason and with the common good; and also—for the men capable of comprehension are few in number—to awaken, and to merit, the confidence

of others, to win the moral

authority of veritable leaders, and to exercise power in a body

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politic which it is permissible to imagine as provided with an organically constituted political structure. I am thinking of a body politic in which, the interests of the social and regional

groups being represented by simply consultative organs, power would be constituted by a legislature directly emanating from the political thought and will of the citizens and of their parties, and by an executive branch which, also issuing from the people but in such a way as to be independent of the parties, would be free of any other preoccupation than that of the common good."* Is there need to add that these considerations, which concern the essence, the nature of a conceivable new Christen-

dom, and which I hold to be founded in reason and logically necessary from this point of view, reveal at the same time the 11 The political conception indicated in these few lines implies in my mind: (1) a personalist democracy (with universal suffrage at the base, and electoral vote and elegibility for women

as well as for men)

in which the citizens do

not only have the right of suffrage, but find themselves engaged in an active manner in the political life of the country; (2) the substitution, for the out-ofdate parliamentary regime, which was suitable for the age of liberal individualism, of a representative regime in which the legislative and the executive would be more clearly distinguished, and in which the two functions of the executive, which are the power of decreeing and the power of commanding (and which correspond to the judicium ultimum and to the imperium, to the existential exercise of authority), would be exercised by governmental organs emanating from the multitude by indirect suffrage, and responsible before the supreme ruling organ elected directly by the people. The representative assemblies would then have the charge of making the laws properly so-called, or of defining the general rules of common life (power which corresponds to the judicium and concerns the structural forms of authority), of preparing from nearby the executive work in close collaboration with the governmental organs, and of controlling the latter (for example by the vote of the budget, the right of proceeding in certain determinate conditions to the invalidation of a decree or of rejecting or overthrowing a minister, the

right of sovereign decision in all cases concerning in a major way the life of the nation...). Finally other assemblies would have a function only consultative, which does

not imply power and concerns the distant preparations of the legislative work and of the executive work (and which corresponds to the consilium). Cf. my book Principes d’une Politique Humaniste, Ch. I (note revised and corrected, 1946).

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difficulties such a conception runs into in order to realize itself in existence, so long as Christians will have to deal not only with a civilization religiously and philosophically divided, but, on

the one

hand,

with

historical

forces

set against

Christianity, and, on the other hand, in the Christian world itself, with univocal prejudices of a very heavy historical weight, and finally with irrational

currents

in the masses,

blindly ruled by the contradictions of a civilization which is no longer according to the measure of man?

Il. THE

AUTONOMY

OF THE

TEMPORAL

The second characteristic feature of the temporal regime which I envisage has to do with what we may call a Christian conception of the secular or lay body politic. This would be an affirmation of the autonomy of the temporal as an intermediate or infravalent end,’ in line with the teachings of

Leo XIII which say that the authority of the State is supreme in its own order. In the preceding chapter I noted the distinc-

tion between the secondary principal cause and the instrumental cause. I also remarked that in mediaeval Christendom

the temporal actually often had the simple role of means, a simple ministerial or instrumental function in relation to the spiritual. In virtue of a process of differentiation normal in itself, though vitiated by the most erroneous ideologies,’* the secular or temporal order has in the course of modern times been 2 Cf. supra, Ch. IV, p. 134, n. 3, and pp. 148-149. *8 This had already begun in the Middle Ages. Cf. Georges de Lagarde, La Naissance de Vesprit laique au déclin du moyen age (I. Bilan du XIIIme siécle; II. Marsile de Padoue), éd. Béatrice, 1934.

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established, as regards the spiritual or sacred order, in such a

relation of autonomy that in fact it excludes instrumentality. In short, it has come of age. And this too is a real historical gain which a new Christendom should preserve. Certainly this does not mean that the pumacy of the spiritual would be ignored. The temporal order

would be subordinate to the spiritual, no longer, of course, as

an instrumental agent, as was so often the case in the Middle Ages, but as a less elevated principal agent; and above all, the earthly common good would no longer be taken as a mere means in relation to eternal life, but as what it essentially is in this regard, namely, as an intermediary or infravalent end. A real and effective subordination—that is the contrast with

modern Gallican and “liberal” conceptions; but a subordination which no longer takes a purely ministerial form—this is the contrast with the mediaeval conception. In this way there is disengaged and of a vitally Christian lay body politic tuted secular body politic. This means the secular and temporal have their

made precise the notion or a Christianly constia body politic in which full role and dignity as

end and as principal agent, though not as ultimate end nor as the most elevated principal agent. This is the only sense in which the Christian can take the words “secular body politic.”

Taken in any other way the words have only a tautological sense, the lay character of the body politic then meaning that the body politic is not the Church; or they have an erroneous sense, the lay character of the body politic then meaning the body politic is either neutral or antireligious, i.e., at the service

of purely material ends or of forces opposed to religion.

On several important points these indications will be further explained and made more precise in certain paragraphs of the following section (see pp. 178-182).

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INTEGRAL

III. THE

HUMANISM

FREEDOM

OF PERSONS

Spiritual and Temporal The third characteristic feature of a conceivable new Chris-

tendom would be, together with this insistence on the autonomy of the temporal order, a conjoined insistence on the

extraterritoriality of the person with regard to temporal and political means. We encounter here the second central fact, a fact of the

ideological order, by which the modern age is opposed to the

Middle Ages. For the idea of strength or fortitude in the service of God is substituted the idea of the conquest or realization of freedom. But of what freedom above all is it a question for a Christian civilization? Not of freedom in the individualist-liberalist conception;

that is, not the individual’s

mere

freedom

of

choice, which is but the beginning or root of freedom; and not of freedom in the imperialist or dictatorial conception, that is, the freedom which would consist in the grandeur and power of the State. Rather, the question primarily regards the freedom of autonomy” of persons, a freedom that is one with their spiritual perfection. Thus, while the center of unification of the temporal and political order is lowered, as we saw, at the same stroke the

dignity and the spiritual freedom of the person emerge still higher above that order. A complete change in perspective On

and

“style” thereby

this expression “freedom of autonomy,” which I use in a sense at

once Aristotelian and Pauline, but in nowise Kantian, cf. my book Du Régime

temporel et de la Liberté.

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occurs in temporal organization. The Christian knows that the State has duties to God and that it should collaborate with the Church. But how this collaboration is achieved can vary typically with historical conditions: formerly it was mainly by way of temporal power itself and legal constraints;

in the future it may chiefly be, even in politico-religious matters themselves, by way of moral influence. St. Albert the Great® and St. Thomas’® explain by the diversity of states or ages of the Church the fact that in the time of the apostles and martyrs it was not proper for the Church to use coercion, but that afterwards it was proper. That in yet another age it is again not proper for her to use coercion is explicable in the

same way. It is necessary that Christ be made known, and to make

Him known is the proper mission of the Church, not of the State. Yet whether it be of a sacral or of a lay and secular

type, a Christian body politic knows that it should aid the Church in the free accomplishment of this mission. In the case of a civilization of a sacral type, the aid in question is of an instrumental order: the secular arm puts to this extent its sword at the disposition of the spiritual. It is normal

then that the coercive force of the State enter into play in order to protect the faith of the community against disintegrating influences; and this is not in the least surprising when

the consciousness of the community is vitally impregnated with the same unanimous certitudes. It may even happen, as was the case in the Middle Ages, that the intervention of the State in these matters moderates and checks the excesses of the spontaneous popular reactions; what is more natural to the crowd than to lynch the heretic? 15 Quodlibet XII (circa 1268), a.19, ad 2 (“Utrum una sit Ecclesia quae fuit in principio Apostolorum et quae modo est’’). 16 Prologue to the Apocalypse; Commentary on St. Luke.

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In the case of a civilization of a lay or secular type, it is by pursuing its own (infravalent) end and in its capacity as (subordinate) principal agent that the Christian temporal city acquits itself of its duty toward the Church. It is by inte-

grating, in line with the pluralist idea described here, Christian activities in the temporal work itself—for example, by giving to Christian teaching its just place in educational life, or by asking religious institutions of mercy to carry a just share of works of social assistance—and in that way itself receiving, as autonomous agent in free accord with an agent

of a higher order, the aid of the Church, that the temporal city will help the latter to carry out its own mission. The mode of activity most proper to the eternal city, namely, spiritual and moral activity,’ then becomes the dominant

mode in the collaboration of the two powers.

The Spirit and the Body Politic An earthly city which, without recognizing a right in heresy itself, assures to the heretic his liberties as a citizen, and even

accords him a juridical status appropriate to his ideas and his habits—not only because it wishes to avoid civil discord, but also because it respects and protects in him human nature and the reserves of spiritual forces which inhabit the universe of souls—favors doubtless less than a city less patient the

spiritual life of persons from the point of view of the object of this life, the level of wisdom and of virtue beneath which

the social body does not tolerate evil or error being thus lowered (although much less so, certainly, than in the neutral city of liberalism): but it favors more the spiritual life of persons from the point of view of the subject, whose privilege “J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., p. 78.

HISTORICAL IDEAL OF NEW

CHRISTENDOM

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181

of extraterritoriality with regard to the socio-terrestrial order— in his quality as a spirit able to be instructed from within by the Author of the universe—is raised to a higher level. One could cite in this respect the statements made by Cardinal Manning to Gladstone some sixty years ago: “If Catholics were in power tomorrow in England not a penal law

would be proposed, not the shadow of a constraint put upon the faith of any man. We would that all men fully believed the truth; but a forced faith is a hypocrisy hateful to God and man... . If the Catholics were tomorrow the ‘Imperial race’ in these kingdoms they would not use political power to molest the divided and hereditary religious state of the people. We would not shut one of their Churches, or Colleges,

or Schools. They would have the same liberties we enjoy as a minority.’’8 Here again the historical ideal which I am striving to characterize finds itself in opposition at once with the mediaeval

ideal and with the liberal ideal. If the liberty of the person emerges more in it beyond the political structure of the city, it is in virtue of the very nature of what I called a moment ago a vitally Christian lay body politic, in nowise in virtue of

a neutralism, of the idea that the body politic must be neutral; and it is in virtue of an authentic sense of liberty, not of any liberalist or anarchist doctrine.

Freedom of Expression It is interesting to note that Marx in his youth began by fighting for freedom of the press, regarded then by the young Hegelians as a social panacea, and to consider the degree of 18 Henry Edward Manning, The Vatican Civil Allegiance (London, 1875), pp. 93-99.

Decrees in Their Bearing on

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liberty the press enjoys today in Marxist Russia. Moreover, the Russian State, like all the other totalitarian States, has

other methods than those of the Prussian kings and their censors, methods good especially for ridiculing governments

and for making martyrs of their adversaries; it has understood that the law is good only if it is strong. The lesson must not be lost, although it is appropriate to apply it in another manner. When Rome, in the time of Gregory XVI and Pius IX, condemned the claim to make freedom of the press and

freedom of expression of thought ends in themselves and unlimited rights, it was only recalling a basic necessity of human government. These freedoms are good and answer to radical needs in human nature: they have to be regulated, as does everything that is not of the order of Deity itself. The dictatorial or totalitarian way of regulating them—by annihilation—seems detestable to me; the pluralist way—by justice and a progressive self-regulation—seems good to me, and is as strong as it is just. Let me suggest that in virtue of an institutional status various groups of publicists and writers,

assembled in an autonomous body, would have a progressive control over the duties of their profession. Then we would

see whether, through the natural severity with which the potter judges the work of the potter, they would not be able to exercise an efhcacious control; it would rather be to protect the individual from his associates that the supreme judicial organs of the State would have to interfere. Even so, the most happy solution is yet another. That the police judge a work of art gives little satisfaction to our sense

for the hierarchy of values, but that another artist judge it and decide its fate scarcely suits this sense any better. All exterior

regulation is useless unless its aim is to develop in the person the sense of his own creative responsibility and the sense of

HISTORICAL IDEAL OF NEW

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183

communion. To feel responsible for one’s brothers does not lessen freedom, though it puts on it a heavier load.

Law and the Pluralist Body Politic The pluralist body politic of which I am speaking, though much less concentrated than the mediaeval body politic, is much more concentrated than the “liberal” one. It is a body

politic with authority. The function of law is to constrain the protervi, the perverse and the hardened, to a behavior of which they are not of themselves capable, and also to educate

men so that in the end they may cease to be under the law— since they themselves will voluntarily and freely do what the law enjoins, a condition reached only by the wise. Law will regain in this pluralist body politic its moral function, its function as pedagogue of freedom, which it has almost totally

lost under liberalism. No doubt those supreme values with reference to which it regulates the scale of its prescriptions and sanctions will no longer be the sacral values to which the common good of the mediaeval city was appendant, and yet

they will still be something sacred: not the sacred material privilege of a class, nor the sacred prestige of a nation, nor the sacred production of a state modeled on the beehive, but something truly and already by nature sacred, the vocation of the human person to a spiritual fulfillment and to the

conquest of true freedom, and the reserves of moral integrity required for all this.

It is again the Thomist doctrine of analogy, in particular of the analogicity of the notion of common good, which, joined here to the Thomist

doctrine of law, furnishes the

justification of the present remarks. Unlike the divine law, which is called immaculate, lex Domini immaculata, because

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HUMANISM

it permits no sin of whatsoever kind, and which is ordered to

a common good which is the divine life itself, human law

cannot, says St. Thomas, forbid and punish every kind of evil; and being ordered to the temporal common

good, it is

natural that it proportion its manner of regulating and of

measuring, of forbidding and of punishing, to the specifically different types according to which the temporal common

good, like the body politic itself and civilization, realizes itself analogically. Diversa enim diversis mensuris mensurantur (Sum. theol., I-II, 96, 2); distinguuntur leges humanae secundum diversa regimina civitatum (Sum. theol., II-II, 61, 2).

The Ownership of Earthly Goods Two other points relating to these considerations on the eminent role of the person in the new Christendom which I am envisaging must here be quickly mentioned: the one concerned with the ownership of material goods, the other with the condition of woman in marriage. As regards the ownership of material goods, St. Thomas,

as we know, teaches that, on the one hand, primarily by reason of the exigencies of human personality considered as elaborating and fashioning matter and submitting it to the forms of reason, the appropriation of goods must be private, since without it the working activity of the person would be hindered; but that, by reason of the primal destination of mate-

rial goods to the human species, and of the need that each

person has of these means in order to direct himself toward his final end, the use of goods individually appropriated must itself serve the common good of all. Quantum ad usum non debet homo habere res exteriores ut proprias, sed ut communes.*® 1° Sum. theol., II-II, 66, 2. On the meaning of this formula, see my Du

Régime temporel et de la Liberté, Appendix I.

HISTORICAL IDEAL OF NEW

CHRISTENDOM

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185

This second aspect was entirely concealed in the epoch of liberal

individualism,

and one

can

think

that the violent

reaction of State socialism which we are witnessing today will recall to men that which they had thus forgotten: the law of common use. The fact remains that in itself this reaction is abnormal,

and in its turn disastrous. To anyone who gives personality the rank and value that it merits, and understands to what

extent in the human species it is precarious and constantly

menaced by the environment, the law of personal appropriation (either in a strictly individual form or in a societal form)

appears no less imperious than that of common use. So that the remedy for the abuses of individualism in the use of prop-

erty must be sought not in the abolition of private property, but on the contrary in the generalization, the popularization of the protections with which it fortifies the person. The point is to give to each human person the real and concrete possibility of acceding (in ways which can moreover vary

greatly, and which do not exclude, when they are necessary, certain collectivizations), to the advantages of the private ownership of earthly goods, the evil being that these advantages should be reserved to a small number of privileged ones.

This manner of stating the problem can also be found in Proudhon, and even—by accident—in Marx; but the Marxist solution is false in principle, because it finally makes the essence of man, alienated by private property, and reintegrated thanks to Communism, consist purely in communion in the

common good characteristic of political life. There are precious indications on this point, in the first Communist writ-

ings of Marx” as in the theses on Feuerbach,” which reveal the metaphysical basis of his Communism, of that social 20 Cf. A. Cornu, op. cit., p. 292. 21 “Historical materialism .. . considers that the true nature

of man

is

constituted by his social activity” (ibid., p. 391; ninth thesis on Feuerbach).

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INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

monism linked to atheism of which it was a question earlier (see Ch. II), and which ignores the highest values of the human person. Marx is fundamentally preoccupied with man and with the human: one might say that the things of the person—of the human person who is individual, who insofar even as individual constitutes a universe—escape his view. Hence the congenital infirmity of his humanism. Hence his strangely monist and immanentist conception of work itself as a kind of common

and absolute substance in which the

essence of man actualizes itself, and which has reference of

itself neither to specifying objects or goods, nor to the creative

activity of the person as such with its own rightful exigencies. Certain ideas of Proudhon could, rather, be recalled here,

without pretending thereby to make any use of Proudhonism. Precisely in order to extend to each individual under an adapted mode the advantages and the guarantees which private property brings to the exercise of personality, it is not a “Statist” or

a Communist

form, it is an associative form

that property, I think, should take in the industrial economic sphere, so that the regime of co-ownership should substitute itself there as much as possible for that of wage-earning, and

that the servitudes imposed by the machine should be compensated for the human person by the participation of the workers’ intelligence in the management and direction of the enterprise. In this way a solution seems possible to the problem—a problem usually so feebly handled by the socialist theories—

of the inducement to work in a collectivized industrial production: for this incentive would then come neither from the application of the methods of parliamentary democracy to that kind of technical city which is the large industrial enterprise, nor from any modality whatsoever of forced labor. Nor would it proceed only from that generosity and joy in work

HISTORICAL

IDEAL OF NEW

CHRISTENDOM

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which presuppose a mystical basis and which the Christian faith can awaken, certainly, as vigorously as the Communist faith, but of which a wounded humanity is not easily capable, and which cover there, but do not suppress there the element of hardship that work likewise involves. It would proceed

also, and this humble human base is indispensable, from the interest itself, transposed under new forms, and not necessarily egoist and grasping, but linked above all to the feeling of operative responsibility—it would proceed also from the inter-

est of proprietorship, or rather coproprictorship, which the working person would have in the good functioning of the

enterprise: which presupposes an organization of this latter in accord with a so-to-speak biological series of interlockings

and superordinations, the individual molecule being directly interested in the life of the cell—of the workshop, for exam-

ple—the cell in the life of the tissue, the tissue in the life of the organ, the organ in the life of the whole. The problem is not to suppress private interest, but to purify it and to ennoble

it; to hold it in social structures ordered to the common good, and also (and this is the capital point) to transform it interiorly by the sense of communion and fraternal friendship.

The “Title of Work” When I speak of the associative form of industrial ownership, it is a question of a society of persons (workmen, technicians, investors), entirely different from the societies of capital of which, in the conditions of the present regime, the notion of co-ownership might make us think; and it is a question of a society of persons in which the co-ownership of

certain material goods (means of production)

(1) would

above all be the guarantee of a possession humanly more

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INTEGRAL

HUMANISM

important, that, if one can so speak, of the “title of work”; (2) would have as its fruit the formation and development of a common patrimony.

According to a very just comment of M. Paul Chanson, capitalist co-ownership, far from confirming the proprietor in his liberty and his activity as person, has instituted a kind of plebs of ownership and of savings; the shareholder of an anonymous society is as such as little a “person” as possible,

for his creative activity consists in clipping coupons. The worker co-ownership of the means of production, if it was understood in a purely material fashion and without concrete reference to the associated persons, would run the risk of ending in a similar illusion, and of bringing to the personality of the worker but a fictitious homage; moreover, the example of the great cooperatives of production is quite significant from this point of view, and it has been remarked that in general cooperative direction is perceptibly more diffi-

cult than employer management. In order for a collective form of ownership to be an efhcacious aid to personality, it is necessary goal a depersonalized possession. What the perspectives in which we are placed, the means of work should serve as the personal possession, for the possession no

that it not have for does this mean? In the co-ownership of material basis for a longer of a thing in

space but of a form of activity in time, for the possession of a “charge” or of a title of work, assuring man that his employment is rightly his, attached to his person by a juridic link, and that his operative activity will be able to progress therein; it should serve to give a title and a social guarantee to the bringing into action of that which is fundamentally and inalienably the property of the worker: his personal forces, his

intelligence, and his arms. That was the profound human

truth which the mediaeval guild had understood and which

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IDEAL OF NEW

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must reappear under new modes, so I maintain with Paul Chanson; it is this truth that La Tour du Pin has rediscovered

with his idea of “ownership of craft.”?? I say “title of work” as one used to say “title of nobility” at the time when an effective duty and function were signified by that expression. Such a possession appeals in us to primordial sentiments which are at the base of natural morality: the concern for work well executed, the sense of the dignity of work; it represents for

him who enjoys it an effective economic armature of the activity and liberty of the person, which ask essentially to not be at the mercy of the moment; it is implied in that participation of the workers’ intellect in the management of the enterprise of which I spoke briefly a moment ago. But I think that it itself presupposes necessarily—in order to have

real and efficacious guarantees, and also and more radically, in order to situate itself in an economy liberated from capitalism, in which alone it can bear all its fruits—the “asso-

ciative” ownership of the means of production, the co-ownership of the enterprise; that is why I have spoken of the

latter first. On the other hand, the conceptions here sketched imply clearly a communal organization of production, without which there would not be possible the accession of the working person to a progressive “qualification.” This organization

should naturally entail, for the workers associated in the enterprise grouped by it, the possession of a common patrimony, which would translate itself concretely by personal payments of various kinds, and which would have for the worker

and for his family a direct personal significance and a direct personal interest.

In the perspectives in which I am placed, this communal 22 Of this extension of the notion of ownership one could seek a justification in the theory of “functional” ownership expounded by Semprun y Gurrea, El Sentido funcional de la propriedad (Madrid, 1933).

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organization must be conceived as establishing itself from below upwards, according to the principles of personalist democracy, with the suffrage and active personal participation of all the interested ones at the base, and as emanating from

them and from their syndicates—the higher organs of the total body of production coordinating with those of the total body of consumption for an “endogenous” regulation of economic life, in harmony with the more universal regulations concerning the common good of men (considered as citizens, and not only as producers or as consumers), and

assured by the higher organs of the total body of political life. While fully recognizing the principle of the primacy of the political over the economical, the community of work in view here is altogether different from the “Statist” corporation of political totalitarianism, which has rendered suspect the very word “corporation”; it is founded on the notion of a moral personality at once autonomous and subordinate, and on that of endogenous development; it does not suppress syndical liberties, it emanates from them; and it presupposes the preliminary liquidation of modern capitalism and of the regime of the primacy of money-profit.

A Regime Consecutive to the Liquidation of Capitalism In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I must insist on

this point that the different considerations proposed here concern in our view a state consecutive to the liquidation of capitalism and have no meaning except with regard to such a state. They presuppose a radical change not only in the material** but also in the moral structure and in the spiritual *8 Not suppression, but passage from private capital to the service of work.

Cf. J. Maritain, Religion et Culture, n. 2.

