In November 1939, six weeks after the beginning of World War II and ten months after his arrival in New York, the English poet W. H. Auden went to the movies. The theater was in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which was then largely populated by people of German descent. (Thomas Merton, then teaching at Columbia University while contemplating entering the religious life, mentions in his journal that one could hear German spoken in the streets there as often as English.1) Perhaps unsurprisingly, especially since the United States had not yet entered the war, the moviegoers were generally sympathetic to the Nazi cause: since many of them had come to the United States during the economic crises that debilitated Germany in the 1920s, they knew what Hitler had done to restore German pride and economic and cultural stability.
But Auden was not prepared for the viewers’ reactions to this film. Whenever the Poles appeared on the screen—always as prisoners of the Wehrmacht—the audience would shout, “Kill them! Kill them!” Auden was utterly taken aback. “There was no hypocrisy,” he recalled many years later: these people were unashamed of their feelings and attempted to put no “civilized” face upon them. “I wondered, then, why I reacted as I did against this denial of every humanistic value.” On what grounds did he have a right to demand, or even a reason to expect, a more “humanistic” response? His inability to answer this question, he explained, led him by a circuitous yet sure route back to the Christian faith in which he had been raised.
The return to faith began with this inquiry into the foundations of value. There had to be some standard by which Hitler’s wrongness—and that of his fanatical supporters in the American movie-house—could be established. Auden soon began to look skeptically on the intellectual network that had nourished and admired him throughout his career; he told Golo Mann (son of the novelist Thomas) that “the English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to; they have nothing to offer and their prospects echo in empty space.” And around the same time he gave a commencement address at Smith College in which he said, “Jung hardly went far enough when he said, ‘Hitler is the unconscious of every German’; he comes uncomfortably near being the unconscious of most of us.”2
By what laws are we governed? In another poem written in September 1939, Auden raised the question wryly but incisively. “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun”; but “Law is the wisdom of the old, / The impotent grandfathers feebly scold”; by contrast, the priest says, “Law is my pulpit and my steeple,” and the judge says, “Law is The Law.”
Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say,
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.
After all this (and more), what does the poem’s speaker dare to conclude? “Like love I say.”
Like love we don’t know where or why,
Like love we can’t compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.3
Auden was by no means the only one, in this time of war, inquiring into those foundations of value, those world-governing laws. The tenor of the whole period might best be seen by looking ahead just a few years, to a moment just after war’s end. In an autobiographical essay called “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” the philosopher Richard Rorty described his arrival at the University of Chicago as a freshman in the fall of 1946. The postwar world was being envisioned, prepared for, even created there—or so the institution’s leaders, especially its president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, believed. “When I got to Chicago,” Rorty wrote, “I found that Hutchins, together with his friends Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon . . . , had enveloped much of the University of Chicago in a neo-Aristotelian mystique.” This brain trust had come to believe that the pragmatism of John Dewey, who had been the dominant intellectual force at Chicago in previous generations, “was vulgar, ‘relativistic,’ and self-refuting. As they pointed out over and over again, Dewey had no absolutes.” This lack made him useless: “Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good—like the God of St Thomas, or the ‘nature of human beings’ described by Aristotle—would permit one to answer the Nazis, to justify one’s choice of social democracy over fascism.”
Even the powerful and enigmatic political philosopher Leo Strauss, no Thomist, agreed that “something deeper and weightier than Dewey was needed if one was to explain why it would be better to be dead than to be a Nazi.” And another figure, one located far from Chicago, loomed equally large in Rorty’s young mind:
Like many of my classmates at Chicago, I knew lots of T. S. Eliot by heart. I was attracted by Eliot’s suggestions that only committed Christians (and perhaps only Anglo-Catholics) could overcome their unhealthy preoccupation with their private obsessions, and so serve their fellow humans with proper humility. But a prideful inability to believe what I was saying when I recited the General Confession gradually led me to give up on my awkward attempts to get religion. So I fell back on absolutist philosophy.4
That is, Rorty “fell back on absolutist philosophy” for a time, before ultimately becoming the late twentieth century’s strongest advocate for the Deweyan pragmatism that his teachers at Chicago had so forcibly rejected as inadequate to the moral challenge of Nazism.
The claim that the young Richard Rorty considered and eventually dismissed—that the threat of National Socialism could only be properly resisted by an equally universal but substantively opposite ethic—is the claim in the light of which each of the figures I study in this book begins his or her hopes for the renewal of Christian thought. That claim in no way entails Christianity in any of its many forms, or religious belief of any kind. There were many leaders (political and intellectual) along the Allies who tried to make democracy itself the substantive alternative to Nazism, in much the way that Richard Rorty would later articulate a model of democracy as something close to first philosophy. But given a cultural emplacement of an at least residual Christendom, it was inevitable that some thinkers would see Christianity as integral to a resistance to Nazism.
