We need to return to first principles and to the most important questions one could ever ask: What is man? What is God? And, what is man’s relationship to God and to one another? The Christian Humanist does not pretend to know the answer to each of these questions, but he knows the questions must be asked.
In our world agog with notions of post-modernity, labels, narratives, and categories, we too often leave important ideas and groups of ideas behind. Ideas that should never have been forgotten, have been, and we are poorer because of it. But, of course, no true idea can ever fully be lost. For if a thing is true, it remains true whether a man remembers it, ignores it, mocks it, or disbelieves it. With paleocons, CatholicCons, traditionalists, neocons, Leocons, libertarians, classical liberals, anarcho-capitalists, distributists, agrarians, we can be as bad as the left in our fetish for labels.
One group that defies traditional definitions and was, more or less, swept away in the cultural upheavals accompanying Vatican II and the rise of the so-called counter culture, is a group of women and men we might fairly name “Christian Humanist.” In 1939, the New York Times gave the movement a lineage. “This is the theme recurring in much of the writings of some of the foremost thinkers of our day, such as the late Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and Berdyaev, Christopher Dawson, and T.S. Eliot.” That same year, French intellectual Jacques Maritain argued for “Integral Humanism” rather than a Christian Humanism. Explicitly building upon the work of the American or New Humanists Babbitt and More, Maritain argued that an “integral humanism” would best “conform to the representative principles of the genuine spirit of Thomism.” In its essence, Maritain’s humanism still reflected the New Humanism, as it would “make man more truly human.” With intense faith in the potential goodness of the person, though, Maritain went much farther than his more Stoic American counterparts. Humanism, he argued, “demands that man develop his powers, his creative energies and the life of reason, and at the same time labor to make the forces of the physical world instruments of his freedom.” Having little use for Maritain, but having enjoyed an intimate friendship with More (his “spiritual uncle”), C.S. Lewis told Cambridge University in 1955 that he preferred to be called an “Old Western Man.” The real divide in Western civilization came not between ancients and Christians, but between Christians and post-Christians:
I play my trump card. Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered. For this is parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history. This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze.
Only a few years earlier, Christopher Dawson had dismissed the need to define Christian Humanism, drawing upon history rather than theology or philosophy. “Humanism is a tradition of culture and ethics,” he proclaimed, “founded on the study of humane letters.” The moment St. Paul quoted the Stoics, “In Him we move and live and have our being,” in his mission to Athens, he bridged the humanist and Christian worlds. The line, which St. Paul quoted, comes from a centuries-old Stoic hymn, “In Zeus, we move and live and have our being.” From that point forward, the English historian argued, any separation of one from the other led to what we must consider “dark ages.” Just “as man needs God and nature requires grace for its own perfecting, so humane culture is the natural foundation and preparation for spiritual culture.” Indeed, Dawson went so far as to argue that Christian and humanism mix so readily that they “are complementary to one another in the order of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being.” Regardless of what label the Christian Humanists employed, they sought to remind the world, in the wake of terror, gulags, ideologies, and brand positioning, that the human person, no matter how fallen, also carries with him a unique face of the infinite.
Disparate Figures Against Totalist Revolt
“In this twentieth century of the Christian era the real contest is between the power of transcendent faith and the power of the totalist revolt against order,” Russell Kirk wrote pointedly in 1963. “In our hour of crisis the key to real power, to the command of reality which the higher imagination gives, remains the fear of God.” A number of disparate figures in the previous century—such as Dawson, Russell Kirk, Eliot, More, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, E.I. Watkin, Gabriel Marcel, Aurel Kolnai, Romano Guardini, Sister Madeleva Wolff, Owen Barfield, Eric Voegelin, Nicholas Berdyaev, Thomas Merton, Frank Sheed, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Etienne Gilson, Maritain, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI to name a few—upheld the traditional concept of each human person as an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom, deeply flawed but also as a bearer of the Imago Dei.
In their many works of faith and scholarship, these men analyzed and explained the innumerable terrors of the twentieth century and argued that the solution to such horrors was really quite simple: to reclaim our faith in God, to embrace the moral and beautiful image found in each soul, and to reclaim His gift to us, our humanity. “Man is man because he can recognise spiritual realities,” Eliot wrote, “not because he can invent them.” Each of the men listed above was, to varying degrees, a Platonist, a Stoic, and a romantic. “Thus the whole universe is, as it were, the shadow of God and has its being in the contemplation or reflection of the Being of God,” Dawson wrote in 1930. The spiritual nature reflects the Divine consciously, while the animal nature is a passive and unconscious mirror.”