HISTORICAL IDEAL OF NEW

principles of the economy:

CHRISTENDOM

II

191

for capitalism itself is fully un-

derstandable only through the spirit which informs it. Is it necessary to indicate, among so many others, two of the characteristic traits by which, to my mind, this new state of culture would be opposed to the present state? In the present civilization, everything is referred to a measure which is not human, but external to man: primarily to laws belonging to material production, to the technological domination of nature and to the utilization of all the forces

of the world for the fecundity of money. In a truly humanist culture, it is to man and his measure that the things of the

world would be referred.2* The vocation of man is great enough, his needs

and desires are sufficiently capable of

growth, that we may rest assured that such a measure would not imply a renunciation of greatness. Greatness demands both abundance and poverty; nothing great is done without a certain abundance, nothing great

without a certain poverty. Can a man understand life at all if he does not begin by understanding that always it is poverty

which superabounds in greatness? It is the tragic law of man’s sin, not of his nature, that makes the poverty of some create the abundance of covetousness and pride. This is the law of

sin which we must not accept, but fight. What would be in conformity with nature, and what we should demand in the social order of new forms of civilization, is that the poverty of each—neither penury nor misery, but sufficiency and freedom, renunciation of the spirit of riches, the gaiety of the lilies of the field—is that a certain individual poverty create a common

abundance, superabundance, riches, and glory for

all. 24In function of this principle, on which he rightly insists, M. Hermant has very usefully brought to light, in a report to the Union la Vérité (June 22, 1935) what he calls the “Jaw of optimal size” and “of the best speed.” See also the work of Georges Cazin, La Sagesse du d’entreprise (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer).

Max pour that chef

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Nevertheless, and this is the second trait that I shall indi-

cate here, it is an axiom for “bourgeois” economy and mercantile civilization that one has nothing for nothing; an axiom

linked to the individualist conception of property. I think that in a regime in which the conception of property sketched above would be in force, this axiom could not hold. Rather, on the contrary, the law of usus communis would require that one state that, at least and first of all for what concerns

the primary needs—material and spiritual—of the human being, it is fitting that one have for nothing as many things as possible, this in virtue of an office of distribution exercised not by the State, but by the different organic communities, beginning with the family community, that integrate the

economic structure of society. That the human person be thus served in his primordial necessities, this is after all only

the first condition of an economy which does not merit the name “barbarous.” The principles of such an economy lead to a better grasp of the profound meaning and the essentially human roots of the idea of heritage, and would, at the same time, call for great transformations in the modalities of hereditary transmission, so that, on the one hand, while assuring to the children the fruits of their father’s work, this transmis-

sion would not be able to permit the constitution or the reconstitution of a class of privileged ones of money, and that, on the other hand, every man, on entering into the world,

would effectively enjoy, in some degree, the condition of heir of the preceding generations.

The Person and the Economic Community Turning now to another great problem which the technical dominants of social life impose everywhere today, that of the

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at once syndical, communal and cooperative organization of production

and consumption,

I shall remark,

in the first

place, that the opposition between the corporatist conception (which in spite of everything keeps its value, however suspect the word may have become) and the syndicalist conception has its acuteness only in the regime of individualist “profit-

making,” which opposes the profit of capital and of the enterprise and the profit of the salaried worker;”> in the second place, that the technical necessities of social life only determine large generic lines, the specificity of a social structure

comes from the ethical dominants in accord with which it takes its typical form: and indeed, in the perspectives of a Christian philosophy the great task which will impose itself in the future in the face of an organic regime which the economic process seems in other respects to render inevitable under one form or another, would be, it seems, in the first

place, to guarantee against any “Statization” the character of moral person which belongs, particularly in a pluralist society, to the syndicate and to the community of work; in the second place, while submitting such a regime to the primacy of the common good, to defend the person against the collectivity of which he is a part: i.e., on the one hand, to assure the

goods of which human life has need, and above all the ele-

mentary goods, to the individuals not incorporated in or not able to be incorporated

in the syndical

and

communal

frames; on the other hand, to guarantee in the very midst of these organisms the right and the liberty of the person. More profoundly, the crucial problem which presents itself

here is that of knowing how to subordinate technology, the machine, and industry to man. Grandnephews of Descartes, 25 If it is true that the antagonism of classes is consubstantial to such a regime, one understands that the syndicalist elements fear that in a capitalistic

regime the corporative organization runs the risk of being utilized above all, in fact, for the abolition of the worker liberties.

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the last heirs of rationalism and anthropocentric humanism,

the Communists believe in an easy answer. On the one hand, they grant that the new civilization must be, like the capital-

ist one, and more so if possible, an industrial civilization. On the other hand, they hold that science, understood in the rationalist sense of the word, science as distinguished from wisdom,”* should be sufficient, through a perfect planning,

to put industry at the service of man. Yet despite themselves they have inevitably ended in making man the slave of industry and

technology.

A science

of the nonhuman,

the

science of the production of things, if it becomes the rule of life, can only impose inhuman rules. The supreme work of the social body, if it is not ordered to the higher values of the person, cannot fail to exact for itself all that man is and to put in, along with God and with man himself, a jealous claim for man. “For God is indeed the highest interest of the per-

son, an interest that absolutely cannot be subordinated to any other.” The truth is that it does not belong to science to regulate our lives, but to wisdom; the supreme work of civilization is not in the order of transitive activity, but of immanent activity: to really make the machine, industry, and technology serve man necessitates making them the servants of an ethics of the person, of love, and of freedom. It would be a serious

error to repudiate the machine, industry, and technology, things good in themselves and, far from having to be repudiated, to be used for an economy of abundance. But it is the

very illusion of rationalism not to see that we must choose between the idea of an essentially industrial civilization and the idea of an essentially human one, for which industry is really only an instrument and is therefore subjected to laws that are not its own. 26 Cf. J. Maritain, Science et Sagesse, Ch. I. *7 J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., p. 255.

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The notion of planning—a notion present from the moment it is recognized that the economy has to be organized and rationalized—now gets a new meaning. This organization and

rationalization must be the work of a political and economic wisdom which above everything else is a science of freedom, proceeding according to the dynamism of means to ends and in continuity with the nature of the human being; it must

not be a so-called universal mathematical prevision.?® Such a political and economic wisdom would aim to regulate industry, not according to industry’s own laws alone, but according to laws to which these are subordinated; in the first

place, it would aim always to regulate the movement of production according to the real needs and capacities of consumption.

I do not forget that the technical aspect of social life, though the most subject to necessity, is also the one which changes most rapidly, and that the economic structure of a

new Christendom can be very different from the draft which the present technical dominants of the economy invite us to trace for a future relatively near at hand. But the aim of this digression has only been to suggest that the ethical dominants that have primacy over the technical dominants are what alone give, as I suggested a moment ago, to an economic structure its ultimate specification and its typical morphology,

and that if one adopts a Christian philosophy of man, of work, and of the ownership of material goods, the way in

which the most important economic problems are posed takes, we may say, a new direction. 28 In his essay La Sagesse du chef d’entreprise, M. Georges Cazin has shown that in the limits even of a particular enterprise, wisdom should have precedence over mathematical technique. Cf. Lucien Lainé, Une communauté économique, le Tapis (1934).

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The Condition of Woman in Marriage My second consideration has to do with the condition of woman in marriage, a condition envisaged from the point

of view of the Christian personalism which is the third fundamental characteristic of the new regime of culture whose image I am endeavoring to trace. It is a commonplace, and moreover a very accurate one, to

say that Christianity has given to woman—treated, in the Orient especially, as an object of property—the sense of her dignity and her personal liberty.

This gain of immense historic importance has been realized thus in the spiritual order; it is there, in that universe superior to the world, that it has above all its value, and it is

from there that it had to pass little by little into the temporal order and into the juridical structures.

This passage took place with an inevitable delay, which the intensity of the life of faith rendered less hurtful in the Christian

centuries,

and which

has been

felt much

more

cruelly since the Renaissance.

What I would like to note here very briefly is that the family of the type which one can call bourgeois, | mean by that founded solely or principally on the material association of perishable economic

interests, is, as it were, the caricature

and the derision, properly speaking the corpse of the Christian family, essentially founded on the union above all spiritual and sacramental of two persons engendering for an eternal destiny other living beings endowed with an imperish-

able soul. And likewise, in the present-day crisis of marriage and the family, a crisis due principally to economic causes but also to

a certain moral ideology, one can say that a pseudo-individ-

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ualism destructive of domestic society, and by which the woman claims an equality in some way material and quantita-

tive with man, and which moreover is only too easily understandable as a reaction against the not Christian but bourgeois conception of the family, is, as it were, a caricature and a

derision of Christian personalism.

It is remarkable that socialist theorists accept in general these dissolving and inhuman results of the capitalist regime

(and for example those which the work of women in the factory creates in particular), as they accept in general the heritage of the bourgeois economy in order to push it further. The Marxist theorists announce thus for the future society a

radical transformation of the family and marriage, in which the equality of economic conditions between the man and the woman will give to their affective relations both a paradi-

saic dignity and a paradisaic liberty. Well, the new Christendom of which I am speaking could also profit from the experiences of our time, but in rectifying them in an entirely other sense. For the process on which certain thinkers of the line of Proudhon and Sorel insist,?® and according to which the woman—after having passed from the juridical condition of thing (a condition which one imputes to the ancien régime) to the condition

of individual, due to her unfortunate

de-

mands and to her revolts of the bourgeois epoch—must pass

finally to the full juridical condition of person—it is only in a civilization of Christian style that such a process can result, this full juridical condition of person corresponding then in

the socio-temporal order to the spiritual condition of person inaugurated from the beginning by the Gospel in the moral

and religious order. 29 Cf, Kdouard Berth, Du ‘Capital’ aux ‘Réflexions sur la violence’

Riviere, 1934).

(Paris:

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In such a conception, which is that of a qualitative and proportional equality, the married woman does not have, save in exceptional cases, the same economic functions as the

man; she cares for “the humble kingdom of her house”*® and it is in the order of private life, and of all that which the domain of relations between private persons comports of humanity, vigilance, and firmness, and of effective tonality, that

she exercises her primacy. But the individualist experience, however disastrous it may otherwise have been, will doubtless have obtained a beneficial result. Here again it is a question of a growth in awareness. Woman will have become conscious in

her temporal activity itself of that personality which the pagan conceptions

of marriage,

and in particular the bourgeois

conception, contested with her so bitterly. And this consciousness is something that cannot be taken away. If in the order of economic relations concerning material goods it is normal that the married woman be nourished by her hus-

band,** she will not thereby lose the sense of her liberty as a person which, moreover, should lead to a full juridical recognition, implying in all that which concerns the matrimonial institution the equality of rights; and it is in order to realize, at the same time as her maternal function, that other func-

tion on which the Bible insists, of assisting the man to live, by right of person similar to him—it is in order to nourish him in her turn in the order of a more secret and more pro-

foundly human* economy that she will be united to him. 8° “Over the humble kingdom of your house you have reigned with wisdom ...” (Raissa Maritain, La Vie donnée). $1 Although even the work accomplished by the woman in her house, in

particular in her function

of maternal

education, has an incontestable

eco-

nomic value, which gives her, even by this title, a right to her husband’s earnings, earnings in themselves ordered to the family community. °° Cf. Raissa Maritain, Histoire d’Abraham (Nova et Vetera, No. 3, 1935, Fribourg, Switzerland); 2nd edition, La Conscience Morale et ’Etat de Nature

(New York: Editions de la Maison Frangaise, 1942). “In this progress of the human that I am trying to read word for word in

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Thus, in a new Christendom and thanks to new conditions

of civilization, the riches of spirituality enveloped in the state of Christian marriage, and so widely misunderstood in

our day, could at last find their full bloom.

IV. THE

Authority and

UNITY

OF SOCIAL

RACE

Fundamental Equality

After this parenthesis, let us proceed to the fourth characteristic of our new Christendom. A certain parity of essence between the leader and the led, I mean an essential parity in the common condition of men bound to labor, will really be at the foundation of all relations of authority and the hierarchy of temporal functions, whether it is a question of political authority or any other kind of social authority. This conception of authority, one can say, is typified not in Genesis, let us observe, however it may be with the possibility of other interpretations, that woman has jumped a stage. She has not been taken from the earth, she has not been ‘formed from the earth’ like man. Dust, by the intermediary of the flesh of man, as man is dust through his animal flesh, she has been made from a human flesh, she has been created within paradise, while man only entered therein after his creation. “Thus, according to the Bible, the physical origin of woman is more noble than that of man. The ransom of this privilege is that the demands of God and of men will be greater in her regard, and even, dare one say, the divine favors. It is Eve who, by her fault, it is true, but also by the boldness of her decision—which is proper to the adult—has taken the initiative which, accepted by Adam, has decided the fate of humanity. And it is a woman still who, without any human counsel, and by the plenitude of her faith, has compensated in some sort the fault of Eve, and made to reascend towards the Savior and towards God the humanity that was going astray. For the same reason God will permit that all the laws that men will make, of themselves

alone or under his inspiration, require always of the woman more abnegation and more purity, more humanity. The traces, the memory of the terrestrial and animal stage weigh on man more heavily. But Eve is very similar to the better Adam.”

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the Benedictine rule but in the Dominican rule, in the Order of Preachers, which is at the threshold of modern times as the Benedictine Order is at the threshold of the Middle

Ages: a society of brothers where one of them is chosen as tuler by the others. In the political order (what form of regime this takes is

quite another question), the organs of government are then regarded by the Christian as having the source of their au-

thority in God, as does any legitimate power, yet as not taking on even by participation a sacred character. Once the

organs are designated, authority resides in them, but in virtue of a certain consensus, of a free and vital determina-

tion made by the people, whose personification and vicar they are: vices gerens multitudinis, as St. Thomas puts it. This

consent itself must be understood in various senses. It can be formulated or unformulated. In the system of hereditary mon-

archy, it is once for all given for an indeterminate future, both as to the form of the regime and the eventual holders of power. In the democratic regime, it is once for all given for an indeterminate future as regards the form of the regime, but

it is periodically renewable as regards the holders of power. In any case, nevertheless, where a purely secular and “homo-

geneous” conception of temporal authority prevails, the head is simply a companion who has the right to command others. As for the economic

order, in this new

Christendom

of

which I am speaking, fellowship is not resolvable into domestic society, as it was in the Middle Ages, nor into the confrontation of two classes alien to each other, as in the age of “bourgeois” liberalism. Rather—assuming the preliminary liquidation of the capitalist regime—it would constitute a specific institutional form corresponding to the natural association of collaborators in one work.

HISTORICAL IDEAL OF NEW CHRISTENDOM

There are two sides to the picture. Because

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the order

necessary for political life is more difficult to achieve in a commonwealth where authority runs its risks within one and the same “social race” than in a commonwealth where authority descends from a superior “social race,” the burden of social life will be heavier and discipline will be stricter.

A Personalist Democracy This brings us once more to an opposition to both the false liberal conception of modern times and the sacral ideal of the Middle Ages. Take the word “democracy” as the progeny of Jean-Jacques Rousseau understood it, and our plan for civilization would surely be opposed to that kind of democracy,

for it is not through an abstract freedom, an impersonal freedom, but through concrete and positive freedoms incarnated

in social institutions and social bodies that the interior freedom of the person demands to be expressed on the external and social plane. On the other hand, one of the essential values included in the very ambiguous word “democracy” is saved in this plan. I have in mind a meaning of this word

that is affective and moral, having reference to the dignity of the person, a dignity of which the people themselves have

become conscious, not of course as possessing or truly meriting that dignity but at least as being called to it. This popular civic awareness consequently excludes the heterogeneous, even

if good, domination of one social category over the mass of the people considered as minors, and it implies even on the level of social life respect for the human person in the individuals who make up this mass. I have just said that the people have become conscious in modern times of this dignity of the person, not as truly merit-

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ing or truly possessing it, but as laying claim to it. And yet it is most often under symbolic and figurative and at times very deceptive forms that modern democracies in fact profess re-

spect for the person in each individual in the mass of the people. This is precisely the drama which the Communist revolution claims to bring to a denouement, and which Christianity alone, socially lived, could truly bring to a de-

nouement by making real what to date is only symbol and figure. This is why it is only in a new Christendom, one that

is yet to come, that this ethical and affective value of the word “democracy,” answering to what we may call popular

civic consciousness, could really be saved. Besides, if the present division into classes** must then be overcome, this society without bourgeoisie and without proletariat would

not be a society without internal structure and without organic differentiations or inequalities. But the hierarchy of functions and advantages would no longer be tied to heredi-

tary categories fixed as of old by blood, which in principle was not an unhealthy solution, or as today by money, which is an unhealthy solution. It is to a genuine aristocracy of work—in the whole amplitude and qualitative diversity of this word**—

that a vitally Christian temporal regime would then teach respect for the human person in the individual and in the people, difficult though it still would be. 88] am taking this word in its strict and most exact sense, such as Briefs for example determines it in his studies on the industrial proletariat; “class” implies a permanent and hereditary condition; the proletarian being without means, and constrained to alienate his hard labor for a wage which is not sufficiently high to allow of any accumulation, it is inevitable, save in exceptional cases, that his condition should be transmitted to his descendants from

generation to generation. Cf. Goetz Briefs, Le Prolétariat industriel (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936). ** Cf. J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 68-70.

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V. THE COMMON TASK: THE REALIZATION OF A FRATERNAL COMMUNITY

The Temporal City and Brotherly Love We come now to the fifth and last characteristic. As regards the common task to be accomplished by the body polli-

tic, let us say, in accord with the indication given in a previous chapter (see Ch. II, p. 74), that for a Christian civilization which can no longer be naive, the common aim would no longer appear as a divine work to be brought about on earth by man but, rather, as a human work to be brought about on

earth by the passing of something divine, namely, love, into human means and into human work itself.

Thus for such a civilization the dynamic principle of common life and common work would not be the mediaeval idea of God’s empire to be built on earth, and still less would it be

the myth of class or race, Nation or State. Let us say that it would be the idea, though according to

the Gospel and not on the Stoic or the Kantian plan, of the human person’s dignity and his spiritual vocation, and of the

fraternal love which is his due. The work of the body politic would be to realize a common life on earth, a temporal regime truly in conformity with that dignity, that vocation and that love. We are far enough away from such a goal to be

sure that there will be work to do! The task is arduous, paradoxical, and heroic. There is no such thing as a lukewarm humanism.

A conception of this sort would be utopian if the fraternal love of which I am speaking were regarded as the sole bond and basis of the temporal community. I am well aware that a

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certain material and, in a sense, biological weight of community of interests and passions, and of social animality, so to speak, is indispensable in common life. And I have sufficiently

stressed in preceding sections the organic character which in this regard a new Christendom would of necessity entail. I am also aware that if it has not as base a conception of human nature at once pessimistic and exacting, so as to make the

most important appear as the most difficult and the best among political tasks appear as requiring the greatest pains, an ideal of brotherly love would be the worst of illusions. Such an ideal is not easy to realize in religious communities, where man is vowed to strive for perfection; and of course it is much less easy in the order of lay and temporal life, a humbler order, it is true, and one nearer to the elementary

tealities of life, and yet much less solicitous about virtue. But if it is absurd to expect of the body politic that it make all men, individually taken, good and fraternal to one another, yet we can and must demand, which is quite another thing (p. 111, n. 9), that it have social structures, institutions, and laws which are good and inspired by the spirit of fraternal love, and that it the more powerfully orient the energies of social life toward such a friendship, as this latter, natural as

it may fundamentally be, is extremely difficult for the sons of Adam. Thus, to begin with, this friendship or fraternal love is, if one chooses to use the word, like a primordial “myth”

giving direction to common life, it is a heroic idea to be realized, a typical end to be pursued, the animating theme of a common enthusiasm, bringing into action the profound energies of the people. In this way, fraternal love appears as an essential dynamic principle in our new Christendom. It

is because this Christendom would be truly oriented in its entirety toward a socio-temporal realization of Gospel truths that it would properly apply itself to a Christian lay common task.

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The Solution of an Antinomy At the beginning of the preceding chapter (pp. 135-136), I underlined a characteristic paradox of the political life of the human being: on the one hand, human persons, as parts of the political community, are subordinate to it and to the common work to be done; on the other hand, the human person, in

the highest values of his life as a person, is superior to this common work and gives finality to it. We see now the solution to this antinomy.

It is not enough to say that justice demands a certain redistribution of the common good (common to the whole and to the parts) to each person. We must say that since the temporal common good is a common good of human persons,

then each one, by subordinating himself to the common task, subordinates himself to the fulfillment of the personal life of others, of other persons. But this solution has a practical and

existential value only in a body politic where the true nature of the common

task is recognized, and along with it, as

Aristotle divined, the value and political importance of fraternal love. It would be a great misfortune if the failure of the

vain optimistic “fraternity” inscribed on the banners of the French “bourgeois” revolution made us forget such a truth. There is no more fundamentally antipolitical frame of mind

than the distrust entertained by the enemies of the Gospel for the idea of fraternal love, whether by great indignant souls like Proudhon and Nietzsche, or by cynics, like so many adorers of what they call order.

Believers and Unbelievers

But a problem is posed here which we must briefly examine. It is the question of the collaboration and participation of

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non-Christians in the life of a Christianly established temporal society, of a vitally Christian lay body politic which, as I said earlier, can include unbelievers and believers.

To try to establish a common

doctrinal minimum among

them, which would serve as a base for common

action, is, as

I have also pointed out, a sheer fiction. Each engages himself and should engage himself in his entirety, each must give his maximum. But it is not to the search for a common theoretic minimum, it is to the bringing about of a common practical task

that all alike are called. And with this the solution begins to dawn. This common practical work, I just said, is not a Christian sacral, but a Christian secular, work. Taken in the fullness

and perfection of the truths it implies, it engages the whole of Christianity, indeed the whole of Christian dogma and ethics: it is only in the mystery of the redeeming Incarnation

that the Christian perceives the dignity of the human person, and what that dignity costs. The idea he has of it stretches out as if infinitely and attains its absolutely full meaning only in Christ. But by the very fact that it is secular and not sacral, this common work does not exact as starting point that every man

profess all Christian truths. On the contrary, it allows among its characteristic features a pluralism which makes possible the convivium of Christians and non-Christians in the same body politic. Hence, if from the very fact that it is a Christian work it proceeds on the hypothesis that those who will take the initia-

tive in it are Christians, with a full and total grasp of the end to be attained, it nevertheless asks all of good will to cooperate, all those who grasp in a more or less defective way, the truths which the Gospel knows in their fullness, and who are

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thus enabled to give themselves in a practical way to this

common work, and perhaps without being the least generous or the least devoted. It is here that the Gospel text applies with all its force: “He who is not against you is with you” (Mark 9:39).

VI. THE SPIRITUAL ATTITUDE OF ST. THOMAS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE Such then is the concrete historical ideal which we ought

to have of a new Christendom; such is the way, I believe, in which Christianity can save in order to transmit to the future, the truths toward which the modern age has been struggling in the cultural order, at the same time purifying them of the

mortal errors in which they are enveloped. It is obvious, at least in the degree to which I have made myself understood, that in

my eyes this purification is wholly different from a simple empiric arrangement or from what I may call a patchwork. Modern civilization is a wornout garment. One cannot sew new pieces on it. It requires a total and, I may say, substantial recasting, a transvaluation of cultural principles: since it is a question of arriving at a vital primacy of quality over quantity,

of work over money, of the human over the technological, of wisdom over science, of the common service of human persons over the individual covetousness of unlimited enrichment or

the State’s covetousness of unlimited power. I have sought in this inquiry to draw inspiration both from

the general principles of St. Thomas Aquinas and, if I may so speak, from his personal reaction in the face of the conflicts of human history. Did he not constantly struggle against two

opposite eternal instincts of error: on the one hand, against

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the instinct of accumulative inertia of a backward Scholasticism which attached itself in the Christian tradition to accidental

and perishable

elements;

and, on

the other hand,

against an instinct of spendthrift dissociation represented in

that time by the Averroist movement and which gave its fruits later in the anthropocentric humanism of modern times?