In the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan, reflecting on the great angelic War that led to his exile from Heaven, speaks of the Almighty as one “Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme / Above his equals.” The idea becomes a constant theme of Satanic rhetoric: it is simply victory itself, strength of arms, by which the winner deems himself God and his cause righteous. As World War II progressed and the balance of power began to tilt more and more strongly toward the Allies, supporters of the Allied cause came more and more to fret about the likelihood of this charge being made against them. After all, it had already been made in the aftermath of the Great War, and not only by Germans. Especially famous in this regard is the response of John Maynard Keynes to the manifest injustices of the Treaty of Versailles: “The glory of the nation you love is a desirable end,—but generally to be obtained at your neighbor’s expense. The politics of power are inevitable,” and this war was simply the most recent in a long series. “Prudence required some measure of lip service to the ‘ideals’ of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen,” but those who understood the rules of the game knew that what politicians called “the principle of self-determination” was simply “an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one’s own interests.”5
And Keynes was no cynical bystander, but an active participant in the British negotiations as a delegate for the Treasury. His view that the Allies had at Versailles imposed a “Carthaginian peace” became influential in the years following that war and became the object of renewed attention as another war approached. (It was perhaps on T. S. Eliot’s mind when, just before the outbreak of that second war, he wrote, “Certainly there is a sense in which Britain and America are more democratic than Germany; but on the other hand, defenders of the totalitarian system can make out a plausible case for maintaining that what we have is not democracy, but financial oligarchy.”6) There is no doubt that the argument of Keynes’s book on the earlier war was on Auden’s mind when, as we have already seen, he sat “in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street” and concluded that “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”7
Auden ended that poem—which, as we will see, he later repudiated—with the closest he could then come to a statement of faith: though “our world” finds itself “Defenceless under the night,” nevertheless “Ironic points of light / Flash out wherever the Just / Exchange their messages.” And armed with this hopeful thought, he utters a kind of prayer:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
But what, precisely, does this flame affirm? Who are “the Just,” and where may they be found? And toward what is their irony directed? The splendid rhetoric of the poem is strangely mismatched with its moral vagueness. The foundations of value apparently did not reveal themselves to any cursory inquiry.
* * *
On the 10th of September, C. S. Lewis wrote to his brother, “In the Litany this morning we had some extra petitions, one of which was ‘Prosper, O Lord, our righteous cause.’ I ventured to protest against the audacity of informing God that our cause was righteous—a point on which He may have His own view.”8 In the minds of more than a few thoughtful people in (what would become) the Allied countries, this question lingered: Is our cause just? Even granted the evil of Hitler, can we be sure that our ways are necessarily superior?
Lewis continued his protest in later conversations with his vicar and recommended to him, as an alternative to such “audacity,” a prayer that Thomas Cranmer had composed when England was at war with Scotland in 1548:
Most merciful God, the Granter of all peace and quietness, the Giver of all good gifts, the Defender of all nations, who hast willed all men to be accounted as our neighbours, and commanded us to love them as ourself, and not to hate our enemies, but rather to wish them, yea and also to do them good if we can: . . . Give to all us desire of peace, unity, and quietness, and a speedy wearisomeness of all war, hostility, and enmity to all them that be our enemies; that we and they may, in one heart and charitable agreement, praise thy most holy name, and reform our lives to thy godly commandments.
A rather different tone than that embodied in “Prosper, O Lord, our righteous cause,” in that the petitioner is in as much need of divine grace as any enemy whose cause might be less “righteous.” Lewis concluded this section of his letter by saying flatly, “I see no hope for the Church of England if it allows itself to become just an echo for the press”—or the government. The Church must bear witness to the Christian Gospel in complete independence of any patriotic imperatives.9
Whether the cause for which England had begun to fight was indeed righteous was one that Lewis felt that he could not decide for himself in the way typically favored by Christian intellectuals, which was by invocation of “just war theory.” In May 1939, he had written a letter to the editors of the journal Theology that argued that “the rules for determining what wars are just were originally rules for the guidance of princes, not subjects,” and that therefore, he concludes “with some reluctance,” “the ultimate decision is one which must be delegated” to the elected leader of the nation. However, he insisted, this does not mean that one’s conscience can be offloaded to leaders: “A man is much more certain that he ought not to murder prisoners or bomb civilians than he can ever be about the justice of a war.”10 Threaded through everything Lewis wrote in those early days of the war—and indeed, later—is a complex weave of skepticism about the state’s motives, fear that even righteous causes can be prosecuted unjustly, and sheer dread. Again to his brother, just a few lines after his fears for the moral integrity of the Church of England, he writes, “One of the worst features of this war is the spectral feeling of all having happened before. . . . If one could only hibernate. More and more sleep seems to me the best thing—short of waking up and finding yourself safely dead and not quite damned.”
Lewis’s deepest anxieties were confided only to his brother, and his controversy with his vicar was conducted mostly in private. Perhaps by October 22 he had resolved some of his doubts, or perhaps he decided that before an audience of students he should be properly patriotic, but in any case, in a sermon he preached at the University Church, he said, “I believe our cause to be, as human causes go, very righteous.”11
* * *
How righteous is our cause? And if it is righteous, what makes it so? Many intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic tried to articulate answers to those telling questions, but were soon to discover that agreement was hard to come by. Some particularly noteworthy episodes in this debate arose from the dynamic work of Louis Finkelstein, a rabbi and Talmud scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York. Finkelstein convinced a number of other American religious thinkers that they needed to describe the role of the intellectual in time of war, and spearheaded the creation of the awkwardly named Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion and Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, which met for the first time on September 9–11, 1940, at the JTS. Finkelstein managed to recruit some major figures right from the beginning: listed among the founders of the Conference were, among many others, Mortimer Adler, Van Wyck Brooks, Enrico Fermi, Sidney Hook, and Paul Tillich. The preliminary announcement for the Conference expressed the hope that it would “serve as the first step toward a more general project, looking to the integration of Science, Philosophy, and Religion,” but Finkelstein repeatedly emphasized that the chief impetus for the Conference’s creation was the need to provide an intellectual answer to totalitarianism, and a number of the papers delivered in the early meetings of the Conference directly addressed this problem.12
During that first meeting, it was Adler who set the intellectual cat among the professorial pigeons with this claim: “Democracy has much more to fear from the mentality of its teachers [especially its university professors] than from the nihilism of Hitler.” And the danger posed by the American professoriate, in Adler’s view, stemmed from the dominance of “positivists” in that profession. “Positivism” was a dirty word for Adler in almost exactly the same way that “relativism” would be for later conservative critics of the academy: positivists were people without firm moral commitments and therefore without any means of resisting the dogmatic certainties of communism and fascism.
