HUMANITIES: grammar, rhetoric, and poetry, for teaching of which there are professors in the universities of Scotland, called humanists.
—Encyclopedia Britannica (1768)
“Humanism” is a much-vexed, highly contested word whose meaning has zigged and zagged in strange ways over the centuries, and has equally often been used to praise and to damn. Its history is intrinsically fascinating, and moreover essential to any attempt to make sense of the arguments about cultural renewal that emerged among Christians during the Second World War. Each of the figures we study here works within a nexus of ideas first generated in the early modern period, and then reconfigured in the nineteenth century. And this is equally true for those who embrace that reconfigured humanist inheritance and those who neglect or refuse it. It is the intersection of this tradition with the inquiries into the basis of value we explored in the previous chapter that generates much of the intellectual energy of these wartime Christian thinkers.
Cicero, in his Pro Archia, refers to the studia humanitatis ac litteratum: humane and literary studies. This phrase caught the eye of some early Renaissance scholars, especially the Tuscan Coluccio Salutati, correspondent of Petrarch, and his student Leonardo Bruni; it encapsulated their understanding of what education at its highest level should be. In the Italian universities of the fifteenth century, one who advocated for this model and taught according to it was known as an umanista—an inevitable coinage, since a teacher of jurisprudence had long been known as a jurista, a teacher of canon law as a canonista, and so on. So the term “humanist,” from which “humanism” in turn derives, was originally the product of student slang.1
As Paul Oskar Kristeller explained long ago in what remains a useful treatment of the history, in the early modern period and especially in Italy, “the studia humanitatis came to stand for a clearly defined cycle of scholarly disciplines, namely grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy,” primarily pursued through reading the greatest Latin writers, though eventually including in a secondary way the major Greek figures. Other philosophical subdisciplines, such as logic and metaphysics, played no part in the humanists’ project. The studia humanitatis therefore were “concerned neither with the classics [as such] nor with philosophy [as such]”; their focus “might roughly be described as literature. It was to this peculiar literary preoccupation that the very intensive and extensive study which the humanists devoted to the Greek and especially to the Latin classics owed its peculiar character, which differentiates it from that of modern classical scholars since the second half of the eighteenth century.”2
Kristeller’s use of the word “peculiar” twice in that last-quoted sentence is a stylistic infelicity, but a telling one. The umanistas were doing something unprecedented in keying the search for wisdom—including specifically Christian wisdom—to the study of literature. This was, to put the point mildly, not in keeping with the dialectical approach of the medieval scholastic tradition, which they scorned. Such rejection of scholastic procedures would have a major impact not only on the development of humanistic study in the early modern era, but also on the way that the history of humanism has been narrated. For in the last two hundred years it has been commonplace to read the history of humanism not merely as a rejection of scholastic method but also as a rejection of scholastic interests—especially theological interests.
Certainly the theology of the humanists—with its emphasis on literature over philosophy, and on the wisdom to be gained from pagan classical writers and thinkers—is dramatically different from that of the schoolmen, but it is not on that account less theological, or less Christian. But such was the story—a secularizing story—that came to be told, by admirers of the humanist enterprise and its detractors alike. Thinkers of the Enlightenment saw the humanists as their predecessors, those who had pried open a locked door and let the light of nonbiblical knowledge in; and (largely Catholic) defenders of the scholastic enterprise saw the humanists as enthusiastic participants in the dismantling of the beautiful edifice of medieval thought. It is the latter group with whom we are especially concerned here—but their story can only be discussed in relation to the secularizing narrative of humanism, which Christian celebrants of the high Middle Ages rightly perceived to be both simplistic and dominant.
What I will call the neo-Thomist interpretation of early modern history may be said to have its origins in a Dogmatic Constitution produced in 1870 by the First Vatican Council: Dei Filius asserted the complete compatibility of faith and reason, and affirmed the legitimacy of the disciplines of the arts and sciences.3 Then, a few years later, in 1879, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Aeterni Patris, “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy,” which affirmed the normative status of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.4 These documents would bear ripe intellectual fruit some decades later in the thought of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, who would articulate a historical account that may be roughly summarized thus:
The scholastic culture of the Middle Ages built an increasingly complex but also harmonious and orderly intellectual edifice that reached its greatest amplitude in the thought of Thomas Aquinas—the philosophical and theological equivalent of the great cathedrals of the period, especially Chartres. In Thomas, biblical and pagan wisdom found their unity and were set in right relation to each other. But this great achievement was soon undermined, first by the inferior and destructive philosophy of the nominalists (Duns Scotus, William of Ockham), which paved the way for both a revival of un-Christian paganism and for the anti-intellectual and egocentric enthusiasms of the Reformation.