St. Thomas, and it is the particular note of his genius, was always able to discern at the core of the firmest order, and of the most ecumenical and catholic tradition, the most powerful energies of life, of renewal, of revolution. It is to this

that is linked his central intuition of analogy as the truly living and universal instrument of research and truth. And this is also why he was able to assume and to save in the catholicity of a doctrine perfectly free and pure, without depreciating one of them, all the truths pursued by pagan

thought in the midst of its darkness and by the systems of the philosophers in their discordant clamors.

Today, in the order of the philosophy of culture or of civilization, we have to do, on the one hand, with conceptions

of univocist inertia which cling to what is dead and done with

in the temporal ideal of mediaeval Christendom and, on the other hand, with a whole ideology of revolutionary decomposition which rises against the very idea of Christendom. I

think that here again the truth must be sought as a summit between these two opposing errors. It is toward the inauguration of a veritable and authentic Christendom, faithful to the

immutable principles of every vitally Christian temporal order, and free from every error springing from anti-Christian ideology and from what I called a moment ago the instinct of spendthnift dissociation, that we must orient ourselves; but

it is toward a new Christendom, realizing according to a type specifically different from that of the Middle Ages the im-

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mutable exigencies of a Christian temporal life, which exigen-

cies are analogical and not univocal. Taken in its essence, the mediaeval ideal of a Christian sacral society is certainly not evil, since it has been good. But existentially it corresponds

to something come to an end. If I may be allowed to use in a paradoxical manner the language of metaphysics in the context of the philosophy of history, let me say that this ideal or this prospective image has been truly an essence, i.e., an intelligible complex capable of existence and inviting existence, but that now and in relation to the concrete and dated existence of the historic age into which we are entering, it is no longer but an ens rationis (“being of reason”) conceived ad instar entis and incapable of existence. If St. Thomas had lived in the time of Galileo and of Descartes, he would have taught Christian speculative philosophy to free itself, in order to be more faithful to the metaphysical thought of Aristotle, from the out-of-date images and fantasies of Aristotelian mechanics and astronomy. May he in our day teach Christian philosophy, in the social and cultural order—in order to save through the moltings of his-

tory the imperishable substance of the past, and above all of the past of Christian Europe, by elaborating a Christian historical ideal capable of existing and inviting existence under

a new historical sky—to free itself from the images and fantasies of the Sacrum Imperium, which, formerly an efficacious

and necessary moment of the growth of history but become

today an ens rationis, could henceforth only cause truth to serve falsehood once more, to cover over and to mask with a

Christian appearance the forms of a temporal regime long since become a stranger to the Christian spirit. The fecundity of analogy in this domain is, moreover, clearly not exhausted by the historical ideal whose main outlines I have here tried to sketch. Others still could arise, under historical climates

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of which we have no idea. And there is even nothing to pre-

vent minds attached to a Christian sacral conception from admitting the hypothesis of an eventual cycle of culture in which it would prevail anew, under conditions and with characteristics which we cannot foresee.

VI THE ISTORIC POSSIBILITIES OF THE REALIZATION OF A NEW CHRISTENDOM

The particular ideal which occupied us in the preceding chapter relates to what I have called the “intelligible con-

stellations dominating human history.” If I have succeeded in expressing it properly, it belongs to the order of essences or of intelligible structures possible in themselves, i.e., not im-

plying any feature which renders them incompatible with existence, with the dated existence of the age into which we are entering. And it suffices that such an ideal be possible for human energies to find therein an efficacious orientation for

a useful historic work. Nevertheless, my study would not be complete if I did not consider also, however rapidly it may be and precisely because in good doctrine the essence itself is

defined by its relation to existence—potentia dicitur ad actum —the conditions of realization of this ideal. I have already pointed out that this ideal, by the very fact that it refers to sufficiently large horizons of the philosophy of culture, is concerned with a relatively indeterminate future.

But it has its roots in the present; and it is from today that it should exercise its dynamic value and orient action, even if it were to realize itself only in a distant future and in a manner 211

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more or less deficient, or to give way under a new historical sky, presently unforeseeable, to another concrete ideal.

I. INTERNAL DIMENSIONS: THE IMPULSE THE SPIRIT IN SOCIAL LIFE

OF

A Refraction of the Truths of the Gospel

in the Temporal Order Let us therefore come to an examination of the conditions of realization of the concrete historical ideal whose major typical features I have sketched. This question has great practical importance as regards the

extent of the élan that one takes, and as regards the prudential disposition of the action. Speculatively, it could seem vain enough, for the issue depends not only on the material

conditions and determinations of history, but also on human freedom, which can turn them to advantage in so many different ways. Here however we could adopt the famous

formula of Karl Marx: “Man makes his history, but under conditions which are determined.’”* Scientific German Marxism forgot the first half of this formula. The fact remains that

the “determined conditions” referred to in the second half render possible certain previsions of probability, at least with

a sufficiently large margin of indetermination. What is in any case certain is that the passage to a new Christendom implies

much deeper changes than that which the word “revolution” ordinarily connotes. We mect here a very important question, 1“Men make their own history, but they do not make it freely, in chosen conditions, but in conditions directly given, bequeathed by tradition. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living .. .” (Der Achtzehnte Briimaire des Louis Bonaparte, Ch. 1).

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that of the internal dimensions of these changes. In a word, they consist in making a real refraction of the Gospel pass into the cultural and temporal order. It is a question of changes in the regime of human life which are at once internal and external, which are to be

accomplished in the hearts of men and in the body politic and in its institutions, and which affect together, though by

different titles, the social and visible domain and the spiritual, moral, and invisible one; and first of all, the spiritual domain.

These changes have often been under consideration in the course of the preceding chapters, as well as the renewal of the scale of values which they imply: the end of the dissociations which have reigned over the modern age, and the historical necessity in which we find ourselves of a new impulsion of the spirit and of faith to raise the socio-temporal order. Now I wish to turn to one particular aspect, in stressing the necessity of transcending not only economism, but also politicism.

Economism Transcended

The idea of such a Christian renovation of the temporal is opposed to the economist conception of social development and of the economy itself, a conception according to which it is solely in the transformation of economic technique that the great transformations of history would essentially consist. This conception is false, even in regard to a materialist economy like that of capitalism. As Amintore Fanfani has recently pointed out: capitalism is above all a spirit.’ 2 A, Fanfani, Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1936).

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Politicism Transcended The idea of a Christian renovation of the temporal order is also opposed to the politicist conception which is properly

the corruption of politics itself. I mean by this word “politicist” a conception which consists not only in regarding the conquest of public powers by a party, or the conquest of political power by a class, as the essential thing in a “substantial transformation” of the regime of civilization, but more profoundly one which forms of the political itself a purely technical idea—one regards in such a case political and social activity as an activity amoral in itself, and social facts as particular instances of physical facts, which it suffices to treat according to purely technical laws, since our private conduct remains

subject to the rules of personal morality. In this conception political knowledge is ultimately identified with an art purely and simply, with a technique, with an art which is subordinated perhaps from without, in this or that man, to morality,

but whose own ends and own texture are strangers to morality; these ends will be, for example, solely the material existence, the power, and the material prosperity of the State.

If it is necessary to give a name to this conception, one can, if one wishes, attach it to the great political writer who is also the great political heresiarch of modern times—Ma-

chiavelli. Every error has its truth; the truth of Machiavellianism is a reaction against a false conception of ethics, against

what may be called supermoralism (meaning by this the melancholic claims of a Pharisaic morality, purely formal and geometric, which would deny nature and life). It is also and above all a certain attitude of soul, a certain force and

metaphysical freedom in the concrete judgments on events

and on men, an attitude of which, truth to say, the style of

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the Old Testament furnishes us a divine example. The man of this character understands that God brings forth good from evil, and he makes allowances for the weaknesses and

violences of men, as also for the metaphysical dictates of nature and history in the course of events and of the designs of Providence.

But this character, this attitude of soul is something absolutely different from an immoralist doctrine or philosophy, just as a purist and sentimentalist attitude of soul is some-

thing absolutely different from a doctrine or a philosophy which recognizes the proper rights of ethics over the whole human domain. And it is the misfortune of human nature that the first attitude, which

is good, finds expression too

often in an amoralist philosophy which is evil, just as the second attitude, which is evil, decks itself out too often in the

truths of ethics, which are good. In any case, one can recognize that the Conquistadors have served in a certain way the growth of history, and at the same time condemn their faults as Las Casas did. One can understand the surrenders to temptation of a political genius whom the grandeur of the

work to be accomplished fascinates, and not approve or excuse for all that these surrenders. One can understand that an immense part of art and technique is tapped by politics

and incorporated into politics, without confusing the latter with a mere technique and denaturing it by that very fact.

It remains that of itself the political and social domain is a domain not only technical, but primarily and essentially human, i.e., ethical or moral. The works of art that man ac-

complishes there are intrinsically human and moral. “Political and social virtues have an essentially moral character. . . . Social life aspires by nature to be woven according to the same laws of integrity, of justice and of love of neighbor, which preside over the moral development of our personality. According as

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they apply to the person or to society, these laws assuredly involve diverse modalities: their substance remains the same;

and their rigor also.’

The Political Good Is a Good Worthy in Itself of Being an “End” of Human Action

(Bonum Honestum) Certain minds misunderstand this point, because they misunderstand the very meaning of the word “moral” such as one employs it when one says that the political domain is of itself a moral domain.

What they call “moral,” is solely—exclusively—individual morality, or the morality which governs the private relations of person to person. And they imagine that we seek to reduce politics to morality so understood, which would obviously be to empty politics of its proper content. No, I do not say, and no one, I believe, has ever had the naiveté to say, that politics is reducible to individual morality or is but a simple applica-

tion of the latter: but I do say, and Aristotle said it long ago, that political science constitutes a special branch of moral science—not that which concerns the individual, nor that which concerns domestic society—but precisely that which concerns specifically the good of men assembled in political society, in other words, the good of the social whole:

this good is an essentially human good, and thus is measured above all by reference to the ends of the human being, and

concerns the morals or manners of man, insofar as free being having to use his freedom for his true ends. The ancients defined it as the right life of the assembled multitude. It is not

a simple bundle of utilities, of advantages and of prosperities. As in all that is truly human, the useful is there taken in its ° The manifesto Pour le Bien commun

(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1934).

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relation with ends good in themselves and for themselves— which are the good and worth-of-man common life of which I have spoken, and a good and worthy-of-man work to be accomplished. And this is why a perfidy, the murder of an innocent person, or any kind of iniquity which can appear as favorable to the utility of the State, goes in reality against the common good and tends of its very nature to destroy it; because the common good is not only what is useful to the State, but the suprauseful rightness—good in itself and for itself—of the life of the human multitude. Thus, consequently, it does not suffice to be pious, just, holy, in order to be a good politician. There is required also

the knowledge of the techniques useful to the service of the common good; but there is also and above all required knowledge of the human and moral values engaged in this common good, the knowledge of the field of social and political realization, and, if I may so speak, of the political visage

of justice, of fraternal love, of the respect of the human person, and of the other exigencies of moral life. It does not suffice to be just to be a good politician, but justice is a necessary condition of every good politics as such: to such a point that, according to St. ‘Thomas,* it is necessary that the prince, in order to govern well, should be purely and

simply bonus vir, a virtuous man in every sense of the word.

The Specific Character of Political Ethics And there is, in the same order of ideas, still another mis-

understanding, or another sophistical maneuver, which I must point out.

Some people imagine that morality measures our acts not 4 Sum. theol., I-II, 92, 2.

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in accord with the just human ends to which these should be proportionate in such or such given circumstances, but by a forest of abstract formulas which life should copy like a book.

This is that supermoralism or moral Pharisaism that I referred to just now. And the partisans of Machiavellianism are the first to attribute to morality this impracticable purism,

to make of it so to speak the ceremonial of human sacrifices required by fidelity to principles which are all the purer as they have been isolated from any connection with life and action, and enthroned like idols or like theorems. To tell: the

truth, it is a good incentive for this class of minds to declare that the first condition for politics is to reject morality. In actual fact, the principles of morality are neither theorems nor idols, but the supreme rules of a concrete activity which aims at a work to be done in such-and-such circum-

stances, with the help of more proximate rules help, finally, of the rules never traced in advance of prudence, which apply the ethical precepts cases in the climate of a concretely upright will.

and with the of the virtue to particular They do not

seek to devour human life, but to build it up.

Politics, in particular, aims at the common good of the social body: that is its measure. This common

good, as I

pointed out a moment ago, is a good that is principally moral, and this is why it is incompatible with any kind whatever of intrinsically evil means. By the mere fact that it is the right common life of a multitude of sinful and weakly beings, it also demands that in order to procure it one know how to apply the principle of the lesser evil, and to tolerate evils whose interdiction would bring with it greater evils. Finally, the politician does not deal with abstract entities; the good and the

evil with which he deals are incarnated in historical energies of a determinate intensity, duration, and amplitude. In the face of the forces in action on the scene of history, he has not

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to appreciate only the truth and the falsity, taken in themselves and in the abstract state, in their intemporal significa-

tion, of the values which they represent. He has also to estimate the energy of historical realization and the coefhicient of future of the good and of the evil that are conveyed by them, And this estimate can lead him to practical conclusions very different from those to which a purely abstract

consideration would have led him by itself alone. The logician or logicist tendencies of the French temperament make it necessary to recall to it these proper conditions of politics, I mean of the most authentically pure political wisdom and political ethics, such as a St. Louis would have understood them. One sees also thereby that the subordination of politics to morality, to true morality—precisely because it is moral itself —is a human, practical, and practicable subordination, and not an inhuman or antihuman, impracticable, and geometric

subordination.

Essence and Existence in Politics

In fact, and to go a step further, it is to the old debate be-

tween essence and existence that the preceding reflections relate. They signify that political and social life takes place

in the world of existence and of contingency, not of pure essences;

and God

knows

to what

adventures

essences

are

there exposed, those essences that the philosopher considers apart. In the end, if history were nothing more than an unfolding of logical necessities, the automatism of essences would suffice for it, and the government of God, the free master of all free agents, would become superfluous. No one

knows this better than the great makers of ecclesiastical policy.

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An ideological politics, be it Jacobin or clerical, knows only pure essences (duly simplified), and one can have a firm con-

fidence that its Platonism will always lead it, with an infallible rectitude, to nonexistence. In history, as I recalled a moment ago, it is not theses that confront one another, as in a book or

in an academic discussion, where everything is concluded to the inmost and meritorious satisfaction of the one who is right and who has shown that he is right; it is, rather, concrete

forces charged with humanity, heavy with fatalities and with contingencies, and which are born of the event and move to-

ward the event, and the existential significance of which the politician has to take into account.

But if it is a mistake to forget that essences act only in existence, i.e., in ceasing to be pure essences, if it is an error to

deal politically with Great Britain as one would deal theologically with Puritanism, with Germany as if it were racism, with Soviet Russia as if it were Marxism—it is no less grave an error to forget that existence is the place of realization of

essences, and that in the measure in which they are realized there, they develop there their internal energies and their logic, while at the same time combining with other forms, and with the whole historical heritage of the matter which

receives them.

The Utilization of Morality These remarks could be developed and deepened. Good things are difficult to manipulate: nothing is more difficult to handle than morality, especially since it has become Kantian

in so many minds who are not even aware of this, and since it has been separated from nature

(which it has to rule by

reason, and which nevertheless, insofar as it derives from the

Eternal Law, measures itself reason). It can bring great mis-

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fortunes if instead of acting as consubstantial with the vital movement of pursuit of the ends of human life it tries to act on this movement from without, i.e., in a word, by imposing in such a case on a movement of life that is amoral, moral

tules that are external to life. It can bring great misfortunes

in the life of peoples if instead of acting as consubstantial with politics it tries to act on it from without, i.e., in a word,

by imposing in such a case on a politics that is amoral, moral tules that are apolitical. Morality demands that before evil is done by a man we should do everything to prevent it; and afterwards everything

to undo it without inducing a greater evil; but, if that is impossible, it demands that we recognize that which is: the existence of the evil that this man has committed, and which

is there, which has been committed, which has taken its

place in the course of the events of the world, together with the good on which it preys. And if it is there, we are perhaps responsible for it in some unknown measure. And what is demanded of us now is that we do everything we can to heal it and to repair it, and to rectify in the direction of the good

the consequences of this fait accompli. In its own order, political ethics proceeds in the same way. And it is in the same way also that the rules of prescription justify in many cases

the ownership of goods of the earth (which have often been acquired by unlawful means). ‘They do not efface the evil, which God will recompense in this life or in the next. They render legitimate a state of fact consequent to the evil, once there has been added to the connections of this state of fact

with the evil action from which it has proceeded such a network of relations with human goods that a restitution is

no longer possible without a greater injustice, and once the good which was in the first instance badly acquired has contracted enough new connections with good actions for it to

be finally cicatrized in existence.

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In pursuing this set of reflections, one would understand that there is to the debate between history and morality another solution than hypocrisy or cynicism, or an endless oscillation between the two. It is the same morality, it is laws and principles equally and essentially moral, which require us to promote with all our strength the good and the just in

history, and not to claim to impose them on it by force when greater evils would be caused by this, or greater duties betrayed; it is within the same intrinsically ethical development that the twofold commandment is given to us, first to devote

all our energies to augmenting unceasingly the credit-side of the good and of the just in the current account of history, i.e., to render there active witness to God; and second, not to

act as if we had, in order to separate there the tares from the wheat, to close the account and so the very movement of this historical existence in which we are: in other words, to insti-

tute ourselves at each moment In fact men most often use evil, because they see in it the This principle is, however, an

the judgment of God on history. badly the principle of the lesser pretext to do nothing for justice. essentially ethical principle, like

the principle of justice to be pursued. And this latter principle also men can use badly, in using it against existence—in which they augment then despite themselves the weight of evil. Finally, if men often use morality badly, it is also that they

neglect to take into consideration another moral truth, which is a primary one: morality demands that we apply its rules to our own conduct, it does not demand that we avenge them on the person of another when that other has been unfaithful to them: that is the business of the eternal Judge, and, in a very imperfect measure, of human judges and human educators:

it is not the business of each one of us in relation to each other. Man, thou art not thy brother’s judge; thou art a sinner as

he is, and he is thy brother: there, in a general way, be it a

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question of private ethics or of political ethics, is the fundamental datum of our behavior toward others. Omnes quidem peccaverunt, et egent gloria Dei. We must judge the moral

value of the acts committed by another; but not the soul of another. We must not be silent, we must denounce vigorously the injustice: but we are not charged with dispensing the divine retributions. Christ, who hated sin, was the friend

of sinners. When another has become guilty of some fault, we may have to change our conduct with regard to him, because we no longer have confidence in him, because he puts in jeopardy certain goods over which we have to watch. But unless we have, by some title or other, a jurisdiction over him, we are not required to exhibit in our behavior toward

him our reprobation of his fault. As though one were to render oneself an accomplice of the fault that a man has committed, not to treat this man as guilty and not to manifest thus by a

social sign the purity of our conscience! This naive form of Pharisaism belongs to the “closed morality” of the social group; so much the more developed as the society in question

is the more primitive, it justifies itself morally only by reflex considerations of social pedagogy, and in relation to a certain good, itself vital, which is the formation of common

opinion.

But it in no way constitutes an absolute and unconditional exigency of morality—the Gospel has instructed us on this once and for all: “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”

Politics and the Providence of God There remains still another problem which could create a difficulty, and of which, to tell the truth, the solution depends

inevitably on a religious position. Everything that is human in us declares that politics, how-

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ever large a part art and technique play in it, is, as I was recalling, something intrinsically moral: a perfidy, an iniquity, supposedly committed in the interest of the State, is a political

fault. The first political condition of good politics is that it be just. But it is easy to see that justice and virtue do not, as a rule, lead to success in this world; and on the other hand, the body

politic has not an eternal life where it can be recompensed,

like the poor man Lazarus, for the injustices suffered here on earth and for the unmerited

defeats, and for the death in-

flicted by the wicked: the only good it knows is in the temporal order.

Is it necessary then to recognize an inevitable conflict between the prosperity of political societies—to which, as an integral part of the common good, political wisdom of its own nature tends—and this same political wisdom insofar as it has as its first condition justice? One cannot, it seems to me, give a valid solution to this

question if one does not admit a supreme political government of the universe, which is properly, in this very order itself, a divine government (for God is the first cause of this

particular order, which is the ethical order), and which provides that for peoples, political societies, nations, good and evil bear their fruits here on earth. One will affirm then that

the political exercise of justice and of the other moral virtues, if it can bring momentarily sufferings and losses, must finally serve the common good of the body politic, which common

good implies normally a certain prosperity of the latter. But this is a supraempirical consideration, and the solution

will remain mysterious, for the good in which the body politic’s justice bears fruit has nothing to do with the immediate and visible result—duration must be taken into account; and precisely because it is the government of the first

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cause which acts here, the temporal good in which the body politic’s justice bears fruit, the temporal evil in which its iniquity bears fruit, can be quite different from the immediate results which the human mind might have expected. It is as easy to disentangle these remote causations as to tell at a river's mouth which waters come from which glaciers and which tributaries.

Pseudo-Realisms

An inevitable division thus separates a Christian conception and a non-Christian conception of politics. One regrets

to have to add that many Christians reject the very idea of a vitally Christian politics. They call themselves realists. Gener-

ally speaking, as the “practical man” is the dupe par excellence of all the utopias, so the man who calls himself a “realist” with a certain tone of assurance and of gloomy satisfaction calls himself this because reality is usually in the right as against him. Only believing in force, but also only believing in what can be seen immediately, he puts his trust in any grandeur, provided that it has underneath it neither foundations nor roots. Many who believe themselves “realists” are, in fact, empiricists and nominalists who think by dialectical commonplaces. Their whole politics inscribes itself on instantaneous cuttings made in time, on separated instants—on abstractions;

however perfect may be in these their estimates of the chances, there is lacking in them the essential element, which relates to the continuity of real time and to what may be

called the “physiology of development” of history. The cuttings would be justifiable if politics were only a game of cards,

or the art of making the best possible use of a discontinuous

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series of distributions of chance, without real past or internal principle of evolution. When these “realists” succeed, it is

for successes without root and themselves deceptive, which burden the cause which they defend with a heavier historical debt, and prepare for it a more disastrous failure. Very different from this banal and weak pseudo-realism, is a second one, more consistent and more profound. Its suc-

cesses are more durable, they would almost scandalize the righteous, who complain of them to God; the fact is that God plays fair, and gives those who have freely chosen injustice the time to exhaust the benefits of it and the fullness of its energies. When disaster comes to these victors the eyes of the righteous who cried against them to God will have long

putrefied under the earth, and men will not know the distant source of the catastrophe.

The pseudo-realism of which I am speaking now is Machiavellian realism. Because it is a pure empiricism, in a science, viz. politics, which directs the life of the human crea-

ture, Machiavellianism implies a kind of atheism in temporal existence. It denies in practice that man has come from the hands of God, and that he retains within him, in spite of

everything, the grandeur and the dignity of such an origin. Its pessimism, which invokes incontestable empiric truths, turns these truths into ontological lies, because the fact that the creature comes from God does not count for it. Therefore it despairs of man for the benefit of the State. It is the State which instead of God will create man; it is the State

which by its constraints will oblige man to emerge from the nothingness of the anarchy of the passions, and to lead a

righteous and even heroic life. In his Preludio al Principe, M.