In the autobiographical reflection I cited earlier, Richard Rorty noted that Adler was among the chief warriors on behalf of President Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago. When Hutchins had been named to the presidency in 1929, at the age of thirty, his thinking about education was mainstream and uncontroversial. But almost immediately he came to question the values and commitments underlying undergraduate education, and when he hired Adler from Columbia University a year later, they began to rethink their university’s mission, and eventually sought to restructure its curriculum according to a model that drew on Aristotelian and Thomist modes of thinking: they conceived of knowledge as hierarchical and susceptible of detailed categorical organization, grounded in unchanging human nature, and pursued via dialectical means, primarily in seminars. They thought of their emerging model as providing the only real alternative to a philosophy of education that they associated with the pragmatism of John Dewey, who had been the leading intellectual light of the University of Chicago in a previous generation. From the vantage point of today, it may seem that pragmatism and positivism are highly unlikely bedfellows, but for Hutchins and Adler they both grew in the same soil, the soil of skepticism about morals: it was disbelief in the universality of moral truth, and the failure to see that human beings are by nature capable of gaining access to moral truth, that created the intellectual perversions of pragmatism and positivism alike.13
On these matters Adler and Hutchins spoke with something like a single voice. Just three months before Adler’s speech claiming that professors were more dangerous to America than Hitler, Hutchins had given a Convocation address at the University of Chicago under the title “What Shall We Defend?” The United States had not yet entered the war, and would not for another year and a half, but Hutchins sees America as already allied in a contest of values with the European democracies against fascism and communism—and does not like democracy’s chances. “With our vague feeling that democracy is just a way of life, a way of living pleasantly in comparative peace with the world and one another, we may soon begin to wonder whether it can stand the strain of modern times, which, as our prophets never tire of telling us, are much more complicated than any other times whatever.”
The key questions for Hutchins are these: “Is democracy a good form of government? Is it worth dying for? Is the United States a democracy? If we are to prepare to defend democracy we must be able to answer these questions.” And “our ability to answer them is much more important than the quantity or quality of aeroplanes, bombs, tanks, flame-throwers, and miscellaneous munitions that we can hurl at the enemy.”14
Already here we see a theme that will grow more prominent in the cultural discourse of the Allied world as the war progresses: a determination to understand the war primarily in moral, rather than military or technological, terms. When Hutchins wrote these words, the general fear was that the Western democracies could not match what he calls the “technical and organizing ability” of centrally controlled governments; by 1943 the fear had reversed its polarities, and intellectuals publicly worried that the victory of the Allies, wholly inevitable, would be a consequence of superior technology, engineering, and manufacture, a case of might once more making right, as perhaps it had at Versailles.
But whether the fear is of losing or of winning wrongly, it has, for Hutchins and Adler, the same foundation: their belief that the Western democracies do not understand what democracy is or why it is valuable, and are therefore in danger of being deprived of it. Hutchins continues his questioning: “What is the basis of these principles of law, equality, and justice? In the first place, in order to believe in these principles at all we must believe that there is such a thing as truth and that in these matters we can discover it.” The idea that there can be scientific truth seems, to Hutchins, not especially controversial: “But there can be no experimental verification of the proposition that law, equality, and justice are the essentials of a good state . . . . Valuable as the truths are that may be found in it, truths about the ends of life and the aims of society are not susceptible of laboratory investigation.” So he needs a model of truth-seeking and truth-finding that rejects the narrow positivist model of what counts as true. It is in the ability to seek and find truth in the moral sphere, Hutchins argues, that true human flourishing occurs.
But “are we prepared to defend these principles? Of course not. For forty years and more our intellectual leaders have been telling us they are not true. They have been telling us in fact that nothing is true which cannot be subjected to experimental verification.” Hutchins perceives that the moral world is endangered by a kind of intellectual pincer movement: positivism in the sciences (where all legitimate questions must be subject to “experimental verification”) and pragmatism in the great world beyond the “laboratory.” And it is worth noting that, on this account, positivism produces pragmatism; pragmatism is what is left over once positivism claims its territory. But neither positivism nor pragmatism can explain why democracy is superior to totalitarianism.
In fact, Hutchins continues, by splitting the human lifeworld in the way they do, positivism and pragmatism leave us with “a colossal confusion of means and ends. Wealth and power become the ends of life,” because the realm of value is the realm of opinion, in which I seek nothing more than easy justifications for my desires. “Men become merely means. Justice is the interest of the stronger.” This corrupted and simplistic approach to decision-making, in which we have no higher ends than the satisfaction of our immediate desires, happens when “moral and intellectual and artistic and spiritual development . . . receive the fag ends of our attention and our superfluous funds. We no longer attempt to justify education by its contribution to moral, intellectual, artistic, and spiritual growth.”
