On January 14, 1943, most of the leaders of the Allied nations met at Casablanca to determine a strategy for the remainder of the war. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill attended, along with leaders of the Free French, and many military officers. (Stalin, occupied with the presence of the Wehrmacht in his country and especially with the siege of Stalingrad, declined to participate.) When the parties arrived, they expected to plan a multifront invasion of the Continent that would drive the Germans back into their own country. After debate, they decided to postpone the vast project of sending armies across the English Channel—that would not happen for more than a year—but they agreed to a full-scale assault on Italy. Still more ominously, they began to plan the “strategic bombing” of Germany. And even before the conference had ended, the Combined Chiefs of Staff composed a directive to their generals that began with a blunt order: “Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”1
Such a comprehensive program could only be articulated by leaders certain of their ultimate victory. The key underlying assumption of this memorandum, entitled “The Bomber Offensive from the United Kingdom,” was that the Luftwaffe was incapable of offering serious resistance to the bombing campaign. (This did not prove to be true.) Of course, the congenitally optimistic Churchill had possessed such confidence since December 1941: when an aide came into his office to say that, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany had declared war on the United States, Churchill blandly replied, “So, we have won after all.” But now, more than a year later, all parties involved agreed that the tide had turned, that the era of the unstoppable Blitzkrieg was over, and that Germany would hereafter be on the defensive. The tone of the leaders’ public pronouncements changed accordingly: whereas earlier in the conflict their emphasis had been on the need for fortitude and hard work, now Roosevelt, in reporting to the American people on Casablanca, spoke of “inevitable disaster” for the Axis powers, and not just for the Germans. “There are many roads which lead right to Tokyo,” he said. “We shall neglect none of them.” Most telling of all was Roosevelt’s insistence that official statements from the Conference include the proclamation that the Allies demanded nothing less than the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers and would not end the war on any other terms.2
One result of this newly absolute confidence—the Allied leaders had of course long prophesied victory, but not in such uncompromising terms—was that, on the home front, thoughts began to turn to life after war. What kind of world would be left to us when the Axis powers had suffered that “inevitable disaster”? There would be much remaking and reshaping to do: who would do it, and what principles would govern them? Such thoughts were on the minds of many, and some of the more ambitious and provocative ideas emerged from a small group of Christian intellectuals. This was a time—it seems so long ago now, a very different age, and one that is unlikely to return—when prominent Christian thinkers in the West believed that they had a responsibility to set a direction not just for churches but for the whole of society. And, stranger still, in that time, many of their fellow citizens were willing to grant them that authority—or at least to listen when they asserted it.
Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson once said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”3 Throughout the world, a similar concentrating of minds had been intensifying for some years—beginning no later than Hitler’s rise to power in 1933—but it was in early 1943 that this intensification of focus produced some especially remarkable work.
In the months following the Casablanca Conference, Christianity and Crisis, the magazine founded in 1941 by Reinhold Niebuhr and his colleagues at Union Seminary, published a series of articles endorsing and explaining a document called “Six Pillars of Peace.”4 The document itself had been produced by an organization called the Federal Council of Churches’ Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, chaired by John Foster Dulles, then the chief foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey. The emphasis of this document, and of the responses to it in Christianity and Crisis, was on the creation of a body of international lawmaking to replace the failed League of Nations, autonomy for nations then under occupation, and a repudiation of the draconian and punitive measures taken a quarter-century earlier in the Treaty of Versailles.5
But the thoughts of certain other Christian thinkers followed a different course. On the very day that the Casablanca Conference began, Jacques Maritain gave the first of his four Terry Lectures at Yale University. His subject: “Education at the Crossroads.” The next day, January 15, W. H. Auden delivered a lecture to the students of Swarthmore College called “Vocation and Society.” His concern was to explore the power of liberal education to prepare young people to assume responsible and meaningful callings in a world that needed their skills. At the same time, across the Atlantic in the city of Newcastle, C. S. Lewis was preparing to give a set of lectures he would later call The Abolition of Man: or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. This emphasis on education was shared by the French refugee Simone Weil, who had recently moved to London, where she devoted the last months of her life to an impassioned plea for the reconstitution of European culture. To this plea she gave the title Enracinement—“Rootedness,” or, as it would later be called in English, The Need for Roots. And elsewhere in the great English metropolis, the American-born poet T. S. Eliot had just completed his poetic testament—in “Little Gidding,” the last of his Four Quartets—and, having sought the spiritual peace that comes from the faith that “all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” now turned his attention, in a series of essays published in that January and February, to what he called “the definition of culture.”
In a time of unprecedented total war, these thinkers concerned themselves primarily with a renewal of Christian thought and practice, especially in the schools of the Western world. Collectively they developed a response to the war that could scarcely be more different from the political pragmatism of the “Seven Pillars of Peace.” Their absorption in theological and pedagogical concerns, which reached its highest pitch just as the war pivoted toward an Allied victory, may seem inexplicably unworldly, at best quixotic. But there is an underlying logic to such thoughts that is worth of serious exploration.