Mussolini, who seems to find a somber intoxication in “Ma-

chiavelli’s bitter pessimism with regard to human

nature,”

cites several texts in which Machiavelli’s “negative judgment” on man, his “justified and disconsolate appraisal,” appears,

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and he adds: “Machiavelli has no illusions and he does not provide the prince with any. The antithesis between the prince and the people, between the State and the individual, is inevitable in the conception of Machiavelli. What one has called Machiavelli’s utilitarianism, pragmatism, cynicism, proceeds logically from this initial position.” And he writes also:

“T assert that Machiavelli’s teaching is more living today than it was four centuries ago.” There is, finally, a third kind of pseudo-realism, as profound and vigorous, as murderous as the preceding. It is that of idealists become cynics, that of idealism inverted, of utopia

become “science” and “dialectic.” Its metaphysical origins are not pessimistic but optimistic; one finds them in Rousseau, not in Machiavelli or Mandeville. It, too, in practice denies that man is a creature of God, but this is because it

does not wish to recognize that which comes from nothingness in man; if man does not enjoy a divine condition, this is

because there is in the world an abomination which binds him; and against this abomination, by whatever name one

may call it, all means are good; doubtless the men who serve this abomination are irresponsible instruments of it, they are doubtless not more wicked than others; but from the moment

they have taken part with the powers of darkness and have renounced nature, i.e., the claim to exist divinely, they have become strangers to the values connoted by the name of man. Hatred for hatred: if for the rich the poor man is not a man, for the conscious proletariat the bourgeois is not a man, nor the kulak, nor the heretic of the revolution. One will treat

him accordingly. A pitiless hardness toward the human person, a radical contempt for his destiny develop thus, in the name of universal brotherhood, with regard to a certain disqualified or disgraced category; and a pragmatism, a utili-

tarianism, a cynicism, symmetrical with those which derive from the “initial position” of Machiavelli.

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In short, and to carry certain typical attitudes to the pure state, there is a positivism of the Right which acts as though it were false that man comes from God and is akin to God; it

ousts God by dint of scorning man. There is an idealism of the Left which acts as though it were false that man comes from nothingness and is akin to nothingness; it removes the Creator in order to divinize man.® The opposed tendencies of which these two. ideal limits indicate the direction explain

many of the contradictions of modern history: Fascism springs from the one, Communism from the other. Both, for all that, call themselves realist, and it is indeed true that their

power of political realization is grandiose. But it is tragic; of itself it is without issue. A realism which does not take into

account, unless it be despite itself, what is deepest in man can indeed be nothing but a pseudo-realism. In order to hold firmly to this truth, however, despite the false evidence of marvels, and in order to conceive another realism, one that will be this time authentic, man has need that faith teach

him wisdom, and to reckon time not by hours and days, but by weeks of years.

II. INTERNAL DIMENSIONS: THE REINTEGRATION OF THE MASSES

The Symbiosis of the True and the False To what do the foregoing considerations lead if not to the conclusion that the coming of a new Christendom depends, 5 If one pursued this analysis, one would doubtless see that National Social-

ism partakes at once of these two practical atheisms. It despises the human

person, it refuses to treat him as a creature of God, but man must serve the

apotheosis of the primitive and divine (daemonic) telluric element which develops in and through him, i.e., in and by the predestined blood.

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above everything else, on the interior and full realization of a Christian lay vocation in a certain number of hearts? This future depends also on the fact of knowing whether a vast Christian renaissance will take place not only among the intellectuals, but in general throughout the popular masses. With these remarks we come to another complementary point. The idea of a Christian renovation of temporal exist-

ence forces us to abandon the anthropocentric humanistic age, and especially the “capitalistic” and “bourgeois” epoch, in order to bring ourselves into a new world. If this is so, such

a renovation has internal dimensions of incomparably greater height and breadth and depth than any other revolution; it is linked to a vast historical process of integration and reintegration.

The fact is that in the nineteenth century the working class for the most part turned away from Christianity. We have already® said a word about the causes of this fact and the re-

sponsibilities of the Christian world. Those remarks concerned the past. Here we have to deal with a second problem, concerning the future: the reintegration of the working class and of the masses. Let us try to indicate its main features as

the problem confronts the Christian. One of the most instructive chapters in a Christian philosophy of history would deal with what we may call the interlacing of masks and roles. Not only are roles of evil often played by masks or figures of justice, but roles of justice are often played (and spoiled) by masks of evil. Not only is bad and useless historical work done by those who carry the standards of truth, but some good and useful work is done (and spoiled) by adversaries of the standards of truth, This occurs because the whole truth is too heavy for human weakness, a weakness which, except in the saints, needs the abatement ® See supra, Ch. III; cf. also J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la

Liberté.

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provided by error. Historical forces which were in themselves normal and providential and which naturally demanded development in a Christian direction, were in the course of

modern history, and through the fault of both Christians and their adversaries, thus forestalled, masked, and warped by anti-Christian forces. In the intellectual order, since the sixteenth century, ra-

tionalism and the most erroneous philosophies have at once activated and deformed, by a sort of parasitism or symbiosis,

something as normal and good in itself as the admirable growth of the experimental sciences of nature. Likewise, in the social order, the growth of Socialism during the last

century—itself automatically called forth by the excesses of capitalism, yet constituting a new and typical reaction to

evils which circulated for centuries in the underground of history, and articulating in a sonorous voice the immense anony-

mous cry of the poor—this growth of Socialism has activated, masked, and deformed certain historical gains that in themselves were normal and good.

In each of these instances, the historical phenomenon in question was bound up with that tendency toward the rehabilitation of the creature which I have pointed out as characteristic of the moder age.

The Prise de Conscience of the Worker's

Dignity and Solidarity In the case of Socialism, then, of what acquisition and

historical gain do I primarily speak? I do not speak primarily of the demand for and the conquest of better material living conditions, of an amelioration, as people put it, of the condition of the working classes.

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No, no matter how just this demand and this conquest may be, of themselves they concern only a particular economic matter, and are so little typical of Socialism that one can find

them in reformist or paternalist conceptions, and that, if we suppose them possible under the present regime, they would, rather, lead to a kind of “bourgeoising” of the proletariat. On the contrary, it is, rather, because of the misery and

the social nonexistence in which it has been kept throughout what we may call the golden age of “liberal” individualism

and capitalism, that the proletariat has been able, wearing the colors of systems that were illusory, and especially when they pretended to be scientific, to realize the gain of which I am speaking. While affecting the order of earthly and temporal civilization, this gain is in the spiritual order, and

this is what makes it important. It is a certain prise de conscience, it is the growth in awareness of an offended and humiliated human dignity, and the growth in awareness of a historical mission. Marxism was constructed to activate and

distort this growth in awareness. And I say that it is impossible to attach too much importance to this phenomenon of prise

de conscience, for all the great advances in the modern age, in art, in science, in philosophy, in poetry, in the spiritual life itself, seem to belong principally to this order of growth in

awareness. The prise de conscience in question has been given a name

in the Socialist vocabulary: it is the coming of the proletariat to “‘class-consciousness.” Two errors appear in the Socialist or Communist notion of

“class-consciousness.”

One is an error of a “liberal” and

“bourgeois” origin—Proudhon thereby remained petit-bourgeois, and Marx did, too; this error makes the liberation of

the working class a final episode in the struggle of liberty against Christianity and the Church, seen as forces of en-

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slavement and obscurantism. The other error is revolutionary

and eschatological in origin; it is the Marxist notion of class warfare’ and of the messianic role devolving on the proletariat. 7 As I wrote recently, “the existence, in moder

society, of two formations

with adverse interests is an historical fact which, like all the facts of history, presupposes before it, together with given conditions independent of the human will, long chains of contingent events and of acts of liberty coming to give there their fruit; the economic and social structure on which it depends once posited in being, it can disappear only with the replacement of this structure by another one totally different. “In following the bent of the dispositions thus created, another wave of contingent events and of acts of liberty was to give of this existence of the conflict of classes, linked to the structure of the capitalist economy, a particular theoretical and practical interpretation, which is the Socialist interpretation. In this interpretation, not only is it a normal progress that the proletariat accede to the ‘consciousness of class,’ but the latter must be at the same time

the consciousness of a moral scission fully accepted, and comport the will to pursue proper ends which are repugnant to subordinating themselves, as the very nature of political society requires, to the common good of the city. And as we are here in human things, where the signs model in their turn the realities which they signify, this interpretation was not only an interpretation of the fact of the antagonism of classes, it contributed to give to the latter a certain real configuration and certain typical characters.

“According to the just remark made by M. Edouard Berth, the division of society into ‘classes’ is a totally different thing than the division of society into ‘orders,’ and it was necessary that the orders be abolished for the classes to appear; each of the orders of the old regime represented a definite function of society, destined to pursue, in its hierarchic place, a common good which was that of society as a whole; the modern proletariat tends on the contrary to constitute an independent totality, which refuses to recognize for itself a common good with the opposite class. “And, in truth, in order for it not to be thus, I mean

in order that the

proletariat, while becoming conscious of itself, should from right now surmount in spirit the conflict from which it suffers, and should strive to transform radically the modern economy otherwise than by exasperating this conflict, there would be required on its part a tension of the energies of liberty strong enough to dominate the inclinations and dispositions engendered by the historical matter—a tension in a sense heroic, and of which man is certainly capable, but which one can scarcely expect of him except in connection

with a living faith bearing on eternal realities, and exalting his nature above itself.” (Preface to the French translation of Goetz Briefs, The Industrial Proletariat.) The secessionist conception of the antagonism of classes, to which

Proudhon had also come, but with regret and much less decisively, has been,

from the point of view of revolutionary effectiveness, Marx’s stroke of genius. It was however, of itself, gravely erroneous: not only because it failed to recognize the natural links and the indestructible human aspirations, of the national and moral order, which continued still to bind the proletarians to the

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But, disengaged from these errors and considered in itself,

this growth in awareness appears as a considerable historical gain. It means the rise toward liberty and personality—these taken both in their interior reality and in their social expression—of a community of persons, the community at once nearest to the material bases of human life and the most sacri-

ficed, the community of manual labor, the community of the human persons engaged in this labor. whole that is the political community, in spite of the fissures due to this eco-

nomic antagonism, and in spite of the condition thus imposed on the proletariat, which a liberty without property reduced to a particularly inhuman form of servitude; but it sought the means of getting out of this evil in a solution of despair, in moral scission fully and decidedly accepted by the proletariat with regard to the common good of the political city. Acheronta movebo. Henceforth the “damned of the earth” will shut themselves up in the very condition of reprobates which has been made for them, and will know no other common good than that of their class of disinherited ones; and

it is from the very excess of evil that, thanks to their “final struggle” and to their war of Titans, will arise the liberation of the human race.

This apocalyptic conception, which, instead of merely summoning the workers of all countries to a solidarity of class, justifiable in itself but subordinate, constituted them into a mystical City in interior war with the existing political cities, remains subjacent to the whole scientific apparatus brought into play by Marx. It may be said that it was the blindness of the opposite class which, in the nineteenth century, precipitated great masses of proletarians into it: these latter had only too many excuses, and they were able to believe that no other resource was open to them. And yet it suffered from the fundamental fault and illusion of all politics of distress; it committed the world to a disastrous schism, and Socialism itself to conflicts without issue; for either, as one saw in the first world war, the national structures and the sense of the political city were to prevail over the “proletarian common good”—whence, for a good

part, the catastrophes which Socialism has known in Europe; or, as happened in Russia, its very triumph in a State was rapidly to oblige it itself—at least in the State in question—to choose between the (so-called) “common good” of the universal proletariat and the “common good” of that political city (“socialism of a country”), and for the latter against the former. Finally, it may be pointed out that if national dispositions manifested at present by the Communists are, from the point of view of the historical process analyzed in this note, a paradox, they represent also a change which can be of extreme importance in the internal evolution of Socialism, and prepare on the side where one least expected it certain preliminary conditions, however distant they may be, of a solution to the conflict between political common good and proletarian common good. It seems, however, highly improbable that the internal logic of Communism will not give birth to some secessionist reaction, of which the Fourth International is perhaps a prelude. (1936)

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Naturally, I am speaking here of a fact typical for this community as such, and not necessarily for each individual in it. We may believe with Aristotle that there will always be men who are constitutionally unfit to work otherwise than in the

service of another man or a group of men and as in some sense “organs” of the latter. The fact remains that the collective consciousness of which I am speaking demands for the working community (whose most typical expression today is the proletariat) a kind of social coming of age and a condition concretely free. In short, the historical gain of which I speak is the growth in awareness of the dignity of work and of the worker's dignity, of the dignity of the human person in the workman as

such. It is to this that the leaders among the workers, awakened to social realities, hold most of all. To maintain

the

sense of this dignity and the rights tied up with it, these men

are ready to face all kinds of evil and also to sacrifice themselves to the most murderous ideologies. It is the tragedy of our times that a primarily spiritual gain

such as this should seem to be bound up with an atheistic system such as Marxism.

The Historic Role of the Proletariat Let us note nevertheless one of the consequences of this awareness. If the proletariat claims to be treated as an adult

person, by this very fact it does not have to be succored, ameliorated, or saved by another social class. On the con-

trary, the principal part in the next phase of historic evolution belongs to it and its own upward movement. One knows with what energy Marxism has insisted on this consequence, but, on the one hand, in incorporating it into

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its erroneous social metaphysic, and in proclaiming not only that the emancipation of the proletariat will be the work of

the proletariat, but that it will be the work of the proletariat single-handed, refusing any other community than its sole community of class; whereas in fact, on the other hand, it

made of this same proletariat a passive instrument in the hands of a party and in the hands of the “revolutionary thinker,” who has for the Marxists a no less exorbitant role than the “legislator” had for Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It remains that, without falling into Marxist messianism,

a Christian can recognize profound insight in this idea that

the proletariat, by the very fact that it will have been in capitalist civilization as suffering from it, not as profiting from it in order to exploit as merchandise the forces of man, is the bearer of fresh moral reserves which assign to it a mission in

regard to the new world; a mission which will be (or would be) truly a mission of liberation if the consciousness it has of it is not (or were not) falsified by an erroneous philosophy. The Christian reproaches the Marxist with having a false conception, at once materialist and mystical, of work; he re-

proaches him with not seeing in work anything but an effort of production, the transformation of matter and the creation of economic values, and with making of it, on the other hand,

not only a high dignity—which is very true—but the highest dignity for the human being, indeed his essence. And he also reproaches the Marxist with having a false conception of class conflict. That classes exist, and without any organic unity between them, and that they are therefore in conflict (it is a fact due to the capitalist structure), and that it is necessary to surmount this conflict, on all of this the Christian and the

Marxist are in accord (see p. 232, n. 7). But how to surmount this conflict? For the Marxist, by a carnal war constituting the proletariat into a military city, into a Jerusalem of the Revo-

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lution voluntarily cut off from communion with the rest of men and crushing, annihilating the other class. For the Christian, by a spiritual warfare, and by a social and temporal struggle which must be waged by all those whom a common human ideal brings together, and in the very movement of which the conflict in question is already surmounted.

For the Christian, what constitutes the bond and the unity of those who must work for a temporal renovation of the world is, first of all—to whatever class, race or nation they may belong—a community of thought, of love and of will, the passion of a common task to be accomplished, and it is here a community not material-biological like that of race, or material-sociological like that of class, but truly human. The idea of class, the idea of proletariat is here transcended. Yet, precisely because man is both flesh and spirit, because every great historical

temporal

undertaking has biologico-

sociological material bases in which the very animality of man and a whole irrational capital is at once borne along and exalted, it is normal that in the transformation of a regime like the capitalist regime it should be the working class which furnishes this sociological base, and in this sense one can

speak of its historic mission, one can believe that on its behavior depend now manity.

for a great part the destinies of hu-

The Crisis of Socialism But for what gain, in fact? This is another question, which depends first of all on the philosophy, on the spiritual attitude that will inspire the masses. Here it is interesting for us to consult the testimony of

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independent Socialist authors, regarded doubtless as nonor-

thodox by the Marxist Party, but whose thought remains, nevertheless, very representative, for they have pushed re-

flection on the history and the principles of revolutionary movements further than others. I am referring to the small

group of disciples of Georges Sorel who ranged themselves among the “revolutionary syndicalists.” A significant book by Edouard

Berth appeared recently

under the title From “Das Capital” to “Réflexions sur la Violence.”’® We find there certain pages which bear on our theme. While remaining attached to the two errors pointed out above (a confusion of social progress with the struggle against religion, and the Marxist conception of the class war), the school of Sorel had vigorously disengaged the element of

truth of which I have spoken. For this school, it is a question above all of passing, as they say, “from the pole of capitalist

fatality to the pole of ‘worker-freedom.’”’ It regards Socialism as “a metaphysic of worker-freedom, and even of freedom simply, of human freedom.” “In the last analysis,” writes Edouard Berth, “what is important is the human factor, man,

his energy, his firmness of character, his capacity for sacrifice and for the sublime,

in a word, his freedom.”

Thus

this

school thought that the revolutionary transformation of the

world would come from the creative bursting forth of proletarian thought and action itself in the worker syndicates. Well, the moment of disappointment and disillusion has come for these Sorelian Socialists; they recognize it loyally— naively also, for they do not ask if their own premises are not

in some sense to blame for the conclusions they deplore. Not only do the proletarianization of the middle classes, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the diminution of

social effectiveness which the progresses of machinism cause 8 Paris: Rivitre, 1934.

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the working class to undergo, result in the latter no longer believing itself called to tread the wine-press alone, but furthermore an internal crisis is occurring in Socialism and in

that worker-consciousness itself of which I have spoken. It is the very idea of freedom and autonomy which seems in danger.

Instead of a proletariat on the march toward social manhood and personality, Edouard Berth depicts for us “‘a proletariat in part plutocratized and ready to accept the more or less

gilded place allowed to it by an Americanized bourgeoisie, and in part raggedly proletarianized and ranging itself under the banner of a demagogic, fanatical and sectarian Communism,” driven by the bureaucratic big stick; and Georges

Sorel’s hopes in the creative personality of the revolutionary proletariat (Sorel regarded the proletariat as “the hero of a drama whose happy end depends entirely on its energy, its devotion and its capacity for sacrifice and sublimity,” and he wished that its violences should be acts of war, of a noble and pure war, almost a holy war)—these hopes seem at the moment in grave danger indeed.

One sees immediately all that which such a tragedy can set in motion in the thought of a Christian. Growth in awareness of the dignity of the human person in the worker, conquest of a social freedom and personality translating outwardly a true interior freedom and personality, liberating mission of the poor and the disinherited come to a sort of historic majority—does not all of this have Christian reso-

nances, and, truth to say, a significance originally Christian? “Ts the working class,” asks M. Berth, “in fact capable of becoming a person?” Yes, without doubt, but on one preliminary condition: neither a man, nor a nation, nor a class

saves itself by the sole forces of man, and if the Pelagianism and practical atheism of the bourgeoisie are adopted and exalted by the proletariat, this will entail the latter’s historical bankruptcy. Its apparent triumphs will but augment its servi-

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tude. Man wins his freedom and his personality, but by opening himself to the life which he receives from the source of being. It is possible that, despite the pessimism of Berth, syndicalism is at the moment the most considerable and the most promising force of social renovation.® But it will keep

these promises only if it rejects the atheism of certain of its initiators. In my view the inevitable option is this: either the popular masses will become more and more attached to materialism

and to the metaphysical errors which for almost a century have fed parasitically on their movement of historical advance, and in that case the movement will develop in forms

ultimately deceptive; or it is out of the principles that Christianity holds in trust and maintains among us that their philoso-

phy of the world and of life will be born. If the latter occurs, it is through the formation of a theocentric humanism whose universal value can reconcile, even in the temporal and cultural sphere, men of all conditions, that their will for social restoration will come to its fruition. Through the formation

of such a humanism they will achieve the freedom of grown-up persons, the freedom and personality not of a class absorbing man in order to crush another class, but of man communicat-

ing to the class his proper human dignity, for the common inauguration of a society from which will have disappeared, I

certainly do not say all differentiation and all hierarchy, but our present division into classes. ® The philosopher, in any case, cannot neglect the studies of the theorists of syndicalism of Socialist and Proudhonian origin, of Georges Gurvitch for example, nor the work of its militants (I note here an article of Raymond Bouyer, “Les Féodaux du tantiéme,” in L’Homme réel, August-September,

1935). On its side the Catholic social school long ago established a doctrine of syndicalism. No less than the syndicalism with Socialist tendencies, Christian syndicalism and the movement of Christian workers can play in certain countries an important historical role. In the order of professional claims and of technical arrangements,

there are besides many

convergences

between

these

two forms of syndicalism [see the important study by Paul Vignaux, Traditionalisme et Syndicalisme (New York, 1943)].

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A Historical Reorientation

I need not insist on the proportions of the historical reorientation implied in such an hypothesis. On the one hand, powerful centers of spiritual and religious rebirth must be formed among the masses. On the other hand, Christians

will have to free themselves from many more-or-less unconscious sociological prejudices. Christian thought will have to integrate truths discerned or surmised in the effort for social emancipation carried out during the whole of modern times, and yet purify them from the anti-Christian errors in the

midst of which they were born. Social and political action inspired by this thought will have to be developed on a vast scale.

It is much more than of any realignment of alliances, it is of a general redistribution of historic forces that, in such perspectives, one is led to think. It could be that then this enigma, so irritating for the mind,

of the temporary opposition, which has occupied the modern centuries and particularly the nineteenth century, between a

Christian world more and more separated from the sources of its true life and an effort of transformation of the temporal regime oriented toward social justice and nourished on the most false metaphysics—it could be that this scandal of the nineteenth century, of which Pius XI has spoken, would find some intelligibility by entering into an infinitely deeper and greater mystery. Does not St. Paul tell us, in reference to the

temporary rejection and final reintegration of the Jewish people, that God has included all under sin that He may have mercy upon all??? If one thought that a new Christian 70 “Conclusit enim Deus omnia [Greek text: tous pantas] in incredulitate: ut omnium misereatur” (Romans 11: 32); “Sed conclusit Scriptura omnia sub

peccato ...” Galatians 3: 22).

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temporal order would arise in a full and durable manner only

after the “disobedience” and the “sin” in which the Christian world of the anthropocentric epoch is “included” will have called forth a new effusion of “mercy,” one would perhaps have an idea of the order of greatness of the historic transmutation with which the inauguration of a new Christendom is bound up.

Ill. THE

CHRONOLOGICAL

DIMENSIONS

About the Philosophy of History The question of the order of greatness of the internal di-

mensions of the changes connoted by the idea of a Christian renovation of the temporal order introduces us thus to another question, that of the order of greatness of the chronological

dimensions connoted by this same idea. It would be fitting to explain oneself first of all here on the question of the possibility of a philosophy of history. In the hands of the pure philosopher—the philosopher who recog-

nizes only the light of natural reason—the philosophy of history, in my opinion, is bound either to fail in its own expectations, or to risk mystification, for in order to get at some

level of real depth and significance it inevitably requires prophetic data. And where would

the pure philosopher find

prophetic data? To my mind this question is capable of a positive solution only if we admit the notion of a philosophy of man in which the philosopher illumines philosophy and the knowledges of the natural order with the light of a more elevated knowledge, a knowledge received from faith and theology." Then only, while of course retaining a conjectural character on many 11 Cf. my book Science et Sagesse, op. cit., pp. 288-345.

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points, can a philosophy of history constitute itself as worthy of the name of philosophy or of wisdom.

The Ages of Christian History It seems that, on the question which occupies us, a Christian philosophy of history is not without ability to provide certain indications.