“Thus”—and here Hutchins becomes as provocative as Adler would be three months later—“we come much closer to Hitler than we may care to admit. If everything is a matter of opinion, and if everybody is entitled to his own opinion, force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion. And of course if success is the test of rightness, right is on the side of the heavier battalions.” And an educational system that does not have as its central concern “moral and intellectual and artistic and spiritual development” is ipso facto bequeathing to its young charges a decadent, impoverished ideal of “democracy” that cannot resist the greater coherence and articulateness of totalitarian movements. Before becoming president of the University of Chicago and rebuilding his whole intellectual equipment, Hutchins had been a law professor and an advocate of “legal realism”; it is in this context that he says, in words that offer a curious echoing counterpoint to Auden’s poem “Law Like Love,” “In law school I learned that law was not concerned with reason or justice. Law was what the courts would do. Law, says Hitler, is what I do. There is little to choose between the doctrine I learned in an American law school and that which Hitler proclaims.”
So the message jointly delivered by Adler and Hutchins may be summarized: Americans have more to fear from their professors than from Hitler, because their professors make us all more likely, over the long run, to become Hitler. Only a clearly articulated and rationally defended account of true justice can resist totalitarianism. “In the great struggle that may lie ahead, truth, justice, and freedom will conquer only if we know what they are and pay them the homage they deserve.” The third term of Hutchins’s trinity is especially important, for he knows that the war was already being portrayed as a war for freedom. But, he had argued earlier in his address, “The moral and intellectual development of free men takes the form of bringing them through the family, through law, and through education to good moral and intellectual habits. This is true freedom; there is no other.” Thus the centrality of education to democracy; thus the centrality of moral formation to education; and thus, as Hutchins and Adler understood it, the centrality of an Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy to moral formation.
When in 1936 Hutchins had published The Higher Learning in America, a book articulating his proposals for educational reform, it was reviewed scathingly by none other than John Dewey. Dewey saw in Hutchins’s model of education an attempt to end dialogue and impose, by authoritarian administrative diktat, a single understanding of the world:
There are indications that Mr. Hutchins would not take kindly to labelling the other phase of this remedial plan “authoritarian.” But any scheme based on the existence of ultimate first principles, with their dependent hierarchy of subsidiary principles, does not escape authoritarianism by calling the principles “truths.” I would not intimate that the author has any sympathy with fascism. But basically his idea as to the proper course to be taken is akin to the distrust of freedom and the consequent appeal to some fixed authority that is now overrunning the world . . . . Doubtless much may be said for selecting Aristotle and St. Thomas as competent promulgators of first truths. But it took the authority of a powerful ecclesiastic organization to secure their wide recognition.15
Dewey’s implication, it seems, is twofold: first, that Hutchins’s behavior is reminiscent of the Catholic Church, almost as though he thinks of himself and Adler as a kind of Magisterium establishing true doctrine; but second, that he probably lacks the true magisterial power to implement his vision. (And indeed by the late 1930s Hutchins and Adler and their supporters were deeply discouraged by their lack of progress in transforming their university.)
For Dewey, Hutchins is longing for, and trying to re-create, a premodern, predemocratic world in which truth is established and then disseminated de haut en bas. This charge made Hutchins uncomfortable. Though the son of a Presbyterian minister, he seems always to have avoided religiously specific language and may have had no Christian belief at all. It was Adler who—though Jewish by birth and not yet a Christian (he would convert only decades later)—spoke more openly and directly about the place of religion in education. For instance, in the same year he spoke to the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, he published a book in which he described the hierarchy of the disciplines of knowledge as ascending on this vector: from “history to science, from science to philosophy, from philosophy to theology, to mystical wisdom, and ultimately to the vision of God.” And as James Gilbert has written in his invaluable book Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science, Adler told Louis Finkelstein that this hierarchy should be the very foundation of the Conference:
Adler sent a deliberately provocative “contract” to Finkelstein for agreement by other planners of the conference. This he titled “On the Fundamental Position” of the conference. For truth to prevail, he declared, hierarchy must rule. The conference should unanimously “repudiate the scientism or positivism which dominates every aspect of modern culture.” This intellectual oath pledged intolerance for error. Most important, it declared that “religious knowledge, because supernaturally generated, must be superior to philosophy and science as merely natural knowledge.”