Each also saw continuity in the classical and medieval traditions of the West. Though deeply respectful to the great pagans of antiquity, such as Socrates, Plato, Zeno, Cicero, and Virgil, each desired a well-ordered Christian society, rooted in the ancient traditions of Athens and Rome and informed by the moral and ethical rules as understood from St. Paul to John of Salisbury and expressed, most successfully, in the Anglo-Saxon traditions of governance, common law, and inherited rights. “All my life for fifty years I have been writing on one subject and for one cause,” Dawson stated in a 1959 speech at Harvard, “the cause of Christendom and the study of Christian culture.” Eliot, who served as an effective intellectual bridge between Dawson and Kirk, told an Oxford audience in 1933: “we are convinced of the vital importance of the reunion of Christendom.” There can be no other choice, Eliot continued, as “the Christian world-order, is ultimately the only one which, from any point of view, will work.” Finally, Eliot argued, “any programme that a Catholic can envisage must aim at the conversion of the whole world.” And, in his prolonged 1953 essay in definition, The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote: “Conservatives must prepare society for Providential change, guiding the life that is taking form into the ancient shelter of Western and Christian civilization.” In the absence of Christian culture and hope, Kirk continued three decades later, “the modern world would come to resemble a half-derelict fun-fair, gone nasty and poverty-racked, one enormous Atlantic City.”
Finally, as the label “Christian Humanist” suggests, each defended liberal education as the only true form of education. The liberal arts, which connected ancient to medieval to modern men, liberated one from the immediate problems of this earth, connecting each person to a greater continuity that transcended time and space. Indeed, properly understood, the liberal arts leavened the reason of each person, allowing that person to gain citizenship in a Republic of Letters, what Cicero and the Stoics labeled the Cosmopolis and what St. Augustine would call, in a specially Christian understanding, the “City of God.” Any other form of education merely forced a stifling conformity on a person, making him less that what the Creator uniquely made him to be.
Division in Disparity
One should not mistake general goals mentioned above, however, for some form of a unified force or group concerted effort, however. At best, these women and men formed only the loosest of alliances. Though each agreed with the three broad principles listed above, intellectual as well as personal differences, sometimes intense ones, separated them. C.S. Lewis especially had difficulty with a number of his fellow Christian Humanists. “Stick to Gilson as a guide and beware of the people (Maritain in your church, and T.S. Eliot in mine) who are at present running what they call ‘neo-scholasticism’ as a fad,” he wrote in a personal letter to a Roman Catholic nun and future president of St. Mary’s College in northern Indiana. Christopher Dawson assumed—probably correctly—that Lewis had taken much of the argument of the Abolition of Man from Dawson’s own 1929 work Progress and Religion. Prior to a reconciliation in the 1950s, when each served on the committee to revise the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Lewis loathed T.S. Eliot, especially for his modernist poetry. “Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil,” Lewis wrote candidly in a private letter to Paul Elmer More. “His intention only God knows: I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land but that most men are by it infected with chaos,” Lewis continued. Perhaps most damning, according to Lewis’s lights, “Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war—obtained I have my wonders how a job in the Bank of England—and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds… the Parisian riff-raff of deviation, allied Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.”
Even within Lewis’s group at Oxford, the Inklings, there was much disagreement. When American scholar Charles Moorman wrote of the Inklings as a collective entity, Warnie Lewis recorded in his diary, “I smiled at the thought of Tollers [J.R.R. Tolkien] being under the influence of Moorman’s group mind.” Still, sometime member, Owen Barfield, thought a group mind—at least in terms of purpose—might be ideal. One should pursue the “sober effort to build up and maintain a common stock of thought rather than to startle with a series of sparkling individual contributions,” he wrote in 1940. To promote Truth and defend the ideals of the West, Barfield continued, a group of men should create “a commonwealth of the spirit, in which there is no copyright.”
Like Lewis, Dawson had mixed feelings regarding Jacques Maritain, but he liked Etienne Gilson.
Dawson does not know Maritain personally, but he believes that his residence in the United States has spoiled both his language and his thought. In the latter, he has made too much emphasis on political issues, in the former, he has become quite a poor prose writer, obscurity replacing his former clarity. Earlier Maritain of Three Reformers and Religion and Culture (in Essays and Order) is one Dawson liked. True Humanism is on the border between the earlier and later Maritain, and contains examples of both good and bad styles. Dawson prefers Gilson to Maritain, and believes former is much clearer and better writer. I pointed out that both of us would have a bias in favor of Gilson, because he treats of the historical development of metaphysical thought, rather than metaphysics directly. Dawson especially likes [Gilson’s] God and Philosophy, also his history of medieval philosophy.”