The first is, as I suggested a moment ago, that a historic upheaval of world proportions would seem to be the inevitable result of the interior drama which has been developing in Western civilization since the meeting of the Gospel message and the Graeco-Roman world, and of which the tragic sense

began to appear in the sixteenth century. What I said in the first chapter about the tragedy of humanism sufhices to illustrate this assertion. In particular, the fatalities accumulated by the capitalist

economy, the dislocation of human life entailed by the industrial conquest of the universe and, on the other hand, the age-long development of anti-Chnistian

forces, as also the

social deficiencies of the Christian world which I have previously pointed out—all of this in my opinion means that the inauguration of a new Christendom, which I regard as possible in itself, must be held as highly improbable, at least as stable

and general success, before the upheaval of which I speak. For the acts and the conflicts of the energies of history must bear their fruit in time. And one does not see how the religious enslavement of man to matter, whether it takes scientific

forms or State forms, would not end in a supreme effort— inevitably catastrophic—of human initiative to save by itself alone a world without God. The second indication which a Christian philosophy of

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history can provide is that the end of a world, even if its proportions are truly universal, is not the end of the world and the end of history. Quite the contrary, for whoever attaches human history to the government of a providential wisdom, the denouement of which I am speaking ought to be regarded as the opening of a new historical age. On the one hand (and this is of value only for the Christian), does not the state of culture of Christian peoples appear as being still extremely backward with regard to the social possibilities of Christianity, and with regard to the full consciousness of that which the Gospel law requires of the temporal structures of the body politic? As regards an effective realization or refraction of the Gospel in the socio-temporal sphere, we are still truly in a prehistoric age.

On the other hand (and this is of value for the philosopher as such), does not a similar observation impose itself in what concerns the natural possibilities of the intellectual and cultural development of humanity? In relation, in particular, to

all the matters of man, and all thereby that is most interesting to us, it would not be difficult to show that our speculative and practical knowledge and our general way of behavior—I am speaking of a knowledge not materialist-illusory, but truly spiritual, and of a behavior which would correspond to it— are still extraordinarily primitive. Should that humanity be near its definitive decline, near the end of history? It would be a premature end, a novel

stopped in the middle. One has been able to call the age on whose threshold we

stand a “new Middle Age.” But this phrase is likely to create illusions. Rather, it would be better to call it a “third age,”

regarding as a first age that of Christian antiquity, which lasted about eight centuries, and characterizing the Middle Ages as the time of formation and education, and of historic

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maturation (in good and in evil) of Christian Europe; modern times would then appear above all as the crashing dissolution,

with a formidable outburst of energy, of the long preceding epoch; and of the third age of our era of civilization one could hardly say that it has begun but, rather, that we are

taking part in the preambles, in the distant preparations which announce it. It is such a division into three ages that, in the

second Commentary on the Song of Songs,’? St. Thomas (or the author who wrote under his name, if this Commentary, contrary to the opinion of Mandonnet, is apocryphal) admits

for the history of the Church; the Church of the thirteenth century is already for him “the modern Church,” and he sees in the reintegration of Israel the characteristic sign of the third age of the Church and of Christendom. In the perspective in which we are placed, one can think that this third age would witness first the general liquidation

of postmediaeval humanism, and no one knows how many centuries it would afterwards endure. I am in no wise imagining it as a golden age, after the manner of certain millenarian dreams. Man would remain in it that which he is, but he would be under a new temporal regime, a new historical sky, also destined to decline in the end for new dawns, since all

that is of time wears away; and it is only under this regime that there would begin to flower the integral humanism, the

humanism of the Incarnation of which it has been a question in the preceding chapters, and which would admit of no other theocracy than that of divine love.

A First Chronological Moment What consequences can be drawn from the preceding comments with regard to the theme of our present researches, i.e., * Comment. in cant. Cantic. (1264-1269), Ch. VI, et seq.

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in regard to the conditions of realization of a Christian renewal of the temporal order, or the historic chances of a new Christendom? It is necessary, I think, to distinguish in this instance two different moments of time. Before the liquidation of the present epoch, it seems to me reasonable to expect for a new Christendom only momentary realizations or partial rough-drafts traced in the midst of civilizations of non-Christian form. Without speaking indeed

of the other conditions which at present render difficult, and relatively improbable, the general and durable inauguration of a new Christian life of the world, and which relate above all

to the powerful development of collective energies quite otherwise inspired, the first condition, on the side of the Christian

world itself (naturally, I am not speaking here of the Church, which has never been bound up with or enfeoffed to any temporal regime whatsoever; I am speaking of the Christian world, which is something temporal), would be that in its entirety the Christian world of today break with a regime of civilization spiritually founded on bourgeois humanism and economically on the fecundity of money, while at the same time keeping itself immune from the totalitarian or Communist errors to which this same regime leads as to its logical catastrophe. Indeed, by the very fact that the Christian world is something of the world, subject today to the law of classinterests which have become predominant in modern civilization, it seems that the general realization of such a condition

is very remote. For, if it is true that nothing is more injurious to the progress of Christianity and nothing more contrary to its spirit than the prejudices and the blindnesses of class or of race among Christians, it is equally true that there is nothing

more prevalent in the Christian world. Instead of the spirit of the Gospel vivifying the socio-terrestrial order, the things of the socio-terrestrial order thus stifle the spirit of the Gospel.

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Another condition would be that a sufficient number of Christians understand that the temporal inauguration of a new Christendom demands means which are proportionate to that end.

The Question of Means I have several times already dealt with this question of means,'* and I return to it only to remove certain misunderstandings. Indeed it includes three distinct questions, to which I shall briefly endeavor to give an answer: the question of the morality of the means itself, that of the morality of the con-

text, and that of the hierarchy of means. It was of this last question above all that I was thinking when I spoke of the purification of means. Some people have thought that I condemned as impure in themselves, i.e., as intrinsically evil, the means not evil in themselves, but of inferior degree, of which

the exclusive or dominant use in view of a higher end poses

an impurity in our action. These are two very different things. With regard to the morality of the means, it is clear that force and, generally speaking, what I have called the carnal

means of war’ are not intrinsically bad, because they can be just. Theologians and moralists explain to us on what conditions these are just, and thereby they perform a work of mercy,

enabling us is not their these doors us light in

to live on this earth. They do not take the lead, it business to open new doors to violence; but once are open, they justify what can be done, and give order to advance into the dark defiles of history.

Force and the use of force implies also violence and terror 18. Cf. my books Religion et Culture; and Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté 14 CE, J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 196208.

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and the use of all the means of destruction. These things also can be just in certain defined conditions.** And it happens that with the progress of science and technique, on the one hand, on the other the growing importance of the part played by the masses in political conflicts, the carnal means of war invented by men become, I do not say more and more cruel— the ancient world was well instructed in cruelty—but more and more grandiose, and almost astronomical in scale. The most obvious example of this is the modern means of war in the narrow sense of the term, of military war;'® there are 15 Tt is necessary then to understand by the word “violence,” “not, as is often

done, the unjust use of force, but every use of force which lacks the character of an instrument of positive law; a just war, a just strike, a just insurrection, are in this sense acts of violence” (Yves Simon, La Campagne d’Ethiopie et la Pensée politique frangaise (Lille, 1936], p. 123). 16 On the question of war, I reproduce here in footnote a page from a Catholic manual of official character, which seems to me to sum up in a very wise manner what is to be said on this subject. “Can war be legitimate? War in itself is a great Evil. It is in fact organized violence and its inevitable effect is to destroy human lives and to heap upon peoples the worst catastrophes. “Moreover indeed it is inapt either to demonstrate the right or to avenge it. For it does not give necessarily triumph to innocence and defeat to injustice. By itself victory goes on the whole to the most clever, to the strongest and sometimes even to him whom chance favors. “Like the duel, it is a ‘stupid and unreasonable’ act, because it cannot give

that which one asks of it, i.e. to declare or avenge a right. “It has become a much greater evil still since scientific inventions and the ways of modern warfare have increased almost to the infinite its destructive powers. “More than ever therefore must we say that war can only be legitimate in

one single case: the case of legitimate defense. “And in order to be in the case of legitimate defense, it is necessary: “a) that a country be unjustly attacked; “b) that this unjust attack have for its object a proportionate good, i.e. a good whose loss would be equivalent for a nation to a veritable physical or moral disaster;

“c) and that there be no other means of defending itself.

“A country, in fact, like an individual, has a right to life, to that which

constitutes it and renders it whole. And when this right is unjustly attacked, or violated, or prevented from realizing itself, a people can, it must even, defend

itself. “But the evils of all wars are so terrifying and todgy especially the struggle can so easily be extended, that the other peoples have the duty of charity and prudence to prevent as much as possible war and, if they can, to impose, but

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others.17 The worst anguish for the Christian is precisely to know that there can be justice in employing horrible means. What I call the question of the morality of the context does not concern the means itself, but the accidental connec-

tions which it contracts in human history. History is impure and nocturnal, it is the history of evil mingled with the good and more frequent than the good, the history of an unhappy humanity on the march toward a very mysterious deliverance, and of the progresses toward good which come about there

through evil and evil means. The Christian is in history; because he renders testimony

there to a suprahistorical world of which he is, he wishes to employ there only good means: thus we have good means dragged into a context where evil means predominate, and running the risk of themselves dragging down by accident such a context. For as soon as a man posits an action in the world, he knows well what he wished to do, he does not know what he has done, or what he has served.

This man, if he fears God, must only employ means that are good in themselves; and he must, besides, envisage also

the context, so that this may have the possibility of being

evil in the least possible degree. After that, let him be at peace. The rest belongs to God. by honest means, a pacific solution of the conflict.” (Petit manuel des questions contemporaines, t. 1, p. 57 [Paris: Office des Oeuvres, 1935].) As far as resistance to unjust laws and sedition is concerned, the same manual teaches, on the other hand: “Sedition is a violent collective struggle

against a government. Such a struggle paralyzes or tends to paralyze totally the governmental action itself. If theoretically it can be legitimate against a government whose tyranny is such that each citizen can consider himself as being

in very grave danger, one must say that in practice, in a general way, sedition

rightly so called is illegitimate because the anarchy and the troubles that it engenders habitually are ordinarily worse than the evils which one wishes to remedy.” 177 am thinking here, in particular, of the measures

that a regime, either

legitimate or not, which has issued from a revolution employs in order to defend itself against its adversaries.

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The fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is a Pharisaical fear. We cannot touch the flesh of the human being without staining our fingers. To stain our fingers is not to stain our hearts. The Catholic Church has never

feared to lose its purity in touching our impurities. If, instead of being in the heart, purity mounts

to the head, it makes

sectarians and heretics. Some seem to think that to put our hands to the real, to this concrete universe of human things and human relations where sin exists and circulates, is in itself to contract sin, as if sin were contracted from without,

not from within.** They claim therefore to forbid consciences the use of all means not evil in themselves to which men have

given an impure context (the writer must not publish, for modern publicity is impure; the citizen must not vote, for Parliament is impure); they require that they refuse to cooperate in the common task of men when impure means are mingled in it by accident (as always happens)**: the Cru-

saders should not set out for the Holy Land, for rapine and cruelty have had their part in the Crusades. This is Pharisaical purism: it is not the doctrine of the purification of the means. This doctrine primarily relates to the question of the hierarchy of means. It rests on the axiom that the order of the means corresponds to that of ends. It asks that an end

worthy of man be pursued with means worthy of man. It does not so much insist on the refusal to employ certain means as 18 “Non quod intrat in os, coinquinat hominem; sed quod procedit ex ore, hoc coinquinat hominem. . . . Quae autem procedunt de ore, de corde exeunt,

et ea coinquinant hominem: de corde enim exeunt cogitationes malae, homicidia, adulteria, fornicationes, furta, falsa testimonia, blasphemiae. Haec sunt,

quae coinquinant hominem” (Matthew 15: 11, 18-20). 19 This refusal would be essential if, for the common work in question (as is the case in an association of bandits), evil means were required of themselves, or employed in fact in a principal manner. The discernment, besides, is sometimes difficult, supposing that it is not a question of an association of bandits but, for example, of financiers or politicians.

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on the positive will to raise up means not only good in general,

but truly proportionate to their end, truly bearing on them the stamp and imprint of their end: means in which that sanctity and sanctification of the secular of which it was a

question in a preceding chapter will be embodied. That such means can and must be used for temporal ends, and by men fighting on the temporal plane itself, “those only will be

astonished at this apparent paradox who fail to appreciate the intrinsic and essential dependence of the political and the social with regard to the moral, of the temporal with regard to the spiritual, and who have not yet understood that

the evils from which human things suffer today are incurable if divine things are not brought into the depths of the human itself, of the secular, of the profane.””° Are such considerations applicable to the great mass of

mankind, who are far from any preoccupation with sanctity? They concern the small number of those who undertake to guide socially and politically this mass: a political fraternity to come, which would have with regard to the inauguration

of a new Christendom that vocation of leadership of which I spoke in a previous chapter (see p. 169). How would such a fraternity purify its means? It was a question earlier (see pp. 155-156) of the use of human means, and I pointed out how in one epoch of our civili-

zation the primacy was given to them for the defense even of divine things, and that it was good that this experience should have been. It failed. Another time is arriving. To claim to renounce human means and human energies would be an

absurdity. I believe that what is needed is not to discard them, is not to turn ourselves away from them, nor is it either to

superimpose on them in a so-to-speak static manner means of a higher order: it is to open them to that great movement of 0 J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., pp. 176-177.

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descent of uncreated Love among men, which is the very consequence of the Incarnation. When I distinguished the means of patience and courage in enduring and those of aggression, or of courage in attack-

ing, and preferred the former to the latter, it is not, as I have ever since then expressly indicated, that I claimed to condemn, like Gandhi, any recourse to force (carnal force, force of coercion). It was a question for me of establishing an order among the means, not of excluding one category of

means. “Force is the midwife of societies”: this observation posed no problem for Karl Marx, except that of acquiring force. It poses a problem for the Christian, a problem all the more grave since force, even when it is just, is of all human means the one which entails the historical context the most

charged with sorrow and with sin, and since it has always involved, even when

just, the eventuality of those horrible

necessities and of those horrible means of which I spoke above and of which even the justice is obscure. Well, I think that the Christian must not refuse to use

thus just force, when it is absolutely necessary. But such means, if they are connatural to our carnal and wounded nature, are against nature in regard to the pneuma which introduces us to the divine ways; the Christian trembles at

the necessity of having recourse to them. If they are Christians, and if they have as their aim a really humanist transformation of the world and the inauguration of a new Christendom,

the men

on whom

the initiative of a recourse

to

force depends are not only bound to impose with an unshakable will the bridle of justice on means which come from the world of wild beasts, and to reject in an absolute manner the use of force as a means of persuasion or as a means of

facility. They must also do violence to force itself to compensate for the violence to which it subjects the spirit; in

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other words, subordinate force in such a way to love that it teally becomes in them the instrument of love in act, and

that, in the action which they direct, the just use of the carnal means of war really happens only as a last recourse and in case of veritable necessity. And it must also be—and here a properly Christian reversal of values intervenes—that before force, and the means of aggression or coercion, which are the only means known to men of blood, a whole world of other means be recognized and employed, and among them those which I have called the means of edification and those which I have called the spiritual means of war: the means of patience and voluntary suffering, which are par excellence the means of love and truth. Only thus can be compensated and turned back into

victory the inferiority which, in the order of the carnal means of war, arises for the Christian from the fact that he obliges himself to rule them by justice and that they offend in him

the instincts of the spirit. As I have already tried to show, the state of a world in which all the violences are unchained would at once reduce to impotence, or to abdication of themselves, Christians who, wishing to act on the temporal plane,

would not put, on this very plane, the folly of love at the head of their means of action.

All of this presupposes indeed a sort of “Copernican revolution” in the conception of political activity; not to content oneself with acting in this order according to the style of the world in order to obtain from the world mechanisms exteriorly and apparently Christian, but to begin with oneself, to begin by thinking, living, acting oneself politically according to the Christian style, in order to bring to the world an intrinsically Christian life. Such a reversal is perhaps in preparation; even

if limited

to restricted

formations

capable of

exercising an animating action, time will be necessary for its

effective accomplishment.

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253

A Second Chronological Moment It seems probable therefore that the new Christendom we

hope for must needs ever, if, in that first itself in fact only in and in the midst of

be formed and prepared slowly. Howmoment of which I spoke, it realized a partial, inchoate and virtual manner, civilizations of non-Christian form and

inspiration, these beginnings and these potentialities would nonetheless be of great value, and would show that the men who work for the inauguration of a new Christendom devote

themselves at the same time, by a generous cooperation, to rendering more human and more just the world in which they are engaged.

And there remains a chance, besides, that they may realize more, and, by playing perhaps a decisive role in a proximate future, that they may enable the historic liquidation of which I spoke a while ago to come about as a crisis of growth exempt from catastrophe and leading to a new world without making men pass through too cruel experiences. In a second moment of time, however, and after this liquidation, it is a full realization (I do not say a perfect one) that we are, to my mind, justified in hoping for the historical ideal of a new Christendom. But by ways which it is not easy to foresee or to imagine, and by means of a “revolution” into which it is necessary, as I pointed out a moment ago, to put singularly more than one puts ordinarily into this word. In every manner, a Christian effort of socio-temporal renewal thus finds, and this is not without importance, a scale

and points of reference by which it may become defined. And whether it is a question of a more or less precarious realization in a relatively proximate future, or of a full realization in a

distant future, it is indeed in time itself and in earthly history that it has its point of aim and application, unlike the prop-

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erly spiritual and religious effort which directly aims at eternal life; and it is from right now that the historic ideal to which it refers should exercise its dynamic value and orient action.

Second Aspect of the Notion of a New Christendom I have just spoken of two different periods with regard to the inauguration of a new Christendom.

Up till now I have used the expression “a new Christendom” in a very wide cultural sense. But this expression can be understood in another and narrower meaning. For if one recalls the distinction I made in an earlier chapter between the intermediate end, which, while being a means is also an

end on its own account, and the pure means or the mere instrument, one sees that it is fitting to distinguish in the

ideal of a new Christendom two different aspects or two different instances, according as this ideal concerns profane or temporal formations having the rank of ends in their own order (i.e., what I called a vitally Christian lay State, and a Christian

secular

civilization,

a new

Christendom

in the

sense in which I have taken this word up till now) or, on the contrary, temporal formations which are only instruments of the spiritual.

If one considers this second instance or this second aspect, the idea of a new Christendom, while concerning the temporal or cultural sphere, spiritualizes itself in some way. What it

designates then is a sort of Christian diaspora, a Christendom not grouped and united in a homogeneous body of civilization, but spread over the whole surface of the globe like a network of centers of Christian life disseminated among the nations. ‘he temporal means of this Christendom are pri-

HISTORIC POSSIBILITIES OF NEW

CHRISTENDOM

255

marily humble means; they can be pared down as much as you please, they will enable it to pass through all obstacles. Even if Christian secular effort were to fail—at least before the liquidation of modern times—to inaugurate, even in a partial and momentary fashion, a new Christian life of the world, and to renew the visible structures of the world, never-

theless it cannot fail as regards this diaspora of Christian civilization.

It might be that before the supreme reintegrations of which I have spoken, the world will in fact know only an epoch of terror and of love confronting each other. It might be that the whole effort of Christians in the temporal order will have to limit itself to rendering less evil regimes of civilization modeled according to Behemoth and Leviathan rather than according to the human person. It may be that the

Christian community, after having had for condition to be persecuted by the pagans, then of persecuting heretics, will

again and anew be in the condition of being persecuted. It would remain to it to attest, in the midst of the vicissitudes

of history, that all that is not love will perish. And, on the other hand, if, as I believe, a full Christian temporal flowering (in the conditions of imperfection and of

deficiency proper to life here below) is promised for the historic period which will follow the liquidation of anthropocentric humanism, it will indeed be the fruit of all the hidden work which will have been done in this direction, and which

it is demanded of Christians of this time to pursue with a

holy energy, and with a great patience. Is it not a self-evident proposition, i.e., one that is known by the sole inspection of

its terms, that in the end it is the most patient who will conquer?

Vil THE MORE IMMEDIATE FUTURE

I. ON POLITICAL

ACTION

On Political Action with Immediate Objective However the case may be with the distant perspectives, certain questions arise concerning the attitude which men conscious of the temporal task of Christianity and anxious to

act in the temporal domain need to take in our day—let us say, if you will, in order to render by an approximation the cives praeclari of the old philosophers, the enlightened political elements. It is essential to my purpose, first of all, to distinguish between what I may call a political action with an immediate

objective and a political action with a distant objective. I call political action with immediate objective a political action which, even if it seeks to work for a very vast future,

determines itself as action and measures its élan with respect to a proximate realization which serves as its point of aim. If now it is true that, by the fact of its interior vices and

denials, our present regime of civilization is enclosed in irremediable contradictions and evils, it seems that a politics

with immediate

objective, a politics suspended to the im256

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mediate future and which places its directly determining end in proximate realizations, has a choice between three kinds of

medication: a medication of preservation, which in order to maintain civil peace will content itself with the lesser evil and will have recourse to palliatives; a draconian medication which will claim to save immediately the sick world by a proximate revolution inaugurating the Communist dictatorship of the proletariat; and a draconian medication which will put its hope in a proximate revolution or defensive reflex ac-

tion leading to a totalitarian recasting of the national State. It is possible that at certain moments and in certain coun-

tries, the first method may accommodate itself to modification by the second or the third (which, moreover, resemble one another very much, except in this that the second gives precedence to the proletarian community in making over the existing political city, the third to the existing political city over the proletarian community in the making). But it does not seem that the politically qualified heads of whom I am speaking would rally easily to one or the other. Does not the first seem to suffer from the miseries of empiricism and opportunism, and like all day-to-day politics does it not presuppose the acceptance of the existing regime of civilization? Is not the

second bound up with an expressly atheistic philosophy and mystique, and does it not expose the person, family society,

and the national community to the dangers of such a mystique? Does not the third (without speaking of the obstacles in fact which, like the second, it would bring to the

effective unfolding of a Christian political activity) demand the amendment of certain evils of the present regime at the

aggravation of other evils, and is it not totalitarian like the second and does it not run the risk of annihilating one of the first conditions for the inauguration of a vitally Christian temporal order, I mean the possibility of that return to Christen-

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dom of the working masses on the march toward their social coming of age, which was a question in the preceding chapter? Faced with these major difficulties it may come about that

our cives praeclari will be tempted to fall back upon what is still a temporal activity, but one that rises above the diversities of political parties (because it is concerned only with the incidences of the temporal and of the spiritual, and only indirectly touches on political life properly so called), I mean upon the strictly limited terrain of the temporal defense of religious interests and religious liberties, however it may be

with the rest. Such activity is certainly indispensable, it is necessary; it is not sufficient. It imperatively requires the Christian; he must

not limit himself

to it. He must

not

absent himself from any domain of human action, he is needed everywhere. He must work at once—inasmuch as he is a Christian—on the plane of religious action (which is in-

directly political), and—inasmuch as he is a member of the spiritual community—on the plane of action which is properly and directly temporal and political.