This story began to take serious hold about a hundred years ago: its first great embodiment may be Maritain’s 1920 book Art and Scholasticism, in which he described “the powerfully social structure of medieval civilization,” in which the artist, to his great good fortune, “had only the rank of artisan, and every kind of anarchical development was forbidden his individualism, because a natural social discipline imposed on him from the outside certain limiting conditions.” These limits and constraints, which were for Maritain intellectual as well as social, created a kind of paradise of theologically informed art: “Matchless epoch, in which an ingenuous people was formed in beauty without even realizing it, just as the perfect religious ought to pray without knowing that he is praying; in which Doctors and image-makers lovingly taught the poor, and the poor delighted in their teaching, because they were all of the same royal race, born of water and the Spirit!” In short, “Man created more beautiful things in those days, and he adored himself less. The blessed humility in which the artist was placed exalted his strength and his freedom. The Renaissance was to drive the artist mad, and to make of him the most miserable of men”—and to do so by preaching to him constantly of his own absolute freedom.5
Maritain repeatedly pursued this theme and helped to make it foundational to the neo-Thomist account of modernity. That account was developed concurrently by Gilson, whose introduction to Thomism (Le thomisme, 1922) was published two years after Art and Scholasticism and who would, in book after book, portray Thomas as the thinker who had achieved a perfect intellectual balance. (The emphasis on “balance” as a major intellectual virtue derives both from Aristotelian thought and from the continual comparison of Thomas’s thought to Gothic architecture.) For instance, in Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, a small book based on lectures he had given in New York in 1937, Gilson presents Thomas as the Goldilocks of philosophical theology: whereas Augustine had been overreliant on revelation, and Averroes overreliant on reason, Thomas had perfectly united the two in a synthesis that could never be bettered. For Maritain and Gilson alike, Thomistic method could only be altered for the worse, never for the better.6 The neo-Thomist account of modernity is therefore necessarily a declinist narrative. It provided the intellectual underpinnings of the Hutchins-Adler project at the University of Chicago and thus Adler’s denunciation of all arguments against Hitler that were grounded in postmedieval thought. It captivated a young Southerner named Richard Weaver when he came to teach at Chicago in 1945 and led to his first (and still most famous) book, Ideas Have Consequences. It continues to govern some histories of ideas even today, most notably in Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation and Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern. It is not, in my judgment, a very good historical thesis, but it has been almost the only one to offer significant resistance to the emancipatory narrative of the Enlightenment that casts the schoolmen as dull, benighted, superstitious logic-choppers.
One of Maritain’s most distinctive contributions to this neo-Thomist account is the attention he gives to humanism. Where other thinkers were content to dismiss humanism as a perversion of true (Catholic, Christian) thought, indeed to accept the verdict of the Enlightenment that humanism and religion are irreconcilable, Maritain perceived the term as standing on contested ground—ground eminently worth fighting for. What was called for, in his view, was not a rejection of humanism but a reclamation of it. As early as 1933 he wrote, “The quarrel is not between humanism and Christianity. It is between two conceptions of humanism.”7 Thomism therefore was not something that preceded humanism and was replaced by it, but was rather its ideal form. “The great defect of classical humanism,” he wrote, “the brand of humanism which, since the Renaissance, has occupied the last three centuries . . . lies not so much in that which is affirmed in this sort of humanism, as in that which consists of negation, denial, and separation; it lies in what one might call an anthropocentric concept of man and culture.” The core problem is its picture of “human nature as closed in upon itself or absolutely self-sufficient.”8 Maritain believed that the humanism of the Renaissance, and still more the later interpretation of that movement by the key figures of the Enlightenment, celebrated and affirmed a truncated humanity, a sad parody, almost, of what humans ought to be and can be. What is needed, he insists, is the restoration of something lost since Thomas: a full humanism, an integral humanism.