Finkelstein replied, “I agree with you absolutely, and unreservedly, in your strictures about the fundamental problems of American education.” Only “a vivid, philosophical, and profound faith in God, which must permeate our whole field of thought,” would be adequate to address the social crisis brought about, or rather revealed, by wars of the twentieth century. But he did not think that people with different views should be excluded from the Conference. He upheld this position of openness with some difficulty, since it was resisted not just by Adler but by other prominent figures he had brought into the initial conversations about the founding of the Conference. For instance, Jacques Maritain had told him that too many American intellectuals were “imbued with positivistic prejudices, misinterpreting philosophy and theology and making of experimental science the supreme standard of thought.” Maritain did not think that any such persons should be invited to participate, no matter how passionately they loved democracy and hated totalitarianism.16
It was Finkelstein’s determination to bring together such a diverse range of intellectuals that led to the fireworks at the first public meeting. Among those listening to Adler’s denunciation of “the professors” was Sidney Hook, a former student and lifelong disciple of John Dewey. Hook was a pragmatist, an agnostic, and a former Communist who had been profoundly and lastingly alienated from the Soviet Union by the show trials in 1936–38. Finkelstein brought him in because of his passionate hatred of totalitarianism, though he was otherwise exactly the sort of person that Adler and Maritain wanted to exclude.17 Unsurprisingly, Hook found Adler’s speech to be wholly misbegotten. “We have just been told that American democracy is in greater danger from its professors than from Hitlerism. Such a statement is not merely false but irresponsible, and at the present time doubly so.” Moreover, Adler’s insistence on a hierarchy of the disciplines, with theology governing philosophy and the Beatific Vision hovering over all, seemed to Hook a recipe for “religious intolerance” and a move toward theocracy. He reports in his memoirs that he responded so angrily to Adler’s paper that Finkelstein, sitting next to him, stomped on his foot to try to shut him up.18
We can see, then, that one of the questions raised by Finkelstein’s Conference is this: Is a general and vigorous commitment to democracy sufficient to resist the encroachments of totalitarianism? In other words, is democracy philosophically self-sustaining—at least, sufficiently so to be getting on with, in time of war? For Adler and Maritain, the answer was no, and that negative had to be insisted upon even more strongly in time of war, and most strongly of all when the opponents are totalitarian regimes, with their comprehensive structures of belief and commitment. Adler’s public vociferousness on this point led Sidney Hook to suspect that serious religious belief was not only unnecessary to democracy but probably inimical to it—as long as it sought enshrinement in the institutions of the public order, which it was always tempted to do. In a 1943 essay for Partisan Review, Hook laid out this argument in uncompromising terms:
We are told that our children cannot be properly educated unless they are inoculated with “proper” religious beliefs; that theology and metaphysics must be given a dominant place in the curriculum of our universities; that churchmen should cultivate sacred theology before applying the social gospel; the business needs an inspired church that speaks authoritatively about absolutes—this by the editors of Fortune; that what is basically at stake in this war is Christian civilization despite our gallant Chinese, Moslem, and Russian allies that the stability of the state depends on an unquestioned acceptance of a unifying dogma, sometimes identified with the hierarchical authoritarianism of Catholicism, sometimes with democracy; that none of the arts and no form of literature can achieve imaginative distinction without “postulating a transcendental reality.”
For Hook all this was a sign that—and these are his italics—Fundamentalism is no longer beyond the pale; it has donned a top hat and gone high church.19
Hook contends all of these developments proceed from one central assumption: that “modern democracy has been derived from, and can only be justified by, the theological dogmas of Hebraic-Christianity according to which all men are created by God and equal before Him.” Hook complains that Finkelstein had made this immovable first principle “the rallying point of the much publicized Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion and Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, whose pronouncements indicate that it has officially accepted Maritain’s Catholic conception of a pluralistic, hierarchically organized culture, crowned by religion, as ‘the cornerstone on which human civilization must be erected in our day.’ ”
Science, Hook says, “has no place” in this system. Rational thought is, if not wholly rejected, then utterly subjected to divine revelation. This mode of thought is for Hook worrying enough in itself, but he is still more concerned that its proponents seem to want to install it in the institutions, especially the governmental and educational institutions, of Western society. “Religious institutions based on supernatural dogmas tend towards theocracy,” so the intrusion of those forces into the rest of society may well portend the theocratic transformation of the West, which would be anything but democratic. Thus Hook responds to the fears of intellectuals like Hutchins that the West could become like Hitler by agreeing—but assigning the blame very differently: “Out of [these antirational movements] will grow a disillusion in the possibility of intelligent human effort so profound that even if Hitler is defeated, the blight of Hitlerism may rot the culture of his enemies.” This is very similar, and not coincidentally so, to the language Dewey used when complaining that Hutchins’s views are “akin to the distrust of freedom and the consequent appeal to some fixed authority that is now overrunning the world.”
Hook finds it particularly ironic that these religiously minded thinkers link the rise of totalitarianism with an overreliance on science, since fascism (he does not mention communism in this context) arose in “such strongly religious and metaphysical countries as Italy and Germany and not in such scandalously heretical and positivistic countries as England and America.” For Hook, it was the absolutist habits of mind spawned by strong religious traditions that made Germany and Italy vulnerable to fascism; whereas in England and especially America, where pragmatism and positivism had recently grown strong, hope remained for democracy—but only if the urge toward theocracy is resisted and people continue to work toward a truly democratic socialism. “Until then it is necessary to prevent intellectual hysteria from infecting those who still cling to the principles of rational experiment and analysis.”
* * *
Eventually, and in response to heated responses like those of Hook and Dewey, Louis Finkelstein would make his Conference private. But privacy was always the watchword of a similar endeavor to think through the role of religion in public life, this one convened in England by a man named J. H. Oldham. He called his gathering the Moot; others called it Oldham’s Moot. It began as an attempt to articulate a coherent Christian response to the coming war; it was needed, Oldham felt, because the Christian presence in English public life was sadly indistinct.