On Political Action at Long Range But how, then, will he do this? Well, I hold that it is to a

political action with distant objective or at long range that our cives praeclari are invited. This would be neither a medi-

cation of preservation nor a draconian medication; it would be perhaps a heroic medication. Note, when we speak of the realization of a Christian-

temporal historic ideal, these words must be well understood. A concrete historical ideal will never be realized as a term,

as a thing which is fulfilled (of which we can say: “There, that is done, now we can take our rest’), but as movement,

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as a thing in the making and ever requiring to be made (as a living being, once born, continues to make itself). When will the “realization” of this ideal, its “inauguration” take

place? When it crosses the dividing line of historical existence, when it is born into historical existence, when it begins to be recognized by the common conscience and to play the

motive role in the work of social life. Previously it was in preparation, afterwards it will continue to be in the making.

I have already drawn attention to the difference between a utopia and a concrete historical ideal (see pp. 127-128). A utopia is precisely a model to be realized as an end and a rest-

ing-place—and it cannot be realized. A concrete historical ideal is a dynamic image to be realized as a movement and a line of force, and it is exactly as this that it is realizable. Hence,

we see, its realization may be far off and yet serve in the present as an aim, and govern during what may be a very long period of preparation an action at each moment proportionate at once to the future goal and to the present circumstances. This is what I am calling a political action at long range. It alone enables us to escape the antinomies pointed out a

moment ago. Political cities, existing national communities, are other than the regime of civilization in which they are set at such-and-such an epoch—it is an essential distinction, and

our enlightened political elements can neither sacrifice them to the abolition of the present regime of civilization, nor sactifice to them the inauguration of a regime of civilization less

unworthy of the human being. The problem that poses itself for them, and which is insoluble for every politics with immediate objective, is to lead—by

means

of the profound

changes, the reshaping of structures required for this, and also the diminutions of sovereignty which are necessary for the es-

tablishment of a veritable international temporal community —the existing political cities through the vicissitudes and the

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dissolution of the present regime to a new regime of civilization, fundamentally different from the present regime because refracting effectively in the socio-temporal the exigencies of the Gospel. Let us suppose therefore that there be formed—and this seems to me to be eminently desirable—not a political party with a religious label as was the German Centrum,* but one

or several political groups of political and truly political denomination and specification (which implies a certain con-

cretely determined view of the temporal common good as such) and authentically Christian in spirit; I say several groups, for on this plane men united by the same religious

faith can very well differ, and oppose one another. If the considerations which I have presented here are correct, those of these groups which would be founded on a sound political philosophy and a sound philosophy of modern history would apply themselves to a political action at

long range, which, instead of hypnotizing itself on the present moment, would reckon on duration, and take into account

the time of maturation necessary for an integral humanist renewal of the temporal order.

It would be practiced from right now. It would not ignore the present necessities of the social body; it is an obligation to provide for the present necessities of men, those that are right before our eyes and will not wait. This obligation nevertheless does not mean that we should sacrifice everything to present necessities; and, for example, in full battle, a general

thinks more of the final victory than of the immediate suffer-

ings of his soldiers. How then to provide for the necessities of the present without compensating one evil by another evil, or without too heavily burdening the future? By measures which, while serving the common good, bring about and prepare transformations more and more profound, and which, 1 Cf. J. Maritain, Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, Ch. III.

THE MORE IMMEDIATE FUTURE

261

if they require patience, if they can only, before the liquida-

tion of the present regime, seem to be palliatives, are in reality more than palliatives and transcend both empiricism

and opportunism, because they prepare positively a new tegime of civilization. This is how the political action of which I am speaking would proceed in this regard, advancing by stages, proposing and, in the measure to which it would succeed in directing events, executing its “plans” of approach

and its own programs, specified by the end to which they are ordered. But this end would be an end at long distance. Master foresters work for a future state of their forests which is calculated precisely but which neither their eyes nor those of

their children will ever see. In the same way it is in relation to a distant end that the political action in question measures its élan; it is in precise realizations, but at a long distance of

time, that its directly determining end itself consists, and it is in function of this end that it orders all the rest.

Christians and Political Activity To avoid any misunderstanding, let us note carefully here that there is a very sharp distinction to be drawn between the

notion of political activity exercised (and legitimately exercised) by Christians, and that of political activity (dependent on one school or another) Christianly inspired. It is not the former idea which is the theme of these reflections. If we consider the political activity effectively exercised on the political plane by men who in the religious order are

Christians, we are faced by a question of fact, and all is then reduced to two observations: the first is that, with regard to

the established political regime, whether it be old or new and

whatever be its characteristic tendencies, and even if it en-

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tirely fails to correspond to the Christian temporal ideal or more or less gravely goes against it, the Pauline principle of

the respect and loyal service due in conscience to the authority which has charge of the common good, will in fact (however

propitious or unpropitious may be the diverse circumstances proposed by way of minor proposition to the practical reason) lead a more or less large number of Christians to accept public offices and to give thus to this regime, with a view to the good of the country, an active and devoted personal collabora-

tion. And this (as well as the opposition to it) is a normal thing. The question of the legitimate nature of the regime must evidently, in certain cases, come up; but most often, par-

ticularly in an epoch like the modern one, the empiric consideration of the lesser evil will settle the question; and even if the regime is disputed, even if it be tyrannical, it is probable that there will always be found a greater or less number who will decide the issue in its favor, for reasons which are valid

for their consciences. The second observation is that—with respect to the political parties and the diverse political formations in activity in the world, and being given, on the one hand, the very com-

plex synthesis of truths and of duties to which the Christian conscience

feels itself obliged; on

the other, the extreme

variety of aspects of political problems, and above all the fierce divisions made by the parties, each of which more or less misunderstands very high values affirmed by the other—the prevalence of one or another aspect according to the families of minds, the professional situations, the social categories, etc., will result in Christians being found in the most diverse political formations, often the most contradictory ones, sup-

posing always that their conscience has not decided that to adhere to such-and-such a formation would be to cooperate with what is evil.

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If it is a question after that of giving rules and precepts for the formation of the Christian conscience, in other words, if

one is considering the de jure question of the political activity morally permitted to Christians, it is to the Church of Christ to give these rules and these precepts and to particularize

them according to the case, I say to the teaching Church, and without anyone—cleric or layman—having authority to increase them of his own right. All that which I have just recalled remains outside the problems which I am treating here. They do not formulate themselves with respect to the political activity effectively exercised by Christians, in other words with respect to a question which essentially interests religion, in its relation with

politics. They concern a much narrower question, one that situates itself essentially in the field of politics itself and of political philosophy; what they are concerned with is the question of a political activity which, insofar even as political, is Christianly inspired, and ordered to a Christian temporal ideal; in other words, the question of what must be, in the conditions of the modern age, a just political activity in the

eyes of the Christian philosopher of culture and of society; and the answer proposed does not claim to be the only possible one, for there can be on this point as on many others, diversity of philosophical schools; it refers to a certain cultural conception, one which seems to me to be just, and which cor-

responds to what I have called an integral humanism. The political activity in question, I have often explained, does not need all Christians, nor only Christians: but only those Christians who have a certain philosophy of the world,

of society and of modern history; and such non-Christians as recognize more or less completely the cogency of this philosophy.

It is normal that on the plane of action these men should

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constitute autonomous political formations; only in certain exceptional cases would this mean that they would refuse on principle to cooperate with the established regime, or to con-

clude agreements with other political formations

and to

collaborate with them. But it is important that they preserve

at the same time the germ of a vitally Christian politics against all that which would run the risk of impairing it. “The more fragile and hidden and contested this germ still is, the more of intransigence and firmness one must devote to keeping it

pure.”* They will therefore have to maintain always their independence and their freedom of movement: because they will envisage their collaborations, their alliances, and their accords—as also their whole political activity and their deepest temporal engagements—in function of the politics at long

range, which I have just tried to characterize.

The Proper Exigencies of a Politics Centered on the Future Every authentic revolution presupposes that one has begun one day to turn away from the present and, in a sense, to despair of it. To transfer the specifying ends of one’s activity onto a state incompatible with the principles of the present

state, to carry in oneself this future which can only be born of an essential rupture, and to take care first of all of it, and fur-

ther to take care of the present in relation to it, to prepare it by all suitable means—doctrinal elaboration, action on minds, social and cultural works, political action—this is the first rudiment of a revolutionary attitude in the widest and most legitimate sense of this word.

In regard to those who would like to add to the list of civic *J. Maritain, Lettre sur l’Indépendance, p, 51.

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duties a sort of duty of civil war, and to constrain each one

of us to choose between contrary illusions of immediate temporal salvation (although comparable on many points), the men who will take this attitude will perhaps seem to make a scission, but it is not they who will have willed this appear-

ance, and it is only an appearance. For there is indeed here without doubt a certain separation, but only in the measure in which the present state of the world ceases to furnish the aim, and the determining objective; there is here no scission,

there is here no retrenchment or secession, there is only a refusal to sacrifice the future to the present (and nothing is

more truly human), there is conversion toward a term and concentration on a center which is not the present order but

a new Christendom which asks to be long prepared and ripened. Truth to tell, there is nothing more scandalous and, in a

sense, more revolutionary (for this is revolutionary even in regard to revolution) than the belief in a politics intrinsically

Christian by its principles, its spirit, its modalities, and the claim to proceed in this world to a vitally Christian political action. But the man conscious of these things knows that the first way to serve the temporal common good is to remain faithful to the values of truth, justice, and love, which are

its principal element. He knows that after the season of the concentration of vegetative energies comes the time of germination and the glorious expansion of life. And with as much

ardor as the disciples of Proudhon or Marx guarding and hatching within them (at the price of the necessary refusals) the future of their revolution, he guards, he nourishes in his soul and in his action the germ and the ideal of the new civilization which we—each according to his measure—are

called to prepare in time and for time, for the terrestrial his-

tory of this poor earth.

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II. PROBLEMS OF TODAY “What Should A Do?”

Certain critics* have reproached me with not formulating a tule of conduct for A, for not telling “the individual Catholic as such” what he should do hic et nunc. My reply is that the conduct of Catholics as such is a question for the Church, and that moreover it is not the business of philosophers to propose instructions. Also, if A asks what he should do, B

will ask the same thing, and who will assure us that A and B should have the same form of activity? Each has his particular gifts, his own situation and significance in the context of existence. And the law of the division of labor is as imperative in socio-temporal activity as in other activities. Moreover, my reflections bear on the times in which we

are and into which we are entering, rather than on the present moment and on “what should be done” at the present moment.* Between the moment when an author gives the “passed 8 In particular, Charles Smyth in Christendom; this polemic has had interesting echoes in Colosseum and in Blackfriars. ““What should A do?” Smyth

asks; and thereupon he reproaches me with preaching, in my book Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, “‘a sanctified detachment.” I thought that I had made myself sufficiently clear on this matter, but it is necessary to believe that for certain readers “the famous

French

clarity’—at least when

it concerns

philosophical questions—is indeed, in effect, “a smokescreen” concealing impenetrable obscurities. A distinguished and sanctified detachment is, in my eyes, the very contrary of a Christian attitude; it is to the exigencies of an engaged freedom that the Christian

is held, but it is not sufficient to say

“Mucking in”; we must also say what the world expects of us there. *1I have indicated elsewhere that in the order of political action, it was the constitution of a “third party” which seemed to me principally required at the moment when this book was written (1934-1936). In what concerns this third party, “which must not be regarded as a party disputing the field with other parties, but as a great gathering together of men of good will” sweeping away conventional prejudices and ideologies and applied to a positive work of social and international justice, acting in liaison with professional groups and disposed, whatever may be the political preferences of the one or of the other, to collaborations useful to the common good

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and to the success of the experiments undertaken by the country, “supporting and raising up reform measures at each instant realizable, and bearing always, whatever may be the fluctuations and the vicissitudes of the movement of political life, toward that which serves truly justice and peace” (Maritain, Lettre sur l'Indépendance, p. 38), it is clear that, aroused above all by the threat of civil war and in opposition to it, such a gathering together would have belonged to the “medications of preservation” of which it was a question in the preceding section, in this sense that it would have aimed above all at guarding against the most pressing perils by remedies of urgency and at maintaining civil peace. Moreover, the very work of transformation or of profound revolution of our regime of culture requires, in order to be brought to a successful issue, that a

sufficient delay in which the world can catch its breath permit new teams to form, and youth to try its chances. The engendering of a world to be born marks the death of the old world, although it is necessary that the latter not die too soon, or from an infection which would let it transmit to its heir nothing but tares.

In speaking of the third party I am saying that which, according to my mind, would have been, because the more time advances without the initiative

of such a gathering together being taken, the more the latter loses its chances. (It has entirely lost them after the great crisis of the Second World War.) To tell the truth it is the absence of political education of certain levels of the population which seems here principally responsible: many of those who would have made the force of the third party having thrown themselves on the contrary into one of the camps which divide today the masses, or into formations without political consistency or comprehension of the real conditions of the unity of the country, and which resembled only in an illusory manner a gathering together of the type described above. The fact remains that, if it is possible to spare France, menaced in other

respects by so many external perils, the eventuality of a crisis of civil war, or of a Communist crisis, or of a crisis of dictatorship, the impartial observer perceives in any case no other way to attempt this than the politics which the third party would have pursued, and which as such imposes itself on all reasonable minds: a politics in accord with the instincts of freedom, of initiative, and of good sense of a population of which, despite the excitations of the press and of the parties, the spirit of measure remains on the whole a characteristic trait—until the moment when it loses control of itself and passes under

the conduct of a violence drunk with logic. In what measure—so long at least as party passions have not provoked convulsions in which the elementary reflexes alone have place—will the spontaneous movements of good sense and the national feeling, the devotion and the personal activity of the men who have truly the understanding of the public good, be able to take the place with regard to such a politics of the work of the third party? Facts alone will give the answer to that question. ; The third party was a solution of circumstance, to my mind necessary ten years ago, the absence of which has cost dearly. The political groupings of

denomination and specification truly and really political, and of intrinsically Christian inspiration, of which it was a question in my Lettre sur l’Indépendance and to which I return here, answer to other necessities more organic and more profound, and presuppose another personnel and other leaders. But with them it is neither the recent past nor the present moment; it is a future more or less distant that one has to consider. (1936-1946)

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for press” of his book and the moment when his book appears, the present moment has a chance, especially in the

epoch in which we live, of having become unrecognizable. Indeed, it is the pressure of the necessities of the hour which most often dictates to men what they should do; sometimes it dictates this to them very badly, and in any case in an unforeseen manner.

In the second part of this chapter, what I should like in considering the present historical period in its general traits is to make more precise that which I have said elsewhere concerning the activities that there is reason to expect, I believe, from Christian initiatives on the temporal and political plane, in other words, to determine more closely the physiognomy of the new political formations whose eventuality has been envisaged in the preceding section.

Catholic Action and Political Action

Let me recall at once that it is on the strictly temporal plane that I remain and that if I naturally address Christians because I am a Christian myself, it is not Christians only whom

I address, nor Christians

insofar as Christians;

but

Christians and non-Christians who, in the order of the philosophy of culture and society, hold as founded on reason the conceptions which I group here under the name of integral humanism. The considerations that I am proposing concern therefore an altogether different plane from that of what, since the initiatives of Pope Pius XI, Catholics of the different countries know under the appellation Catholic action, which belongs essentially to the religious and apostolic order (see Appendix). If it has been said that Catholic action should lead to political action and prepare the solution of social problems, it is

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in the degree to which it belongs to it to shape, in the midst of their respective temporal communities, Catholics firmly and fully instructed in the common doctrine of the Church,

notably in social matters, and able to cause to pass into life an authentically Christian inspiration. But it would be to confuse the spiritual and the temporal to imagine that the common doctrine of the Church suffices in itself to resolve the conflicts of temporal history and to provide the concretely determined solutions which men have need of hic et nunc.

Beneath this doctrinal sky, a social and political philosophy, and practical elaborations, are necessary. And it is the same in the sphere of action. It is important here to guard against taking up old errors in

new forms. If the mediaeval Church directly formed and shaped political Europe, it was because it had the task then to make the temporal order emerge from chaos: a superadded task which it could not refuse, but to which it did not resign itself from the very beginning without legitimate apprehension. Today the temporal organism exists, and highly differ-

entiated. It is not to the Church but to Christians as temporal members of this temporal organism that the transformation and regeneration according to the Christian spirit belongs in a direct and immediate manner. In other words, it does not

belong to the clergy to hold the controls of properly temporal and political action. The proper task of Catholic Action, as it does not cease to proclaim through its authorized organs, is

to create an essentially Christian state of mind, and it is only when “politics touches the altar” that it has to intervene (by a sort of modern adaptation of the old potestas indirecta’)

on the political plane. In the order of strictly temporal, social, and political activities, it is normal that the initiative 5 Cf. Msgr. Paul Richaud, Notions sommaires sur l’'action catholique (Panis: Spes, 1936), p. 47; and the collection of papal texts published and commented on by the Abbé Georges Guerry in L’Action Catholique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936).

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come from below—I mean from laymen acting at their own risks and perils.

Necessity of New Political Formations It seems normal, and inevitable, that to new social and political conceptions there correspond appropriate organs of action. The awakening of Christian conscience to the strictly

temporal, social, and political problems implied in the inauguration of a new Christendom will entail, I hold, the birth of new temporally and politically specified political formations, whose inspiration will be intrinsically Christian. These new political formations should, to my mind, be conceived as temporal fellowships of an entirely new type—which would be purely secular, as opposed to religious Orders like the

military or hospitaler Orders of former times, and which would posit as a principle, respect for the person and the spiritual force of evangelical love, as opposed to a secular but atheistic Order such as, for instance,

the Communist

Party today;

they would devote themselves to a long and exacting work of transformation, which requires, together with much spirit of sacrifice, the difficult renewal of means which has on various

occasions been referred to in this book. ‘They would be in the beginning, clearly, minority formations, acting as ferments

and depending on the initiatives of a small number. In a sense, one wishes their birth immediate, for later the external

circumstances could render it singularly more difficult; to consider however the internal preparations required, it is clearly desirable only for the moment when the spiritual and

doctrinal conditions of it will have been sufficiently assured, and when there will rise up in new generations personalities really called to such a work. Rough drafts can already be

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formed of it; this is visible for whoever follows with attention

the signs of new germinations; “even now, and in the most unpromising conditions, and with the awkwardness of first attempts, the first steps have been taken.”* The work itself will take time to appear. The new political formations of which I am speaking presuppose indeed a profound spiritual revolution; they can come to existence only as one of the expressions of the resurrection of religious forces which will take place in hearts. They presuppose also a vast and multiform work of preparation, in the order of thought and in that of action, of propaganda and of organization. They presuppose

the penetration

of new

conceptions into the worker and peasant world, for it is from the midst of proletarian élites collaborating with the “intellectuals” that they must arise. If A asks what he must do,

he will find in all this enough to employ his talents.

Historic Situation of These New Formations

Let us imagine that these new political formations have come into existence.

In the order of movement and action, they could clearly, as any political entity, contract all the alliances, pacts, or

momentary accords which would seem to them required by

the circumstances; the French monarchy allied itself formerly

with the Ottoman power and with heretical princes; the Holy See has never been afraid to sign concordats with States very far from practicing Christian maxims. It is a question here of opportunities of the moment; and they are subject to an ethical rule, but this does not mean 8 J, Maritain, Lettre sur ’Indépendance, p. 52.

that it is necessary to

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deal only with men whose ideas and conduct one approves;

it means that the object for which one works must be an intrinsically good concrete effect, and not compromise greater goods, I mean

in the concrete future of history, and if one

considers the concrete connections of the forces at play (see pp. 218-219). But another question, at once more general and more

fundamental, can be posed apropos of the new formations envisaged here: it is that of the effective situation which would be theirs, in the concrete structure of history, vis-d-vis Fascist

or racist totalitarianism and vis-d-vis Communism, supposing in other respects the doctrinal positions which the analyses contained in the present work have defined. Their concrete situation (and therefore their practical attitude) with regard to Communist forces and with regard to forces which, for lack of an appropriate generic name, I will call “Fascist” (Italian Fascism representing the first mode

under which certain fundamentally common, but very differently specified, energies have manifested themselves in history) would be, to my mind, primarily determined by the following dominants or conditions of fact: on the one hand, the diverse sorts of Fascism are all, by virtue of their original tendency and of their statism, opposed to the historic ideal in

which these political formations would see their specifying end, and opposed to the existential base and to the primordial

necessity which they would recognize—I mean, by this “existential base” the movement which carries history toward a substantial mutation in which the “fourth estate” will accede (under a favorable or unfavorable sign—that still greatly depends on the human will) to ownership, to a real freedom, and to a real participation in the economic and political enterprise; and, by this “primordial necessity” I mean the historic necessity of the “reintegration of the masses” into a civilization which is Christian in spirit. On the other hand,

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Communism certainly recognizes the existential base in question, but while falsifying the concept of it because of its erroneous philosophy of man and society, and falsifying as a result the direction to be imprinted on the evolution; there where our new political formations would proclaim the primordial necessity of reintegrating the masses into a civiliza-

tion which is Christian in spirit, it affirms the necessity of integrating them into a civilization atheistic in spirit; there where they would recognize that it is necessary in a large

measure to collectivize the economy in order to permit the person to lead a supracollective life, it undertakes to collec-

tivize it totally and in such a manner that the entire life of the human being finds itself also collectivized. Thus it is the very aim and raison d’étre of the whole movement which are falsified in one case, the historic base

(and the aim) which are rejected in the other. The basic opposition of the new political formations of which I am speaking to the two contrary forms of politico-social totali-

tarianism would therefore depend in part on the same theoretical reasons (concerning above all the dignity and the liberty of the human person, and the values which are proper to him), but in part also on dissimilar but equally pressing reasons of concrete situation. Hence it follows that accords

with one or the other forces could be envisaged only with regard to objectives which are not only limited but neutral, or have only a “material” significance. As soon as the “formal” enters into play, that is to say, the specifying and animating

element of the action, it is their fundamental independence and irreducibility which the new political formations would, above all, have to affirm. If, in particular, in face of a Com-

munist dynamism already powerfully developed, they did not always maintain their independence and their freedom of

movement, they would run the risk, after having brought for a moment a romantic stimulation and the freshness of a

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mystical humanism to allies of a day, of being reabsorbed or devoured by them, as happened in Russia to the non-Marxist elements which had at first rallied to Lenin in the name of the spiritual revolution. For, in good revolutionary practice, the friend of yesterday becomes quickly the enemy of today, and the most hated. But then, caught between Fascism and Communism, what

would be the destiny of the new formations of which I am speaking? Minority formations—would they not inevitably be crushed by the triumph of the one or the other? Things are not quite so simple as that. There would be

chances—and in such a matter what more can one wish for than chances?—for these minority formations, if they existed, of becoming in some countries sufficiently strong, I do not say to cease to be a minority (any more than the other parties

themselves with which I am comparing them), but to take the initiative of the operations’ (and perhaps to act on Com-

munism itself, and to incline it not only to extend to Christians a Godless hand, but to deliver itself from the atheism

which is the root of its other errors). Here it is necessary to take into account the aspirations of a despairing world for something that is really new and both better and more human * The activity of these formations would be, moreover, it seems, the best

means of escaping the singular suppleness of the Leninist methods, which put Christians in the alternative either of collaborating with Communism for certain proximate

and particular temporal ends good in themselves,

but in

letting themselves be led or digested by it, or of refusing such a collaboration in letting pass occasions perhaps privileged of acting for the good of men, and in appearing to manifest bad will. It goes without saying that, in the domain of works of assistance, limited collaborations, such as those which the ecclesiastical authority has permitted in certain cases between parish priests and Communist municipalities for help to the unemployed, have not the inconvenience pointed out here. But, in general, the question for Christians, strictly speaking, is not so much to accept or to refuse the collaborations proposed by the Communists, as to guard in any case their liberty, and to accomplish themselves in the social order their own obligations of justice and of fraternal friendship, and to work for their part for the birth of a new order. And this even is of a nature to knock down many prejudices, and perhaps to change notably certain psychological situations.