Certainly, the Augustinian Dawson felt little sympathy for what he would have perceived as Maritain’s extreme Thomism. The twentieth-century neo-Thomists, especially Maritain, tended to believe that religious emotion was dangerous, while rationality was an essential pre-cursor to faith, as all rationality would lead back, inevitably, to God. This was a belief that Dawson simply found wrong. Dawson explained his opposition to the neo-Thomists in a private letter, written in 1957:
It is, of course, necessary to define this philosophy of culture against the absolutism of the Neo-Thomists and the relativism of the moderns (I do not know what else to call them, for they now disavow the name of po[s]tivist and materialist too). On the whole I would say that my thought is in the tradition of the medieval English scholasticism—a theological absolutism combined with a philosophical relativism, and it is also the tradition of the French Catholic traditionalists like Bonald and de Maistre.
While Dawson greatly revered St. Thomas and considered him the pinnacle of medieval thought, he argued that other strains of Catholic thought equaled or completed Thomism.
Just as Dawson thought the neo-Thomists were too abstract and theoretical, if not outright ideological, the neo-Thomists thought little of Dawson, considering him a “mere” historian, a recorder rather than a creator. Further, Maritain regretted T.S. Eliot’s failure to come into the Roman Catholic Church, quipping “Eliot exhausted his capacity for conversion when he became an Englishman.” And, Berdyaev—a Russian Christian Humanist who played a significant role in Dawson’s thought—liked Maritain personally, but considered him “unjust” in his scholarship. “I developed a deep affection for him,” Berdyaev admitted, but “I could not help regarding his ‘Christian philosophy’ as a superstructure on a basis of Aristotelian rationalism.”
The question of politics also divided Christian Humanists in the twentieth century. Maritain and his brand of neo-Thomists were generally much more pro-liberal and pro-democracy than were the Augustinians, especially Dawson and Kirk, neither of whom held any fondness for mass democracy. In this, the Augustinians sided with Plato, seeing much of democracy as nothing more than animalistic, mob action, a dangerous loosing of the passions. Kirk especially feared that in the twentieth-century mass democracy served as a pseudo-religion. “This error of perfectibility is one of the illusions to which democracies are especially prone,” Kirk stated in 1960. “A distaste for the supernatural; an excessive appetite for comforts; a notion that all the problems of life may be solved by some simple formula or law—these are deceptions into which many men slide in democratic times.” Democracies may also, Kirk feared, substitute the Divine Right of the People for the equally dangerous Divine Right of Kings. Liberal democracy proves seductive because it promises “progress without the onerous duties exacted by tradition and religion.” It attempts to offer security, provided by the state, at the cost of human virtue and community. “Poverty is not in itself evil; nor inequality; nor death,” Kirk explained in 1955. “All of these may be occasions for virtue. But a society which would deny men the right to struggle against evil for the sake of good, or which simply ceased to distinguish between good and evil, would constitute that domination of the Anti-Christ.”
Kolnai, a Hungarian Jew who converted to Catholicism after reading G.K. Chesterton, also expressed strong opinions about those he might have regarded as allies. An especially strong animosity existed between Kolnai and Voegelin. Though they had known each other in Austria, each being a member of the Georg Fleischer discussion society, Kolnai decided that Voegelin was “a fascist savant of rare acumen and coolness.” In his autobiography, Kolnai recanted his earlier comments regarding Voegelin. “I judged him—I fear—somewhat one-sidedly, not only in private but in the book I was then writing.” Voegelin was not the only one to receive the point of Kolnai’s intellectual sword. In a review of Maritain’s Man and the State, he accused the neo-Thomist of being a “French Republican banquet orator,” presumably awaiting, with anticipation and glee, the revival of the guillotine terror of the French Revolution.
Still, the various Christian Humanists of the twentieth century—whether Augustinian or neo-Thomist—drew upon each other’s works frequently, and some, especially the members of the Inklings, were close friends. Dawson and poet Roy Campbell met with either the Inklings as a whole or the various members of the Inklings from time to time. What’s more, Dawson and E.I. Watkin were best friends for most of their lives. Eliot thanked and cited Dawson in many of his philosophical and literary works, and his “The Four Quartets” seems to represent best Dawson’s arguments regarding culture in poetic form. Historian of philosophy, the neo-Thomist Etienne Gilson also acknowledged his profound admiration for Dawson in a letter to Frank Sheed. Gilson especially appreciated Dawson’s Making of Europe and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. The latter, “provided me with what I had needed during forty years without being able to find it anywhere: an intelligent and reliable background for a history of mediaeval philosophy. Had I been fortunate in having such a book before writing my [Spirit of the Middle Ages,] my own work would have been other and better than it is.” Tolkien’s mythological Middle-earth work often parallels Dawson’s work from the same period, and Tolkien drew on Dawson’s work frequently in his own academic papers; Dawson edited one of Maritain’s books; Voegelin drew on the work of Von Balthasar, Maritain, and Gilson and influenced Pope Benedict XVI; Kolnai relied upon Röpke; and Röpke frequently cited Dawson and Kirk.