In one sense, the concerns of the Moot resembled not only those of Finkelstein but also those of Frank Buchman, an American missionary in England, who had been the driving force behind the Oxford Group—a Christian parachurch organization devoted to spiritual renewal, largely through a series of private meetings and discussions—and then of what he called “Moral Re-Armament.” Buchman launched his campaign in May 1938, with a speech in which he claimed that the coming crisis in Europe is “fundamentally a moral one. The nations must re-arm morally. Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”20
Oldham had convened the first meeting of the Moot a month earlier, but his emphasis was quite different. Like Buchman, Oldham had been a missionary, indeed the child of missionaries to India, and served in that country for some years before returning to the United Kingdom, where he became the perfect embodiment of a distinctive twentieth-century type: the religious bureaucrat. For many years he served as secretary of the International Missionary Council, an organization he helped to establish; after World War II he helped to create the World Council of Churches. He traveled all over the world building organizational relationships, convening meetings, and commissioning white papers; but the Moot represented his uneasy sense that none of this activity would do much good if Christianity could not reach the minds of the people of the Western democracies, especially their leaders. Oldham’s sense that Christian thinkers had not offered a compelling intellectual alternative to other accounts of the world was the impetus for his convening of the Moot.
The Moot met several times a year from 1938 to 1947; its cast of characters varied, but among the most regular attenders were T. S. Eliot, the German sociologist-in-exile Karl Mannheim, the theologian Alec Vidler, the historian Christopher Dawson, the philosopher of education Walter Moberly, and the critic and editor John Middleton Murry. (It perhaps goes without saying that neither the Moot’s members nor the Conference’s were concerned to have women participate in their deliberations.) Sometimes visitors to England were asked to sit in—Reinhold Niebuhr did this on two occasions—and those who did not join the group but were deemed sympathetic to its concerns, like C. S. Lewis, were occasionally asked to write papers that the group could discuss.
Oldham assigned a secretary to record the substance of each conversation, and those records have been collected and published by Keith Clements as The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938–1944. Read in order, the accounts tell a curious story. When the Moot began, just after the German annexation of Austria, war in Europe was very likely but not inevitable. The coming of war, the early Nazi successes, the gradual turning of the tide, and the ultimate victory all affected the character of the conversation, its tone, as well as its substance. Always hovering over the meetings was the question that had been raised so assertively by Adler and Maritain: the breadth of views that should be represented in the Moot.
In many respects, the odd man out in the Moot was, or should have been, Mannheim. A Hungarian Jew of no defined religious convictions, he nevertheless shared the other Moot participants’ interest in the renewal of British society. (He became a British subject in 1940, and his friends often commented on his enthusiasm for British ways of life.) He contributed more papers than anyone else in the group, and he often set the tone for the discussions. Alec Vidler commented many years later that “in some respects Mannheim was the central figure in the Moot. His conception of ‘planning for freedom’ as the proper alternative to totalitarianism, on the one hand, and to British laissez faire or muddling through, on the other, was one that commended itself to us.” Indeed, Vidler commented that the Moot as a whole could be described as “exploring [the] philosophical, ethical, sociological, political, theological, and indeed all other aspects” of Mannheim’s key ideas. “The centrality of Mannheim’s role is shown by the fact that when he died suddenly in 1947, we spontaneously stopped meeting; at any rate Oldham never called us together again.”21
After Mannheim’s death, his widow wrote a touching letter to the regular members thanking them for accepting her husband so warmly, even though he was in so many ways different from the others.22 But perhaps those differences made his presence so valuable. In the midst of the Battle of Britain, the question of what the Moot should be doing, and who should participate in it, returned to the forefront; there was, after all, a need to reconsider the shape of a project that had begun before war commenced. Mannheim, characteristically, wrote a whole paper on this subject, and in response to this paper, Eliot said,
I can express what I mean best my mentioning one reason why I have found the Moot most profitable to myself: which is that I find in it, not merely agreement achieved or hoped for, but also significant disagreement. I mean that one can waste a great deal of time, in the present world, by disagreeing with people whose thought is really irrelevant to one’s own thinking—however important it may be or may have been from some other point of view. What is valuable is the formulation of differences within a certain field of identity—though the identity may be very difficult, if not impossible, wholly to formulate; what is valuable is the association with people who may hold very different views from one’s own, but are in general at the same stage of development and detachment—these are the people worth disagreeing with, so to speak. This I think we have in the Moot, and this we ought to keep.23
Clearly Eliot was thinking primarily of Mannheim’s own contributions here—especially given that in the preface to his postwar book, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, written exactly a year after Mannheim’s death, he singles out the sociologist for particular thanks, “since my debt to [him] is much greater than appears from the one context in which I discuss his theory.”24
Though charity seems generally to have reigned at the Moot—largely, it would seem, because of Oldham’s ability to generate positive yet meaningful conversations—and the kind of acrimony that drove Finkelstein to make his Conference private seems never to have emerged, not everyone was happy with the Moot. Middleton Murry, who in the very first meeting had responded to a paper by the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson by stating that what the world in general and England in particular needed was “the Renaissance of the Christian imagination,” became increasingly dissatisfied with the meetings, at least in part because of the emerging centrality of Mannheim. In January 1943 he announced, “My feeling is that the Moot is no longer engaged in a corporate quest. It flits from one idea to another of a multitude of things, but on none drives its inquiry passionately home . . . . I no longer feel the urgent and passionate search for truth which I once felt in the Moot.”25 On these grounds he resigned from the Moot and went on to other things.