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than the existing forces, and where the deep vital claims, and the great irrational energies which the sorrow of the generations causes to pass into the men of today, would find at last a form of truth. Evil and error are of themselves versatile, not

having roots in being. And the moment approaches perhaps when men, having put all the hope of their heart in the glamour of matter and being dreadfully deceived, will cry out for the truth. In what concerns more particularly my own country, the historical vocation of a nation such as France must also be taken into account. No one can ever act there except in the

name of liberty. More even than the illusory liberties invoked by bourgeois liberalism, and by the parties of personal dictatorship and the parties of collective dictatorship, true free-

dom can move the great instincts of the heart of France—and by this true freedom I mean at once the suprapolitical freedom to which the human person tends, and the social and political liberties whose collective organization he needs for this destination from the very beginning. But, in the end, the fact remains that the coming of a totalitarian regime, be it dictatorial or Communist,

would

have as result the legal annihilation of every independent political formation. This risk is undeniable. It does not signify that the formations of which I am speaking would thereby be

suppressed out of effective existence, and that they would have no chance of passing through the meshes of a tyrannical regime of whatever kind.

Fascist T otalitarianisms and Communist Totalitarianism

And now, supposing that nothing is done, and that a pollitics of Christian inspiration does not come into existence, or

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shows itself feeble and impotent, or deviates on the way, it seems hardly avoidable that the peoples who are still ignorant of the benefits of the totalitarian regimes will pass under regimes of this kind—Fascist or Communist—in forms more or less violent, attenuated, or mingled with other elements.

By virtue of a reflex automatism, which is not human but mechanical,

Communism

rouses

and nourishes

defense

re-

actions of a Fascist or racist type, and these in their turn rouse

and

nourish

Communist

defense

reactions,

so that

these two multitudinary forces grow in simultaneous opposi-

tion: the one and the other making of hatred a virtue,® the one and the other vowed to war, a war of nations or a war of

classes, the one and the other claiming for the temporal community the messianic love with which the Kingdom of God should be loved; the one and the other bowing men down before some inhuman humanism, the atheist humanism of the

dictatorship of the proletariat, or the idolatrous humanism of Caesar, or the zoological humanism of blood and race.*® But Communism appears as an erroneous system which at once stimulates and deforms a process given positively in ex-

istence: the process of historical “generation and corruption” 8 “This victory will be preceded . . . by a universal class hatred with regard to capital. That is why Christian love, addressing itself to all, even to the enemy, is the worst adversary of Communism”

(Bukharin, Pravda, March 30,

1934). “There is a virtue which must be your stimulant, which must be the flame of your youth, and the name of this virtue is hatred” (Professor Bodrero, to the students of Padua). “Yes, gentlemen, to hate one’s enemies and to love

intensely one’s friends. Not to hate, or worse still, to love one’s enemies is a form of cowardice which no principle which tends to a durable and serious victory can accept” (Scorza, chief of the Fascist Youth, Giovent& Fascista, Apmil, 1931; in response to an article of Osservatore Romano where it was said that “hatred, a Fascist virtue, is not a Christian virtue”). ® Cf. Charles Journet, “L’Eglise et les Communautés totalitaires,” Nova et Vetera, October-December, 1935. © On this notion of race, which does not correspond in anthropology, for present-day humanity, to any anatomo-physiological reality, to any unity of “blood,” but only to a “psychological unity,” to a typical mentality due to historical and social conditions, see the recent work of P. Lester and J. Millot,

Les Races humaines (Paris, Armand Colin, 1936).

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in virtue of which a new civilization (to which it depends, in great part, on human liberty to give a moral physiognomy

or some other kind of physiognomy) will be posited outside

the—broken—shapes of bourgeois civilization. On the contrary, it is as a defense reflex at once against this existential process and against Communism that the different kinds of

“Fascism” they tend maintain capitalist

have been constituted from the very beginning; therefore, by virtue of their original principle, to the development of history within the forms of civilization, while carrying to a revolutionary in-

tensity certain defense reactions that have arisen from the disturbances of the latter, and while having recourse in a large measure to State Socialism; and they can only nourish

their moral and emotional dynamism on the historical retrospection of certain ideal forms of the past (the Roman empire of the Caesars for Italian Fascism, the mythical world of primitive Germanism for German national-socialism, the Holy Empire for the dictatorships of the Catholic type).

I have already pointed out that they are very differently specified, and it would be very wrong not to recognize these differences, which often involve formal oppositions, not only of interests, but of spirit; while both imply the suppression of political and civic liberty, for the profit of an “authoritarian

democracy” and of the dictatorship of a master, Italian Fascism springs from a more highly political mode of civilization 11] mention only in passing these last kinds of dictatorships, because they stand in the background of history: in effect, historical conditions limit the

possibility of them to exceptional cases like that of Portugal; on the other hand, and especially, the spirit and the dynamism proper to Fascist totalitarianism are attenuated in them in a measure more or less large, which gives them a higher moral value, but deprives them to this extent of expansive energy. The dictatorship of M. Salazar, which is undoubtedly the most intelligent of the dictatorships presently existing, keeps itself carefully on guard against the totalitarian spirit of a Mussolini or a Hitler, but it is also the one in which the character construction of reason is the most marked; the army

and the military chiefs have been up till now the sole effective support of this dictatorship.

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than National Socialism, whose telluric force, on the other

hand, stirs wp much richer instincts of elementary life and sensibility; its totalitarianism even has undergone forcibly certain mitigations.!2 Nevertheless, despite their specific diversity, the different kinds of Fascism have in common funda-

mental generic characteristics, notably those which I have just indicated.

While Fascist or racist totalitarianism thus rouses and employs powerful irrational forces, which assure it a great historical energy (and which tap for its benefit certain authentic human values, such as the instinct of national com-

munity and the love of country), the social and political truths which it invokes—and they are numerous, I am thinking here of the criticism of liberal individualism and of the

fictitious democracy of the nineteenth century, or of the importance accorded to creative tension, or of the direct and “popular” sense of authority, or of the almost vitalist notion

of the community of the people—these truths are doubtless realized in it in successes which can be grandiose, but which

concern particular ends: reform of the State, recoveries of independence and sovereignty, imperial ambitions, righting of national energies or psychic deliverance of the aspirations

of a people; with regard to more universal and deeper historic phenomena which concern the transformations of human civilization, they are only realized in these as entailed in the material process of decomposition and mutation of capitalism without being able to dominate this process, in the absence of an internal creative principle ordered to a higher substantial form; if they appear to nourish human civilizations, it is

a great deal less in the forms of civilizations which invoke them today but which are dehumanized in other respects, 12See below, pp. 281-283. These pages were written in 1936. The verbs should now be in the past tense.

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than in the retrospections which I spoke of a moment ago.

In order that there should succeed to capitalist civilization in decadence a new world superior to Communism, nothing less is required than the personalist and integral humanist principle in its widest significance, nothing less than the energies of spiritual and social resurrection of which man does not become capable by the grace of the State, but by a

love which vivifies his freedom as a person, and which fixes the center of his life infinitely above the State. It follows from all these considerations that the Fascist or racist totalitarian regimes cannot grasp what is most funda-

mental in the movement of history, to impress on it—which is impossible if one denies the principle of the person and of freedom*—a truly human and liberating direction. Hence they will, it seems, be led, on the one hand, to orient their

own internal evolution in a direction more and more close to the Communist morphology (of which it seems certain tendencies of the extreme Left of Italian Fascism are witness); on the other hand, in order to carry their tension of defense

to the maximum of violence and efficacy, to develop an ethnic or national imperialism and a politics of prestige which will

shake to the very foundations that which subsists of European common civilization, and to disorganize more and more profoundly (as is only too tragically apparent in Germany) the

internal structures of civilization which are at once the most delicate and the strongest, and which constitute precisely the most

fundamental

obstacle

to an implantation

of Com-

13 am speaking of freedom in the pure and simple sense, i.e., of the freedom, suprasocial in itself, of the human person. I am well aware that Fascism, and Communism likewise, and even National Socialism, appeal to freedom; and there is, in fact, in these diverse regimes a certain freedom,

more

real

perhaps than that of bourgeois liberalism, but it is a freedom secundum quid, the freedom, immanent in social life, of the initiatives that surge up from the bosom of the groups composing the temporal community or the State. It is

not from this freedom secundum quid that the energies of resurrection of which I speak arise.

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munism, because they concern the world of the soul and of freedom, and are bound up with the moral values inherited from Christianity.**

By virtue of this double process, the Fascist or racist regimes seem destined in the midst of capitalist civilization, not by

dissolution and discouragement but by excess of tension and of stiffening, to lead the nations of old Western culture to the requisite point for some Communist or imitation-communist experience, sprung from Fascist or racist totalitarianism itself, or produced against it,® unless they do not lead them simply to mutual destructions which would deliver Europe over to

the conquering enterprises of other continents. They claim, as on the other side Soviet Communism, to bring to the world new forms of civilization: it would be rash to deny that this may be possible; neither do I wish to prejudge unforeseeable evolutions which can take place under the pressure of the necessities of existence and of the natural energies of the human being. The question is for us to know if these new civilizations, in which good mingles with evil, as in every terrestrial thing, merit in either case the name of human civilizations, i.e., which reach the very heart of man not only

to make use of it and to burn up its reserves of heroism and *4“Ttalian and German politicians and publicists point to democracy as the first step to Bolshevism, and it must be admitted that a democracy, like the

European, which has been misunderstood and misused, may well deserve this accusation, but the present-day European nationalism is no ‘bulwark against Bolshevism’; on the contrary, it is the last step on the way to Bolshevism. .. . The idea of applying Soviet principles to Europe is absurd, but the increasing distress of the European people caused by the application of false national principles will increase the danger of a Communistic revolution to such an extent that the absurdity will become a fact. Events will prove this within a few years in some countries, within decades in others” (Ludwig Freund, The Threat to European Culture [London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935], pp. 110-121). * Inversely, it seems that Communist totalitarianism is led, in the degree to which it takes shape as a national State, to borrow certain traits from Fascism, whereas, on the other hand, it accentuates to the maximum

opposes it culturally to National Socialism.

all that which

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of exaltation, but to raise up there stable formations of virtues, and to create in the conscience and in society structures

which are vital and progressive, and not merely decorative; and in order to tend of themselves to something other than

pride and war. For the philosopher of history and providing that one takes sufficient account of duration, Fascist or racist

totalitarianism in its different types appears as a historical inevitability attracting in reality Communism or historical misfortunes of like dimensions, because, while reacting against Communism with immediate successes which strike the

imagination, it is incapable of rising higher than it and of discovering the truly human form called for by the movement of history: a discovery which can only come about by an effort of the spirit and of freedom surmounting the determinism of the material forces of evolution.

The Spiritual Bases of the T otalitarian Principle Similar considerations are valid in the spiritual order. One must remark here first of all that declared atheism is not the

only form of resistance to the divine ordinations, of “impiety” in the ancient sense of this word, nor the only form of practical negation of God. There is an atheism which declares that God does not exist and which makes its god of an idol; and there is an atheism which declares indeed that God exists,

but which makes of God himself an idol, because it denies by its acts, if not by its words, the nature and the attributes of God, and His glory; it invokes God, but as a protecting genius attached to the glory of a people or of a State against all others, or as a demon of the race.

I shall be on guard here against falling into an error whose

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gravity I pointed out earlier, and against confusing an abstract principle with the historical realities in which it takes shape.

I know that not only all sorts of political accommodations, but a genuine good faith and good human will and a sincere belief in the true God, and a poorly enlightened devotion for religion, can join in the concrete with the totalitarian principle. I know that the latter can be realized under different modalities, which more or less attenuate or aggravate its malice. It has nevertheless its own exigencies, which the

philosopher has the duty to consider. And doubtless the civil power, since Constantine, has always sought more or less to utilize and to divert for its own ends the Christian religion itself. But let us not be deceived: there is an abyss between these disorders and these deviations, however grave they may be, and the devouring absolute which affirms itself today, and which claims man in his entirety for the temporal community or for the State. It is highly remarkable that even where the words “‘totalitarian State” first came into use, that is, in Italy, the totalitar-

ian principle has been in the sequel half broken by the resistance of the Catholic Church, with which the historical

conditions obliged it to come to terms. Its claiming of man in his entirety for the State found itself, consequently, reduced

of necessity to the human activities of the temporal order— as if man could split himself in two so as to have the State for soul of his soul in the order of temporal life and have, in the order of spiritual life, another soul of his soul.*® Reduced thus

by force (if one can employ a word as contradictory as the thing itself which it designates) to a semitotalitarianism, or, remaining totalitarianism pure and simple,’ political totali16 One finds again here under a modern form the Averroist notion which was raised in the first chapter of this book; see above, pp. 21-22. 17 This is the case with German National Socialism; but here it is less the

totalitarianism of the State than that of the community of the people (unity more biological than political) that must be a question,

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tarianism wishes in any case that the State become the absolutely sovereign reality and the absolutely sovereign regulator of the temporal life of men, and therefore of the acts of con-

science which it implies: “everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State,’”18 and it wishes to inform alone, “soul in the soul,” the energies of the soul

for the conduct of terrestrial life, the only one which matters to it; in virtue of ineluctable logical exigencies, it will there-

fore ask that the spiritual—there at least where it meets the temporal and concerns the conduct of “civil life,’ the order of civilization—integrate itself, in the conscience, with the State’? or with the spirit of the people, and serve them. Considering the totalitarian principle in itself, as historical energy having its own law, it appears thus that this principle en-

velops a fundamental aversion toward Christian ordinations,?° 18 B. Mussolini. ““We are [members] of a State which controls all the forces which act in the bosom of the nation. We control the political forces, we control the moral forces, we control the economic

forces, we are in a full

Fascist corporative State” (Scritti e Discorsi, 1926). “I affirm anew and with no less energy my formula of my speech in the Scala of Milan: everything in

the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State” (ibid., 1927). See also the text cited above, p. 135; and again: “The Fascist State, the highest and most potent form of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It assumes

all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of man. Consequently, it cannot limit itself to the mere functions of guardian of order, as liberalism wanted;

it is not a simple mechanism that the sphere of so-called individual liberties limits. It is form and interior norm, and discipline of the whole person; it penetrates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, the directive inspiration of human

personality joined in society, descends into the depths of

being and makes its nest in the heart of the man of action as well as of the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist: soul in the soul” (Dottrina). “Liberalism puts the State in the service of the individual; Fascism reafirms the State, as the true reality of the individual” (Dottrina). “The State, con-

sidered as universal ethical will, is the creator of right” (Dottrina). Driven back in fact by the counterattack of the Papacy, the dynamism of these ideaforces remains in the Fascist doctrine. It would be easy to find in the National

Socialist texts the testimony of similar totalitarian claims, testimony sometimes still more vehement. 19M. Gentile has expounded clearly all of this in the proper language of his philosophical system; the fact that he has been put in disgrace as official inspirer does not prevent the principles indicated here, and which are independent of Gentilian actualism, from remaining central in the Fascist conception of the State. 20 Cf. Charles Journet, art. cit.

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an aversion which is rendered inefficacious only in the degree to which totalitarianism is efficaciously thwarted by the opposition of religion. ‘There where it does not seek, as under its Communist form, to exterminate the latter, it seeks to annex

it practically by taking possession of consciences; it renders it impossible for them to express a free Christian judgment on

the things of the temporal order, or to undertake in this order a free Christian action; it takes away from them the means of defending moral values in public life; it tends even, insofar as this is in its power, to alter their internal view on good and evil, on the just and the unjust, measured according to the

measure of the State, not according to that of God. Totalitarianism—and therefore the anti-Christianity which I am pointing to here—has undergone indeed in Italy, I was

recalling above, a grave check by reason of the papal intervention of 1931, before the energy of which they had to cede; as in themselves they remain naturally that which they are, it follows that, concretely considered, the form of the State presently existing in Italy appears to the philosopher of his-

tory as that of a totalitarianism inhibited by Catholicism; we are here in the presence of one of those mutual interlockings of two adverse forms, with its advantages and its dangers, the observation of which is so instructive for the historian and for

the philosopher, and which the Catholic Church accepts because it knows that it has God and time on its side. While in Nazi Germany the place recognized in public life to the works

and institutions of the Church and to the apostolate of the faith shrinks more and more and is invaded by persecution on all sides, in Italy it remains very great on the contrary, although the ethic of the State, with its pagan virtues, exercises its pressure against it and only makes to religion the conces-

sions to which it is strictly obliged.” *t The Ballilas have been constrained to concede Sunday to religion and the family. (1936)

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It follows from these analyses that where religious forces, and above all the Catholic Church, do not succeed in holding in check the forms of totalitarianism which claim to protect

God, the real “impiety” of this totalitarianism will develop as a dissolving force preparing in spite of itself an offensive return of open anti-Chnistianity and of open atheism.

On Martyrdom as a Solution If,, through initiatives, g the absence of Christian temporal P things were to come to pass according to the possibilities which I have indicated in the preceding reflections, then the

question posed a while back: What should A do? would have a chance of finding itself singularly simplified. Whether it be under a Fascist totalitarian regime, or a Communist totalitarian one, A will in vain consent to taking part in the game and to collaborating, in order to foment good, in forms of civilization which are more evil than good: if he claims to be

a Christian in existence itself, and above all in temporal existence, he will learn quickly to suffer rather than to act. It is clear that so long as the Christian temporal initiatives and the new formations of which the world has need delay in

appearing, each man can and should work individually to prepare them, and even in a certain sense to substitute for them by his private action.” That, it goes without saying, is the task to be accomplished in any case. But so long as in the properly political, and not private, 22 “We believe that as regards the temporal common good one neglects ordinarily a great deal too much the efficacy of the energies which depend on the life of the person, and of the duties which correspond to them. There is required much vigilance and critical attention in order to resist all the solicitations of hatred or of injustice, to keep one’s spirit free in a time when conven-

tional lies bring pressure to bear on every side, when the press which defends the established order competes in excitations with the revolutionary press,

when one has made of the lie the political arm par excellence, as if in that

domain calumny became a venial sin; there is required much vigilance in order to offer in one’s soul a refuge to the truths despised by men, and to practice,

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order, a Christian temporal action will be lacking in the world, something will be lacking in the organism of Christian activities taken as a whole. The world will gladly undertake to accord the dispensation thus rendered necessary. For men engaged in the world, who find themselves cut off by failures

for which they are not responsible from the “political” strife which is the activity most connatural to the world, martyrdom, invisible or visible, dispensed by the world dispenses from this combat: over him who is dead to time, time loses

its rights. Who knows if, from a long habit of being victims, Chris-

tians do not count unconsciously on this solution? Martyrdom is a solution, but a hyperbolic solution (and, for all those who prepare by their omissions and their torpor the martyrdom of others, a lazy solution). A St. Thomas More would, moreover, have held it presumptuous to brave the glory of being

decapitated for God before having exhausted the other means of terminating honorably his trial. Martyrdom does not suppress, it calls for and fecundates the solutions proportionate

to nature. It will be necessary indeed that one day these should be found.

In envisaging the hypothesis that “nothing would be done,” I had designedly taken things at their worst. I have confidence, indeed, that something is being done and will be done,

and by Christian initiatives. The Christian temporal forces called for by the world are now in the phase of preparation, of in judging the events and the actors of the temporal drama, the truth which the Gospel requires of us. “And this interior vigilance translates itself to the exterior by words and by acts. And each vigilant soul creates thus about it an efficacious radiation of

truth and peace. We hold for certain that if such centers of radiation were numerous throughout the world, many things would change in the political

life of peoples, many

evils would

be rendered

impossible,

many

difficulties

which seem inextricable would find unexpected solutions” (Manifeste pour le Bien Commun [Paris: March, 1934]).

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long-distance preparation; it is impossible that one day they will not issue visibly in the world.

Is the Christian Imprisoned in a Tragedy? If the world purifies Christians by shedding their blood, at the same stroke the blood of Christians will purify the world also.” It is perhaps from this double purification that the new Christendom which must come will be born. Meantime, while the diverse opposed forms of totalitarianism grow in the world, how would the sense of a tragic catas-

trophe not awaken in the Christian? Not to speak here of the other forms of totalitarianism,

which are, as we have seen, primarily reactionary forms, and which,

moreover,

also

envelop

a fundamental

error—the

Christian sees in Communism, carried to an extreme degree of violence, errors which wound cruelly his intelligence and his heart: the will to build a world without God, and to make emerge from life an individual, familial, and social ethics

likewise without God, the radical negation of contemplative values and the affirmation of the fecundity of hate, the eviction of wisdom sacrificed to the idolatry of science, the claim to socialize man in his entirety, a feigned forgetfulness of the

soul and of its destiny, the refusal to recognize in life any sacred reserve, and to conceive that there can coexist with the

temporal community the educative authority over the human 23 “Fven if the Christian lay effort failed to renew the visible structure of the world, another temporal task,” I have written in another essay, “would still be incumbent upon Christianity: that of infusing from within, and as if in secret, a certain sap into the world. Naturally one must suppose also that

this Christian sap will be somewhat bloody” (Du Régime temporel et de la Liberté, op. cit., p. 134). Is it necessary to point out the calumnious use made of this text by certain people, who have imagined that it was a question there of the blood of the adversaries of Christianity?

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being of a supratemporal social body such as the Church. He sees religion hated, antireligious propaganda obstinately put-

sued, or only modified in its methods, despite the offers of collaboration made to believers. He sees a multitude of men made in the image of God offer themselves as molten lead to

the imprint of “materialist” orthodoxy and of atheistic conformism, and obey other men with a joy in submission which is permitted only in regard to God.

But he knows also that in the man who professes them, extreme errors are more evidence of generosity than is lukewarmness, and that many profess these errors only in virtue of an inveterate ignorance, and of a terrible misunderstanding as to the identity of that which they hate: he sees in many

young Communists a hunger and a thirst for justice which does not know its own name; he loves these ardent souls. He

recognizes in the horror of the destructions which threaten

the world, the countenance of the omissions of generations of Christians—of his own omissions; he knows that Communism

is a parasite on a historic movement of emancipation of the human work-force which is at once inevitable and normal in

itself, and of the exigencies of justice which are as it were “the indignant soul of nature,’ and of the truths of Christian origin which have been spoiled by dint of waiting; and that even in making it cry out against God, it is the voice of the poor and of the have-nots that it transmits to our ears; he knows that the poor have never obtained justice—I do not

say of the saints, I say of the mass of men socially taken, Christians as well as non-Christians—except when they have claimed it by force. Nothing of all this diminishes by one iota the gravity of the errors and dangers of Communism.

All of this shows that it is marked with the supernatural sign of the great passages of the sword of God in history, and that in order to be able to surmount it, it is necessary first to con-

quer oneself,

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The Christian is not imprisoned here in a tragedy without issue. The solution, in the spiritual order, the saints have taught him is a love stronger than the powers of hell. In the temporal order, I think that there is also a solution; it can be

found only by going ahead, by accepting the risks of creative freedom, by consenting to that kind of reversal of values which in every sphere will have the real take precedence over the word, and the internal and the substantial over the

external and the apparent; by inaugurating, in the full sense

of the word, a politics intrinsically and existentially Christian; by working here and now, for a future however distant it may be, to prepare a new Christendom, of which the notion of

integral humanism expresses, in my opinion, the distinctive character.