And they were not alone in their emphases. England in the war years was a highly pedagogical island. In Human Voices, the novel in which Penelope Fitzgerald describes a slightly fictionalized version of her experiences working for the BBC during the war, we meet a “Junior RPA” (Recorded Programmes Assistant) named Willie Sharpe, whose “notebook contained, besides the exact details of his shift duties, a new plan for the organisation of humanity.” At one point, when the whole staff is being trained in first aid, Willie gets an unexpected opportunity to describe his plan to one of the higher-ups:
We mustn’t grudge the time we’re spending on this Red Cross course, Mr Haggard. In fact, personally speaking, I’m very glad of the training because it contributes in a small way to one of my general aims for all humanity. I mean the maintenance of health both in mind and body. Education will be a very different thing in the world of tomorrow. It will start at birth, or even earlier. It won’t be a petty matter of School Certificate, the tedious calculations of facts and figures which hold many a keen and hopeful spirit back to-day. It will begin as we’re beginning now, Mr Haggard, you and I and all these others here this evening, with a knowledge of our own bodies and how they can be kept fighting trim—fighting, I mean, needless to say, for the things of the spirit. Yes, we shall learn to read our bodies and minds like a book and know how best to control them. Oh boy, will the teachers be in for a shock.6
There were very many like Willie in England in those days: indeed, the searcher through libraries and archives can easily come to the conclusion that people then thought about little other than “the organisation of humanity” and how one might “fight for the things of the spirit” in the postwar world to come. This is effectively the subject of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Begin Here: A War-Time Essay (1940), and of F. R. Leavis’s Education and the University: A Sketch for an “English School” (1943), and of Christopher Dawson’s The Judgment of the Nations (1942), and of Lewis Mumford’s Faith for Living (1940) and Values for Survival (1946), and of Walter Moberley’s The Crisis in the University (1949), which arose from his wartime work and reflections, and of countless articles, essays, and newspaper editorials—including Dwight MacDonald’s famous “A Theory of Popular Culture” (1944), which Eliot believed to be “the best alternative” to his own account that he had read.7 These arguments had little in common with one another except a conviction that the world had gone astray because its people had been poorly educated, and if the total destruction of the human world were to be averted, new ways of educating had to be found. Even a treatise on political, economic, and social polity like Fredrich Hayek’s later-to-be-famous libertarian manifesto The Road to Serfdom (1944) took the fact of such miseducation (and its influence on the unpopularity of his ideas) for granted, as did, from the other end of the political spectrum, Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in Los Angeles between 1942 and 1944.8 Penelope Fitzgerald’s Willie Sharpe was but one voice in a vast, vast chorus.
In Britain, with its tradition of national educational policy, this impulse was seen in what the social historian David Kynaston has called “a flurry of wartime action” featuring “three main elements”: “The Norwood Report of 1943, which examined what should be emphasized in the curriculum at secondary schools . . . ; the Butler Act of 1944, which vastly expanded access to free secondary education; and, from the same year, the Fleming Report on the public schools.”9 In America, individual colleges and universities took up similarly reflective tasks, though some got more attention than others: the most talked about was Harvard College’s so-called Redbook of 1945, a report made by a faculty committee to the university’s president, James Bryant Conant. Its proper title is General Education in a Free Society, and it set the tone for many schools’ reconsideration of their core curricula. The unspoken question underlying all these explorations was the same: if the free societies of the West win this great world war, how might their young people be educated in a way that made them worthy of that victory—and that made another war on that scale at worst avoidable and at best unthinkable?
Perhaps, though, we might say that there was one other point on which most of these thoughtful observers were agreed: miseducation had left the ordinary citizens of the Western democracies in the helpless thrall to the propagandistic machinations of unscrupulous nationalist movements. In 1941, George Orwell had insisted, “One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty . . . . Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it.” Indeed, “Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.”10 The thinkers whose ideas I will describe in this book agreed with Orwell on these points, but did not think he had described inevitable realities, but rather, contingent and to some degree reversible ones. They thought it possible—and necessary—to restore Christianity to a central, if not the dominant, role in the shaping of Western societies. Why they thought this was necessary, how they planned to achieve it, and what particular visions of Christianity moved them are the chief topics of this book.