By this stage, nearly five years into the conversation, it was possible to describe the participants’ general orientation to the problems of the day, though they differed considerably on some details. The first agreed-upon point was that the disastrous wars of the twentieth century were the natural consequence of a loss of European religious focus and unity that had occurred over a very long period through gradual erosion. On this matter Christopher Dawson’s role in the first meeting would have helped to set the tone, since Dawson had written several books arguing that Catholic Christianity during the Middle Ages had created a unified Europe whose loss had been catastrophic. In that meeting, Eliot had responded to Dawson by commenting that it might be better not to think of the current crisis as a product of recent causes—for example, the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent rise of National Socialism and fascism, or the collapse of the Russian monarchy and its replacement by a Leninist regime—and more as a set of events whose roots ran centuries deep and might take centuries to resolve.26
(In response to this belief that the collapse of church authority had led to war, one might reasonably point out that in ages of far greater ecclesial power there had been a good many wars, some of them quite bloody. But in general, it seems, and this is noteworthy, for conservative-leaning intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, the more distant past was simply blotted out by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—as though nothing of general significance, especially for Christendom, had happened before that. The laïcité that the Revolutionaries made a permanent part of the French national identity was for them one of the key defining events of history. Perhaps the Moot to some extend borrowed this attitude from French thinkers such as Maritain, Paul Claudel, Leon Bloy, and others.)
The second point of agreement was that the churches of the European countries had allowed this erosion to occur, usually by inaction but sometimes by active collaboration with forces of secularism. The rise of the Deutsche Christen in Germany (a church wholly subservient to the demands of the state), or the demands by French bishops and Jesuit leaders that laypeople and theologians alike should cooperate with the Vichy regime, were merely dramatic and extreme examples of something that had occurred all over Europe. There was perhaps no need to create an alternative church to resist the corrupt one, as pastors in Germany and Switzerland, led by Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller, had created the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church); but it was useful to think of a “Church within the Church,” a network of like-minded pastors, theologians, and laypeople who were capable or resisting the forces of social conformity. For, as can be seen from C. S. Lewis’s comment on the prayer for the Lord to “prosper our righteous cause,” the subordination of religion to patriotism was not just a problem in Germany.
For many of the same reasons, it was important to imagine a “University within the University.” The Moot’s thinking about this matter was intensified and focused by the appearance in 1943 of a book by Amy Buller called Darkness over Germany, with a preface by A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and a regular Moot participant. Buller certainly believed that the moral abdication of the German church was tragic: in her prologue she writes, “I record these stories [of conversations with young Germans] to emphasize the need for youth and those who plan the training of youth to consider carefully the full significance of the tragedy of a whole generation of German youth who, having no faith, made Nazism their religion.” But Buller insists that even this wholesale ecclesiastical collapse would not have been sufficient to ruin almost the whole of German youth if the universities had not been equally complicit in the Nazification of the country. (Like Eliot and Dawson, she understood the coming of the war as the culmination of a movement centuries in the making, and in focusing on the immediate circumstances in Germany “we may fail to realize the significance of the spiritual bankruptcy and real destitution underlying it all, for that is something which is evident in the whole of Western civilization, though in more insidious forms and subtle dress.”) In her epilogue, she records interviews with English young people who have, she says, been “taught to believe in the League of Nations since they were in their cradles” and have been told by their parents, who experienced the Great War, that war accomplishes nothing.27 They could see no reason to fight Hitler. Their attitude marked, Buller believed, a failure of political and moral education, and the blame for that failure goes to the schools as well as or even more than the churches. (This argument rhymes with the statements of Mortimer Adler to which Sidney Hook so vociferously objected.) So the need for a spiritual and moral renewal of the British educational system was the third point on which the Moot agreed.
The fourth point of agreement involved a distrust of the methods employed by Frank Buchman in his Moral Re-Armament program. Buchman is rarely mentioned in the Moot, but his public activism and evangelistic cheerleading were clearly not to the taste of the Moot’s members, nor did their gifts run that way. As early as April 1939, they had already talked in some detail about the creation of a kind of secret society, an order of men—almost certainly they would all be men—devoted to influencing the major institutions of British society: the government, the Church of England, and the universities. (This idea was probably the first cause of serious uneasiness for Middleton Murry.) The proposed order resembled a cross between the Freemasons and the Fabian Society. The Fabians had been created at the end of the nineteenth century by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, among others, and enthusiastically joined by such eminences as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, in order to bring about socialism not by revolution from below but by ameliorative actions from above—thus the long-standing joke that the best thing about being a Fabian was that your socialist commitments required you to attend cocktail parties with the rich and powerful.