Maritain published his fullest statement of this view, Integral Humanism, in 1936. His argument for the restoration of a true humanism begins with the assertion that the “dissolution of the Middle Ages” was a “catastrophe” that “opens the epoch of modern humanism,” which embodies itself as “the cult of humanity, of sheer man.” But “sheer man” is not Man at all, for Maritain: “The misfortune of classical humanism is to have been anthropocentric, and not to have been humanism” at all. That this was indeed a misfortune Maritain concludes by reading the history of late modernity, within which “the rationalist [i.e., anti-supernaturalist] idea of the human person has received a mortal blow.”9 That blow has been administered dually by Darwinian and Freudian ideas, which, in Maritain’s understanding, leave the Christian understanding of humanity untouched but inflict damage on anthropocentric humanism from which it cannot recover. (Since in these contexts Maritain tends to mention Nietzsche also, we can discern in his argument an anticipation of Paul Ricoeur’s famous identification of the three great “masters of suspicion.”10) The seemingly irresistible rise of Soviet Communism and National Socialism, to which—again this familiar point, made by so many in those dark days—the “cult of humanity” has no answer, proves that anthropocentric humanism is dead. What remains, he believes, is a choice between “two pure positions: the pure atheist position, and the pure Christian position.”11
Later in the book, though, Maritain has to acknowledge that, at least from the Christian side, matters are a little more complicated: there are in fact “two Christian positions.” That he does not acknowledge more than two may perhaps indicate a reluctance to sacrifice polemical force, but more likely reflects his belief that only two genuinely Christian accounts of humanity can be sustained in the current crisis. One is that of the great Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who, Maritain admits, was as evisceratingly dismissive of anthropocentric humanism as any theologian could possibly be. But the theological principles on which he based this dismissal arose from what Maritain called a “primitive Calvinism,” a “primordial antihumanism”—the “annihilation of man before God.” They are consistent principles, wholly Christian and biblical in their foundations, resistant to the corrosive effects of modernity—yet dependent, says Maritain, on the belief that “grace does not vivify.” Barth’s theology leaves human beings in their annihilated state, but Maritain believes that the true Christian message brings people out of the grave of sin and readies them for a fully theocentric humanism. Anthropocentric humanism has been dealt its death blow; the Barthian Christian breathes, perhaps, but can only prostrate himself before a righteous God; it is only the Catholic Christian, whose “conceptual equipment” is supplied by St. Thomas Aquinas, who can rise to new and vibrant life, both individually and communally.12
If the “cult of humanity” is over; if Communism and National Socialism can create but cruel parodies of humanity; if Barth’s “primordial antihumanism” is cold and lifeless; and if Thomist “integral humanism” alone can forge a clear path to the fulfillment of human destiny—then the question that faces us is “a question of a total recasting of our cultural and temporal structures . . . . It is a question of the passage to a new age of civilization.”13 So Maritain in 1936. And in November 1942, writing a preface to a new English edition of the 1937 lectures called The Twilight of Civilization, he sought to clarify the meaning of his title:
The twilight of civilization—the pessimism of the formula was only a relative pessimism. If twilight ushers in night, night itself precedes day . . . . In my mind the notion of the present trials endured by civilization was inseparable from that of a new humanism, which is in preparation in the present death struggle of the world, and which at the same time is preparing the renewal of civilization, even if it be only for the time that St. Paul predicts as a “resurrection from among the dead.”14
Though Maritain would spend the war in America, those remaining in his homeland meditated on his ideas throughout the war. When France fell to the Wehrmacht in 1940, it was divided into two zones: an occupied zone in the north of the country and a “free” zone in the south, with the headquarters of its puppet government at Vichy. The largest city in Free France was Lyon, a hundred miles east of Vichy, and the leading theologian at the Institut catholique de Lyon was Henri de Lubac, a Jesuit priest. His superiors—including Fr. Norbert Boynes, the Assistant General of the whole Society of Jesus—made it clear that he and all other faculty of the Institut were to be obedient to the Vichy government, a command with which de Lubac took strong issue. Throughout the war he participated in the Catholic Resistance, and became a target of the Gestapo when German troops marched into Lyon in 1942. He was able to escape to a religious house farther south and continue his research and writing. This work consisted of an ambitious treatise on the meaning of the “supernatural” and an explanation and critique of the rise of an atheistic humanism in the nineteenth century: The Drama of Atheist Humanism. (These would be published after the liberation of France in 1944.)15
The essays that formed the latter book repeatedly made the same argument: that the biblical teaching that human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26), while elevating us to a great height within Creation, came eventually to be perceived, by many Western intellectuals, as a curb on our greatness: thus “the time came when man was no longer moved by” that account. “On the contrary, he began to think that henceforward he would forfeit his self-esteem and be unable to develop in freedom unless he broke first with the Church and then with the Transcendent Being upon whom, according to Christian tradition, he was dependent.” That breaking with Transcendent Being began with “a reversion to paganism,” but ultimately “came to a head in the most daring and destructive form of modern atheism: absolute humanism, which claims to be the only genuine kind and inevitably regards a Christian humanism as absurd.”16 And so arose “atheist humanism (l’humanisme athée), which sought to protect and extend human greatness by emancipating it from bondage to God. But this, de Lubac argued, ended by unleashing bestiality and evil. The Nazis were the logical culmination of the attempt to construct humanism without God.