The Course of the World Or do the Christians of today think that Christianity can be lived only on paper, that its energies are so weak that they can do nothing for the earth, that all that remains for us is to

try to please the devils which seem to us a little less evil than the others, in order to obtain from them the favor of a pro-

tection, and that there is nothing to be hoped from a resurrection of the forces of the soul? Have they decided not to understand the epoch they have entered, to refuse their pity to the more than human sufferings which rend the human being abandoned to itself? Hail, then, pestilence and famine!

You are purer than we. In fact, there is no reason to be astonished that in face of a

state of history in which the internal conflicts of the social, in order to be surmounted, would have to be themselves un-

derstood and penetrated in spirit, a certain world of Christian

denomination reacts today rather poorly than well; there is no

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reason to be astonished that there is in its comportment a

very small element of the spiritual, I mean of intuition and of freedom, and a very large element of the social, I mean of reflexes and of mimicries of group or of class colored over with spirituality by good conscience. The statistical laws of human

nature are at play here. But there is no need to be astonished either that Christian civilizations perish like the others; and by the same abandonment to the fatalities of matter.2* New births will come to be. It is also a statistical law that the

difficult discoveries of which the growth of history has the most need take place rarely without the help of the energies

of error and calamity. The purifications which would have saved everything come about then after everything has been ruined, and is beginning to bloom again. Thus goes the course of the world. The same ones who aided the saints to sanctify themselves by torturing them, draw profit from their merits and nourish with the glory of the crucified ones—once one has canonized them—the commonplaces of their eloquence and the prosperity of their

enterprises; and they will not fail to prepare new saints for new sufferings and new canonizations. The worlds which have

arisen in heroism lie down in fatigue, in order that there may come in turn new heroisms and new sufferings, which will

cause other worlds to rise. Human history grows thus, for it is not here a process of repetition, but of expansion and progress: it grows as an expanding sphere, drawing near at one and the same time to its double consummation—in the absolute

from below where man is god without God, and in the absolute from above where he is God in God. 4In his Study of History, Arnold J. Toynbee (leaving out primitive societies) counts twenty-seven distinct civilizations in historic times, of which five survive today.

Appendix fies

eo erakEOreACTON

I In a recent issue of Sept [February 1, 1935], Etienne Gilson has perfectly shown how the activities of the Christian distribute themselves over three distinct planes. I would like further to emphasize this point, because of its great practical importance.

The Plane of the Spiritual and that of the Temporal On a first plane of activity which is the plane of the spiritual in the most typical sense of the word, we act as members

of the Mystical Body of Christ. Whether it be in the order of liturgical and sacramental life, of the work of the virtues or of contemplation, of the apostolate or of the works of mercy, our activity has as its determining object eternal life, God and the things of God, the redemptive work of Christ to be served

in us and in others. This is the plane of the Church itself. On a second plane of activity, which is the plane of the temporal, we act as members of the terrestrial city and as

engaged in the affairs of the terrestrial life of humanity. Whether it be of the intellectual or moral order, scientific 291

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and artistic or social and political, our activity, while always, if it is right, being turned toward God as its final end, has as its direct determining aim goods which are not eternal life, but which concern in a general way the things of time, the work of civilization or of culture. This is the plane of the world.

They Are Clearly Distinct These two planes of activity are clearly distinct, as the

things which are Caesar’s and the things which are God’s. It is clear that the order of redemption, or of the spiritual, or of the things which are God’s, should vivify to its most intimate depths the order of terrestrial civilization, or of the temporal, or of the things which are Caesar’s; but these two orders remain clearly distinct.

They Are Not Separate They are distinct, they are not separate. To abstract from Christianity, to put God and Christ aside when I work at the things of the world, to cut myself into two halves: a Christian

half for the things of eternal life—and for the things of time, a pagan or diminished Christian, or ashamedly Christian, or neutral half, i.e., infinitely weak, or idolatrous of nation or of

race or of the State, or of bourgeois prosperity or of antibourgeois revolution, or of science or of art made into the ultimate end—such a splitting is only too frequent in prac-

tice; it can even serve to characterize a certain epoch of civilization, of which the political philosophy of Machiavelli, the Protestant Reformation (considered in its cultural effects),

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and Cartesian separatism illustrate the beginnings. As soon as one takes note of what it represents in reality, as soon as one transports the formula of it into the light of intelligence, it appears as a properly deadly absurdity.

What you do, says St. Paul, do in the name and in the power of Christ. If grace regenerates us, if it makes each of us a “new man,” is it in order that we should make a bargain with the “old man” who in the temporal will serve Mammon in security of conscience, fortified or exasperated by the con-

solations or the deceptions dispensed by a civil society in itself detached from any connection with the gospel law, whereas in other respects and in the accomplishment of our religious duties we will serve God in peaceful conscience, consoled by the promises of the Church and the comforts of religion? In reality, the justice of the gospel and the life of Christ within us want the whole of us, they want to take possession of every-

thing, to impregnate all that which we are and all that which we do, in the secular as well as in the sacred. Action is an

epiphany of being. If grace takes hold of us and remakes us in the depth of our being, it is so that our whole action should

feel its effects and be illuminated by it.

The Temporal Plane Is Subordinate to the Spiritual Plane What does this mean? I have to deal with two different planes, with two different objects, with two different common goods, the one spiritual, the other temporal. They are different, but the one is by nature subordinate to the other; of itself

the temporal wants to be vivified by the spiritual; the common good of civilization asks of itself to be referred to the com-

mon good of eternal life, which is God. On the one plane and

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on the other, I will do my work well only by having in regard to the object in view the necessary competence

and the

needed instruments; but there even where I act as member

of another city than the Church of Christ, Christian truth

and life should permeate my activity from within, should be the vivifying and rectifying soul of all the material of knowledges and of means of realization which I shall bring into play; whether the object at which I work, such as planting a vineyard or building a house, depends on a technique independent in itself of the Christian faith, or whether it itself,

and however large may be the part of technique tapped by it, is essentially of the ethical order, as the things of the social and political domain, and depends hence intrinsically on su-

perior principles which the Christian faith and Christian wisdom will assign from above.

A Necessary Distinction . . . If I turn toward men to speak to them and to act in the midst of them, let us say therefore that on the first plane of activity, on the plane of the spiritual, I appear before them as a Christian as such, and to this extent I engage Christ’s Church; and that on the second plane of activity, on the

plane of the temporal, I do not act as a Christian as such, but I should act as Christian, engaging only myself, not the Church, but engaging my whole self, not amputated or in- | animate—engaging myself who am a Christian, who am in the world and work in the world without being of the world, who by my faith, my baptism, and my confirmation, and insignifi-

cant as I may be, have the vocation of infusing into the world, wherever I am, a Christian sap.

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... Which Allows Us to Judge More Exactly the Bearing of Our Actions Let us have the patience to pause here a moment and to turn our attention to the sense and bearing of these two phrases: to act as Christian, and to act as a Christian as such.

We shall thus gain some enlightenment. We

shall understand

the error of certain apologists of

politics (of a separated pseudo-politics) who, trembling for nature, reason, and the fatherland, and even also for Holy

Church, imagine that Christians who wish to act as Christians

in the world, at one stroke precipitate the world into the dark perils of a catastrophic supernaturalism, and trespass at the

same time on the proper mission of the Church. These authors do not know how to distinguish “to act as Christian” and “to act as a Christian as such,” and so to engage the Church. And to what, consequently, does their logic come, if not to ask that

the Christian when he acts on the temporal plane not act as Christian? But what will he do there, if he does not act there

as Christian? He will be a beast, a piece of human material

utilized by the forces and the interests of the world. And we shall understand also the wholly opposite error of

certain badly enlightened apologists of religion who would readily think that piety and the defense of religious interests make up for everything, and that, in order to acquit ourselves of all our duties toward the terrestrial city and the temporal order, it suffices that we satisfy that which is required of us in the spiritual order, falsely regarded as separate. That is not true. Even the religious who have quit the world are called

to open their hearts to all the misery and anguish of the world and to welcome them within themselves in order to apply

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there the blood of Christ: and thus, by a way which is wholly spiritual, they still take care of the temporal and act on it. And we others who are in the world, are required not simply to act as Christians and as Christians as such, as living mem-

bers of Christ on the plane of the spiritual, but also to act as Christians, as living members of Christ on the plane of the temporal. Otherwise the weakness or abstention of Christian energies in this order will result in the abandonment of the

world to other energies, which do not labor for its good.

The Third Plane of Activity But this analysis is not complete. There is yet for the Christian a third plane of activity, which appears as intermediary between the two others. It belongs, in truth, to the same

order as the first and signifies but a particular aspect or a particular function of this order: it is therefore distinct from

the first plane only by an “accidental” distinction, which does not concern the essence of the activity expended but its points

of application. ‘This intermediary plane is the plane of the spiritual itself as inflected on the side of the temporal and joining the latter, it is the plane of the spiritual considered in

its connection with the temporal. By the very fact, indeed, that the spiritual order is at once superior to the temporal order and in vital union with it, there is in the temporal: 1. with regard to the temporal order itself, a zone of truths

connected with the revealed truths of which the Church has the deposit, and which direct from above the temporal thought and activity of the Christian; it is thus that the encyclicals of Leo XIII and Pius XI* have elaborated the prin1To these pontifical documents have been added, since this book was written, the encyclicals and the messages in which His Holiness Pope Pius XII has illumined with a lively light the great human problems of our time. (1946)

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ciples of a Christian political, social, and economic wisdom,

which does not descend to the particular determinations of the concrete, but which is as a theological firmament for the more particular doctrines and activities engaged in the con-

tingencies of the temporal; 2. with regard to the spiritual order, a zone of questions

which by themselves (“‘mixed” questions, touching on martiage for example, education, etc.) or in virtue of circumstances of fact include a relationship to this order: while concerning the earthly city, they concern also, directly or indirectly, the good of souls and eternal life; the Christian, as a

member of the Mystical Body, has to consider them primarily and above all not according as they concern the temporal order and the good of the earthly city (which, moreover,

suffers detriment itself if superior goods are violated), but according as they concern the supratemporal goods of the

human person and the common good of the Church of Christ. This, then, is a plane of activity where the Christian has

still for object eternal life and the order of divine things, either as demanding the safeguard of the proper goods of the spiritual in the temporal order, or as giving from above the supreme rules on which the good of the temporal order itself

depends. It is the plane of the spiritual as joining the temporal. On This Third Plane, the Christian Acts as a Christian as Such, and, to

This Extent, He Engages the Church On this third plane, as on the first, the Christian acts and

appears before men as a Christian as such, and to this extent he engages the Church. This is why the latter insists so much on the independence which our action should preserve there

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with regard to the temporal activities that unfold on the second plane, and in which we should ourselves participate (no longer as Christians as such, but as Christians). It is on this third plane, as on the first, that the laity is called

by Catholic action to collaborate in the apostolate of the teaching Church. It is on this third plane that it exercises a

Catholic civic action (in the strict sense of the word), when it intervenes in political things in order to defend there religious

interests and in the strict measure demanded by this defense, which is not at all the same thing as to work at a properly political work directed by a certain conception of the temporal common good to be procured. In order rightly to “take part in politics,” it is necessary to know how to discern political realities, to have a concrete idea of the means of assuring the common good of the earthly city. In order to defend religious interests engaged in the temporal, it suffices to know how to

discern these religious interests.

The Place of “Catholic Action” The whole work of “Catholic action” takes place on the

first and third planes. If, by the teaching which it dispenses and the spiritual formation which it procures, it prepares laymen to act as Christians, to participate in the struggles of the temporal and to participate there as Christians, to assume the social and political work to which they deem themselves

called and to assume it as Christians, it guards itself with the

greatest care from laying the shadow of a finger on this second plane. And it is not only because the Church does not want at

any price to find itself enfeoffed to temporal things. It is be-

cause, also, with regard to the work proper to the second plane, with regard to a work which must descend to the ulti-

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mate contingent realizations demanded by the service of the temporal common good, the competence of an activity whose

order is wholly spiritual quickly finds its limits. These precisions are doubtless quite arid. They are elementary and cannot be disregarded without detriment. Be-

cause of this, it was necessary to insist on them first. In the next section, I shall try to show some important applications of the principles thus established, in what concerns especially

the problem of the Catholic press.

II

The Three Planes of Activity of the Christian As I have tried to explain in the previous section, the

activity of the Catholic distributes itself over three planes: the plane of the spiritual, the plane of the temporal, and the intermediary plane of the spiritual joining the temporal. On

the temporal plane, he acts as member of the terrestrial city, and he must do so as Catholic. On the plane of the spiritual (pure spiritual or spiritual joining the temporal), he acts as member of the Church of Christ, and to the extent that he

presents himself before his brothers as a Catholic as such he engages the Church.

These Three Kinds of Activities Are Necessary

First consequence: The three kinds of activities thus situated and defined cannot take the place of one another. They are all three necessary, each on its own plane.

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I am well aware that they impose themselves on each individual person only according to his condition. On the plane of the temporal in particular, on the plane of social and political activities, one conceives that for this or that indi-

vidual, strictly political activity can reduce itself to voting on election day in conformity with the idea which in conscience he forms of the temporal common good; one conceives that for a vast majority an activity of the purely social or civic or

educative order can satisfy that which is required of them in the temporal domain. The fact remains that with regard to the ensemble collectively considered of the Catholic population of a country a

complete temporal activity, political as well as social and civic, of Catholics acting there as Catholics, is normally required; I even think that from this point of view the lack of properly political

formations,

of inspiration

authentically

Christian but specified by a certain conception of the temporal common good, is everywhere making itself cruelly felt today.

Union on the Plane of “Catholic Action” Second consequence: On the third plane, on the plane of the spiritual joining the temporal, of Catholic action and of civic action for the defense of the proper values of the city of God that are engaged in the temporal, union should evi-

dently be the watchword; it is clear that the union of Catholics can alone give sufficient force to establish among them a network of cultural works which might be as the beginnings of a

virtual Christendom, and to have religious interests respected by civil legislation—it being well understood that it is a question here purely of the incidences of the spiritual in the temporal, and of the authentically religious interests such as they

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301

are determined hic et nunc by the Holy See and by the Episcopate, not by the particular judgment of no matter what personality or no matter what party usurping the mission of speaking in the name of the Church, and sometimes thinking that they understand her interests better than she herself. It is impossible to conceal from oneself that so long as the edu-

cation of the Catholic masses will not be more advanced in this domain, so long as they will not have learned better to distinguish that which is of religion and that which is of the socio-temporal, from the interests, prejudices, and passions

of the sociological order, the union of Catholics on the plane of the spiritual joining the temporal and of civic action, however necessary it may be in itself, will pose delicate problems.

Diversity on the Plane of the Temporal But on the second plane, on the plane of the temporal, it is not union, it is diversity which is the rule. When the objective is the earthly life of men, when it concerns earthly interests,

earthly goods, this or that ideal of the earthly common good and the ways and means of realizing it, it is normal that a

unanimity whose center is of the supratemporal order should break up, and that Christians who receive Communion at the same table should find themselves divided in the body politic. It would be contrary to the nature of things, and therefore very perilous, to demand on this plane a union of Catholics which could be there only artificial, and obtained either by a political materialization of religious energies (as was the case too often with the “Catholic parties” such as the German

Centrum), or by a weakening of the social and political energies of the Christian, and a kind of escape into general principles.

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The Problem of the Catholic Press It is the business of the philosopher to insist in and out of season on distinctions of species which practical life wishes only to confuse. But in this even he renders himself useful,

for his part, in the very order of practical life and of action. For it is not with impunity that such distinctions and specifications are forgotten or disregarded. Those I have just pointed

out have become all the more necessary and require all the more rigorously to be respected, in proportion as the condi-

tions of existence of the Christian in the body politic have become more complex and more differentiated. A particularly notable example is furnished us here by the problem of the Catholic press. It is a fact, and one not confined to France, that the Cath-

olic press at the present time excites many complaints, and that the more its existence appears as indispensable, the more considerable appear to be the difficulties which it meets in acquitting itself of its task. By a strange paradox, we observe, on the one hand, the insistence with which the highest au-

thorities in the Church point out the importance of the works of the press and, on the other hand—at least in the order of culture and of secular activities—the small degree of efficiency

of that which it seems possible with the best will in the world, and with all the required professional capacities, to realize in this domain. Why is it so? Primarily because elementary laws which

govern the truth of our action have been neglected, the type of action proper to the second plane (purely temporal) and the type of action proper to the third plane (spiritual joining the temporal) having been almost constantly confused in

practice.

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By the very fact that it presents itself as specifically Catholic and that it addresses itself to Catholics as such, a periodical

of Catholic denomination stands on the plane of the spiritual. By the very fact that it is a periodical, and that contact with

actuality is indispensable to it, it inevitably runs the risk— if it does not take certain rigorous measures until now too neglected—of being drawn on to the temporal plane, and of making judgments on the temporal event as such. From this spring two major disadvantages, between which

we have a choice, and which often accompany one another: (1) either one is going to compromise Catholicism and the Church in political and social quarrels, cause religion to be confused with such-and-such a sociological projection of it, bind it to this or that interest of party or class, rivet, for example, for a moment French Catholicism to such-and-such a

position on the Dreyfus affair; (2) or, in order to avoid in a certain measure this first disadvantage, one will abstain in a certain measure from engaging himself on the temporal terrain properly so called, and one will strive to remain on the spiritual terrain, but without renouncing the right explicitly

to express himself on the temporal as such. And then, since, in order to be brought efficaciously to their end, temporal things must be treated on their own proper terrain, with the particular options and the competence and the means which this implies, one will find himself inevitably weak in regard to them; and as at the same time one lets the reader believe

that one is providing him with all that which he needs in order to judge these things and in order to direct his own activity in regard to them, one will provoke in him, especially in moments of crisis, grave and legitimate disappointments.

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To Speak as a Catholic Having a Certain Temporal Position and to Speak in the Name of Catholicism Are Two Very Different Things Let us denounce therefore the equivocation contained in a formula like the following, which it is not uncommon to

meet: “We wish to judge from the Catholic point of view all temporal, political or economic,

national or international,

artistic or scientific questions.” Such a formula, in order not to be illusory, must necessarily be taken in two different ways: for there is a judgment of Catholicism on these questions, but this judgment bears only on certain very lofty principles on

which they depend, or on certain spiritual values implied in them, and cannot tell me whether it is fitting to support or to oppose the wheat policy of M. Flandin or the foreign policy

of M. Laval. And there is a judgment of the particular Catholic who is myself on these questions in which it is fitting, if I devote myself to political action, that I take a position on the policies of M. Flandin and of M. Laval; and that I do so

as a Catholic, illuminating with the lights of my Catholic conscience my knowledges and my passions as a man engaged in the affairs of the world; but in which it would be intolerable

that I claim to speak in the name of Catholicism, or to drag along into my path Catholics as such.

Let it be well understood that it is not only because the Church does not wish to be enfeoffed or compromised in temporal things that such a distinction must be made. It is

also because differentiations linked to the nature of things are in play here, which precisely explain this wish of the Church. And it is because, finally, the rightness and integrity

of the action—of spiritual action on its spiritual plane, of

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temporal action on its temporal plane—suffer from the misunderstanding of these differentiations.

Two Essentially Different Types of Periodicals

What then? Must we renounce the attempt altogether? Must we give up the very idea of a Catholic press, or think

that the only authentically admissible Catholic press is the religious weeklies and the diocesan bulletins—and more, these in their official parts? I do not think so, but I think it is urgent to take cognizance

of the problem, and to resolve it by the distinction between two essentially different types of periodical, the one specifi-

cally Catholic and religious, and as a result Catholic by denomination, the other specifically political or “cultural,” and which it is certainly to be hoped will be Catholic, but Cath-

olic in inspiration only, not by denomination.

Specifically Catholic Periodicals Periodicals of the first type pertain to the field of “Catholic action.” How should these be conceived? To my mind, they should include two clearly and explicitly distinct sections, one called Catholic action, in which would be set forth, and would

only be set forth, the common doctrine of the Church, not only in its speculative values, but also, and principally no doubt, in its practical values, concerning the direction of human life and the incidences of the spiritual in the temporal; and one called information, in which, and in which alone,

would be treated the questions of the specifically cultural and

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temporal order. And how? In a manner which escapes the

inconveniences pointed out above, and therefore which manifests as fully as possible, far from masking it, the diversity of positions natural in this order. In this section the reader should, by means of a review of the press, of inquiries, of correspondence,

of an “open forum,”

etc., be made

aware

of the whole span of the positions adopted by the men of our time, and notably by Catholics, in the properly temporal domain, in the domain

of political and social, national

and

international activities, as well as that of aesthetic and literary,

pictorial or musical activities, or of the scientific activities of the present moment.

In order to watch over the rigorous objectivity of this information section, in order strictly to eliminate from it every more or less tendentious inspiration, as also to keep it mgor-

ously distinct from the Catholic action section, there would be required—I am in no illusion on the point—a vigilance of a quality almost heroic. But a Christian journalist is certainly capable of it. And let no one say that a journal constructed according to this type would not find readers! I am persuaded that a great number of minds today would be happy, on the contrary, to find a periodical able, on the one hand, to give them

the

Catholic doctrinal formation of which they feel the need, to explain to them and comment on the pontifical encyclicals and the pontifical acts, to make known to them the great syntheses of Christian political and social wisdom; and, on

the other, to offer them exact and objective information on all the aspects of the temporal problems of the epoch, and to

permit them thereby to escape the atmosphere poisoned with lies for which the excitations of parties are responsible.

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Specifically “Temporal” Periodicals Catholic in Inspiration Periodicals of the second type belong to the temporal

sphere as such, which implies that they have taken their concrete and determined positions on the questions of this order, and that they have adopted not only a political and social philosophy, but a well-defined concrete political and social

line—not only in function of religious interests or of the good of the Church, but also in function of the temporal and

terrestrial good of the body politic and of civilization. By this very fact it is obvious that they do not engage the Church—even if, as is to be desired, they draw their inspiration in the most explicit and most intrepid manner

from

Christian wisdom—and that they do not depend on any other initiative than that of the particular persons or groups who

have founded them. And doubtless, to the extent that their inspiration is truly and integrally Christian, they bear witness to the Gospel and serve in an efficacious manner the penetration of Christianity into the world and into life. But the proper and direct end at which they aim is not the apostolate; it is, rather, a temporal work to be accomplished, a temporal truth to be served, a terrestrial good to be assured. And the observations proposed above make it clear that the

temporal positions thus defended are normally diverse, indeed contrary. That Catholics should form on the temporal plane different groups, and even opposed one to another, is normal;

all that is demanded here is that they should keep in this diversity and in these oppositions the rules of truth, of loyalty, of justice, and of charity to which they are bound to conform

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their actions, not only with regard to those who share their faith, but with regard to every man.

We Must Choose between One or the Other Formula This second type of periodical, this press formally belong­ ing to the temporal plane and Christian by inspiration not by denomination, seems to answer a vital necessity. The first type of periodical, to which corresponds a press formally and specifically religious, a press of general or spe­ cialized Catholic action, is no less necessary. Both are already represented, in France and abroad, by a great number of journals and reviews. It is the problem of their differentiation which I have wished to pose here. To my mind, it is very important that this differentiation be more and more clearly and explicitly marked. I am persuaded that those Christians who are undertaking to found and to direct periodicals should begin by choosing one or the other formula, and that it would be very harmful to attempt a fusion or a hybridization of the two: for essences ask to be respected. (Sept, April 12 and 26, 1935)