The idea seems to have originated with Mannheim, who said, “Halfway between the freelance existence and the organised one stands what we call the ‘order.’ Its task is to revitalise the social body and to spread the spirit.” It is by intention a mediating sort of body, situated “between the huge organised bodies which can only adapt themselves very slowly to changing conditions and the individual who is simply acting for himself and does not have to take a broader responsibility.” Members of this order will certainly “get in touch with the people, find out what is going on in the nooks and corners of society,” but also, and more importantly, “persuade organised bodies like the Churches and the Civil Service to accept the new ideas and the practical proposals which are necessary in an age of democratic change.” Mannheim sees this order as an organ disseminated throughout the body politic, “an integral part of the social organism like its nervous system, coordinating its activities and spiritualising its aims.”28
The Moot members’ proposed order would probably have focused more on committee meetings than cocktail parties, but nevertheless betrayed a similar mistrust of purely democratic methods, of serious social change generated by ordinary people—even if they at least nominally wished to “get in touch with the people.” And for those who shared Amy Buller’s sense of what had gone wrong in Germany, and Christopher Dawson’s of what had gone wrong throughout Europe, such mistrust was inevitable. A people whose moral formation had been ignored (at best) by churches and universities alike were scarcely in a position to understand the need for the complete transformation of churches and universities. In a 1942 meeting, Mannheim asks—this is the secretary’s summary—“Is there a chance for a rebirth of a popular religion within the churches or will they in their rigidity expel from their ranks those who are able to cope with the new realities of the world, inner and outer?”29 There is no record of a direct answer, but the sentiment of the Moot was clearly on the side of the latter alternative. A spiritual renewal of the working classes was clearly vital—Eliot at one point, again in response to one of Dawson’s laments for a lost medieval unity, pleads for “more carnality, more materiality, and more superstition”—but none of the members of the Moot were placed to offer much help in that regard. Thus the proposed order, which would support and implement Mannheim’s “planning for freedom”: that is, it would help to generate social and political structures that would in turn teach the citizens of democracies how to exercise freedom responsibly. Presumably, when people became fully and truly free, these structures would wither away, as in Marxist theory the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to.30
Though conversations about the formation of this order, its governance, and its ideal size were frequent and extensive, it is not clear that anyone in the Moot had any idea how to go about creating it. Moreover, the members increasingly felt their own isolation, not just from the rest of British society but from like-minded people elsewhere in the world. After Reinhold Niebuhr’s second visit to the group—in which he “suggested that a Christian civilisation was a civilisation which always knew itself to be ethically un-Christian”—Mannheim commented that the Moot suffered from not being in dialogue with partners in the United States and on the Continent.31 Most of the participants continued to enjoy their meetings, and to learn from one another, but as the war went on, the energy seems gradually to have drained from the meetings. Great plans for social transformation gave way to friendly chat. It is no wonder that when Mannheim died there was no one remaining with the drive and energy to sustain the meetings.
* * *
Twenty years ago, the French philosopher Pierre Manent, in The City of Man, developed a sweeping argument about the rise of modernity. Manent contends that the Western world long struggled to resolve a twofold inheritance: a classical understanding of Man, the “party of nature,” committed to a belief in humanity’s inherent greatness and keyed to the virtue of magnanimity, versus a Christian understanding, the “party of grace,” committed to an acknowledgement of our brokenness and emphasizing therefore the virtue of humility. But this contest proved interminable and fruitless, and was given up. What replaced it was a kind of non-understanding, an agnosticism about “human nature,” an awareness that such speculations were not only irresolvable but unnecessary. We did not need to answer the ancient question Quid sit homo? We did not decide the grounds on which Man could be said to have rights; we needed only to define Man as the creature that has rights, and to see freedom as the goal toward which those rights tend. “Modern man is concerned only with the instruments of his emancipation project or with the obstacles to it. Nothing substantial, be it law, good, cause, or purpose, either holds his attention or holds back his advance any longer. He has become a runner and will go on running until the end of the world.”32
The debates and disputes I have been recording in this chapter bear witness to a widespread concern—concern at times rising to the status of panic—that liberal instrumentalism, that willingness to defer ultimate questions as the price to be paid for getting along with one another, had left the democratic West unable to generate the energetic commitment necessary to resist the military and moral drive of societies that had clear answers to Quid sit homo? Suddenly, intellectuals throughout the democratic Western countries felt impelled to improvise an ethics and a metaphysics to suit the moment, in much the same way that their nations’ militaries were scrambling to create new weapons and hasten the production and distribution of existing ones.
We have caught just a glimpse here of the variety of those answers. The full range could only be explored in a very large book indeed, or perhaps a series of them—though a good start on such a project has recently been made by Mark Greif in his book The Age of the Crisis of Man. The focus of these pages is on those who came to believe, in the harsh light of worldwide political crisis, that the decision to bracket, within the public sphere, fundamental questions about human nature had proved a disastrous one and needed to be rethought—and quickly. For these thinkers, vexed questions of human nature had to be raised once again, and raised in such a way that a Christian answer to them was made compelling.33
In the BBC radio talks that C. S. Lewis gave in 1941—talks that eventually became part of his book Mere Christianity—he said,
First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from the whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man . . . . And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.34
For Lewis and the other thinkers we will explore here, that “going back” could only happen in two distinct stages. First, there were the immediate exhortations to be given to a war-weary and confused populace. Lewis’s radio talks were meant to meet that need, as were the ideas generated by Finkelstein’s Conference.
But the second stage was, in the minds of the thinkers we will explore in this book, even more important. It involved, whether the current war was won or lost, educating a new generation so that the bracketing or suspension of ultimate questions that Manent describes would no longer seem either natural or desirable. This stage would involve not immediate improvisations but long-term planning—of just the sort that was ever being discussed in Oldham’s Moot. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in a summary of the Hitler years that he wrote at the end of 1942,
The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating. In short, it is much easier to see a thing through from the point of view of abstract principle than from that of concrete responsibility. The rising generation will always instinctively discern which of these we make the basis of our actions, for it is their own future that is at stake.35
And the question of “how the coming generation is to live” cannot be extricated from another one: how should the coming generation be educated? What is perhaps most distinctive and remarkable about the figures we will be studying in this book is that their answer, generally speaking, involved not just theological and philosophical reflection but also literary experience. By striving to integrate literature into a specifically Christian model of education, they were, whether they knew it or not, reclaiming a tradition of Christian humanism that had its roots in the early Renaissance.