Indeed, it was Kirk who perhaps best summarized and synthesized the works of the European Christian Humanists. And though Kirk rarely identified himself in his works as a Christian Humanist, he was one par excellence. “In that Christian Humanism,” Kirk wrote in 1957,” it is altogether possible, lie the norms which could restore nobility to letters and order to a sea of troubles.” Not only was Kirk close friends with Roy Campbell, Eliot, and Röpke, but he also drew on Voegelin and Dawson numerous times in his own historical and philosophical works. Prior to his death in 1994, as mentioned above, Kirk had even planned to serve as editor for Dawson’s collected works. Through his published works and published lectures, Kirk introduced at least three generations of Americans to the European Christian Humanists, establishing an informal trans-Atlantic Republic of Letters.
A group of men of this intellectual and moral caliber and traditionalist mindset could never have arisen in any recent century prior to the twentieth. The nineteenth century, for example, though dominated by the Liberal mind, was relatively peaceful, a few European conflicts, the wars for independence in Latin America, and the American Civil War being notable exceptions. As Dawson proved, while the nineteenth century ignored or mocked the authority inherent in Christianity, it did inherit and maintain the morality of Christianity, labeling it “natural” rather than revealed. John Henry Cardinal Newman recognized what was coming, but knew that the nineteenth century, in and of itself, was not evil. It was only in the twentieth century that the madness of the French Revolutionaries, the dominance of scientism and positivism, de-humanized technology, and the anti-religious ideologies of the socialists and utilitarians, combined to bear malicious fruit. The Christian Humanists—each brilliant in his own way—arose in the twentieth century, as if an answer from Grace, and they fought the good fight, attempting to re-infuse the culture with Christianity. Not only did these thinkers defend the best of the past, but they also looked to the Holy Spirit as the guide for the future. The future, then, was unknowable, for it lay only in the mind of God, and man could achieve it only by surrendering his will to the glory and power of God.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, any scholar must admit that the Christian Humanists of the previous century fought the noble fight, but they only succeeded in carrying the old traditions on to new generations. Ultimately, they served only as watchmen and guardians of tradition, rather than as the leaders of a new-Christ infused culture. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, they fought vigorously, believing that the infiltration of the Protestant churches by modernist thought would leave the anti-modernist Catholic Church the only player on the field. Frank Sheed, who did so much to publish the works of the Christian Humanists, wrote that the Catholics of the mid-twentieth century were euphoric and confident in the supremacy of their faith Sheed’s work leads one to believe that their euphoria often bordered on sheer arrogance. And, as Scripture reminds us, pride goeth before the fall. Further, he argued, he and his allies should never have counted on the interwar literary revival being permanent. “The revival, in England anyhow, was strictly literary—there was no comparable outpouring of notable work by Catholics in painting or architecture,” Sheed conceded.
The Whirligig
The whirligig of modernity and post-modernity swirls us closer and closer to the oblivion of the Abyss. Dawson’s almost forgotten historical works also seem more important than ever. At home, our culture drowns in its sexualized and pornographic advertising, clothing, and entertainment. With some important exceptions, our politicians continue to pander to the lowest common denominator as they gradually dismantle the Republic in favor of a flabby empire without purpose or meaning. Indeed, for many of our leaders, “democracy” has become a term of religious significance and intensity, and “freedom,” not the natural law as St. Paul told the Christians of Rome, “is written in the hearts of every man and woman on this earth.” With even fewer exceptions, our academics remain trapped in their own subjective realities, publishing only for each other. “The present confusion in letters is connected with a similar confusion in our ideas of life,” More wrote in 1930. “Novelists and poets of discontent,” he continued, are “vultures [who] fatten themselves on carrion.” Our corporations pursue their “dreams of avarice” as we walk through the Wal-marts of the world, mesmerized by Muzak and the shrines to the materialist gods, made, of course, in the People’s Republic of China. Every once in a while, even enough lead paint in the toys shipped from Communist Asia gets our attention. An article appears in a major newspaper, a congressional hearing is held, and a recall is made. The average American student knows that “he/she is worth something” and that “he/she is as good as everyone else,” but he could never name the last serious book he read, let alone one of the seven cardinal and Christian virtues. He may very well not even know what a virtue is or that such a thing exists.
All of this should make us realize that we do need to return to first principles and to the most important questions one could ever ask: What is man? What is God? And, what is man’s relationship to God and to one another? The Christian Humanist does not pretend to know the answer to each of these questions, but he knows the questions must be asked. The Christian Humanist, Kirk wrote in 1956, understands that the “past and present are one—or, rather, that the ‘present,’ the evanescent moment, is infinitely trifling in comparison with the well of the past, upon which it lies as a thin film.” Indeed, the Christian Humanist understands the he always is a second away from eternity.
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The featured image is “Portrait of Holger Drachmann” (1902), by Peder Severin Krøyer, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.