During the war years, these figures were quite astonishingly prolific. The various challenges of wartime life seem to have acted as a profound stimulant on them all. In the last six months of her life, Weil wrote the equivalent of two substantial books—indeed, the intensity with which she pursued her ideas surely contributed to the pleurisy that killed her. Lewis gave several series of broadcast talks to the BBC, lectured to Christian groups throughout Britain, published books of Christian apologetics, theological fantasy, science fiction, and literary criticism—all while continuing his lectures and tutorials at Oxford and faithfully answering letters from readers and listeners. Auden wrote four exceptionally ambitious book-length poems and dozens of articles and reviews, while holding down a day job as a teacher. Maritain published fifteen books during the war years, while also working for the Free French. Eliot’s output, as measured by page count, seems comparatively small, yet he wrote the most important poems of his career during the war, while keeping up a steady stream of lectures and periodical essays, attending countless meetings of various study groups, serving as an air-raid warden, and continuing his work as an editor at Faber and Faber.
A book that tried to give even a reasonably full accounting of such ceaseless and frenetic intellectual activity would need to be a thousand pages long—and still longer if it took into full account those Christian thinkers like Niebuhr who were more active in practical politics and stood nearer, or hoped to stand nearer, to the primary sites of governmental power. This book has a narrower set of concerns. The war raised for each of the thinkers I have named a pressing set of questions about the relationship between Christianity and the Western democratic social order, and especially about whether Christianity was uniquely suited to the moral underpinning of that order. These questions led in turn to others: How might an increasingly secularized and religiously indifferent populace be educated and formed in Christian beliefs and practices? And what role might people like them—poets, novelists, philosophers, thinkers, but not professional theologians or pastors—play in the education of their fellow citizens of the West? The circulation of those questions among these five figures is the subject of this book. All that they did and thought and suffered and wrote that does not relate to the circulation of these questions will be set aside here, though sometimes referred to parenthetically and in notes for the benefit of those who may be curious.
Touch of Evil, that Gothic masterpiece by Orson Welles, begins with the most famous tracking shot in the history of cinema. In muted light, we see a close-up of a kitchen timer attached to what appears to be an explosive device, held in a man’s hands. The camera pulls back to show him darting towards a nearby automobile: he sets the time—it looks like around three minutes—then furtively drops the device in the car’s trunk and scampers off. We are, we now see, in a city at night. The camera remains focused on the car as an oldish man and a young woman get into it and drive away. The camera pulls back to the rooftops and tracks backwards ahead of the car, which is soon stopped by some goats in the road. As various people move in and out of the frame, the camera continues its retreat and soon picks up a couple walking down the street. Eventually the car, having overcome its obstacles, re-enters the frame; its driver and the couple come simultaneously to a border crossing. Conversation ensues with the border patrol. When the car is waved through, it passes out of the frame; the camera stays with the couple as they embrace. Then their kiss is interrupted by the blast and flash of an explosion.
I have imitated Welles in this book. A chapter or section begins with one figure, whose ideas and writings are explored. Then, at a point when those ideas intersect, thematically and (roughly) temporally, with those of another figure, the focus shifts. We remain with that thinker for a while, then link to a third. Eventually the one with which we began rejoins the scene. The lives of the people who populate this book only rarely meet, or even correspond; but their ideas circulate from one to another constantly. It is this circulation I have tried to capture by an eccentric means of narration. What might correspond to the explosive device of Welles’s film I leave as an exercise for the reader.
The account that follows will be generally, though not meticulously, chronological. The development of the war, from its anxious beginnings to the confidence in Allied victory that became widespread by 1943, caused certain intellectual themes to emerge, or to become centrally important, at particular moments, and then to recede into the background. For instance, the question of whether intellectual and scholarly pursuits are legitimate in time of war arises primarily in 1939 and 1940, after which most of the people concerned deemed that they had settled that issue to their own satisfaction, or at any rate had handled it as well as they could. I have tried to track the major themes in the order of their emergence; but when some text from a different moment provides particular insight into the character of an idea, I have not hesitated to cite it, even at the cost of violating chronology.
The first two chapters provide the intellectual background to what follows by describing both the debates that raged—and “raged” is often just the right term—in the years leading up to the war and the elements of the history of Christian thought that my protagonists believed particularly germane to the challenges of their moment. The third chapter describes the attempts by these figures to adapt to the exigencies of thinking, and exhorting people to think, in the midst of worldwide war. The fourth and fifth chapters outline their diagnosis of and responses to the “principalities and powers” that, as the war extended its reach and grew more obviously horrific, they came to believe were dominating their historical moment. After a brief interlude that serves to remind us that other modes of Christian thought and practice—some chosen, some imposed—were possible valid responses to a world at war, the sixth chapter describes the ideas that consolidated themselves in the climactic year 1943. That chapter is therefore the pinnacle of the narrative, and the one that follows describes the diminished urgency, the abating of intellectual intensity, the shifting into a more meditative and less hortatory mode, that characterized all these thinkers—those who survived—in the last year of the war. And finally, the afterword looks at a certain younger figure who took up the torch my protagonists had laid down—or, perhaps it would be better to say, declined to take up that torch, preferring instead one with the power to illuminate a very different segment of the cultural spectrum.