The proper response to the Nazis therefore required not just fighting them but also re-emphasizing the imago Dei, for otherwise the Nazis’ opponents could become all too much like them. As de Lubac was writing the essays that would be collected in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, he was also helping to edit and publish a series of books, the Cahiers du témoignage chrétien (Notebooks of Christian Witness). The first volume in this series, written by a Jesuit named Gaston Fessard, appeared in 1941, under the title France, prends garde de perdre ton âme!—“France, beware lest you lose your soul!”
But how could a nation in such circumstances preserve its soul?
* * *
Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909 to a Jewish family sufficiently nonobservant that she did not learn the distinction between Jews and Gentiles until she was ten years old. (She had heard the word “Jew” but thought it meant “usurer.”) Throughout her childhood, she was frequently ill and obsessed with both moral and physical hygiene: she would often refer to her “disgustingness,” by which she meant some, any, form of uncleanliness. From an early age, she lamented the suffering of others and sought to share in it. She was deeply attached to her older brother André, who would later become a great mathematician, and always believed herself intellectually inferior to him; for much of her life, she would call herself a failure, even though she had great academic success. For instance, in 1931 she was one of only eleven people in France to pass the agrégation exam in philosophy—this was the primary means by which people qualified as teachers in the lycée system. Another successful examinee that year was Claude Levi-Strauss, and while he says in his great memoir Tristes Tropiques that he was the youngest successful candidate of his year, Weil was in fact two months younger.17
Another successful examinee that year was Weil’s close friend and eventual biographer, Simone Pétrement. Pétrement’s narrative of her friend’s life remains the best available, but her intimacy with Weil lends a peculiar character to the book: it is simultaneously a modern scholarly biography, full of appropriate citations and documentation, and something like a saint’s life, full of anecdotes illustrative of Weil’s personal oddity and moral passion.
The idea of sainthood forms a penumbra around readers’ responses to Weil, even when, as is frequently the case, that idea is accompanied by suspicion. Auden named her as one of those writers, along with Pascal, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, who tend to overwhelm readers with the brilliance and originality of their insights—but later, “one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one’s first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion.” Readers’ thoughts about such writers’ ideas can rarely be divorced from impressions of the character and style of their lives; for this reason, written treatments of them tend toward the hagiographical or anti-hagiographical. Thus Susan Sontag, writing in 1963, commented that Weil’s life is an “exemplary” one, and that “[s]ome lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which ‘we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence.’ ” This is to see Weil as a kind of saint, “if one may use the . . . term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense.” It may be that “[n]o one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it.”18
Moreover, such complex responses did not arise only after Weil’s strange death, by something like self-starvation, at the age of thirty-four; during her lifetime, people often treated her as a curious or even bizarre psychological case, as she herself understood, and resented. In one of her last letters, to her parents, she notes that people always speculated about her mental health and the brilliance of her mind, but did so precisely in order to avoid asking the one question that really mattered: “Is what she says true?”19
* * *
During Holy Week of 1938, Weil went with her mother to the great abbey at Solesmes, where, she had heard, Gregorian chant was sung very beautifully. Weil attended every service she could during this time, despite being afflicted by the severe headaches she had been enduring for several years. She also met a young Englishman in whom she discerned a spiritual radiance—to Pétrement, she called him “angel boy”—and from whom she learned about the poetry of George Herbert. She would later tell her unofficial confessor, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, that Herbert’s “Love III” had a special power for her. “I learned it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that . . . Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”20
This experience sent Weil down a path of rethinking what it means to be a human being. But this would not, for her, result in a reclaiming of the notion of humanism. Also, though drawn to Catholicism, she would never receive baptism, and she never accepted Maritain’s version of the faith. Indeed, as I will argue later, Maritain’s thought became for Weil almost a bête noire, a nemesis—at best a false friend. She would not seek to correct and reclaim Catholic humanism. Even to speak of humanism is to place the human being at the center of his or her own story, which is precisely where we do not belong: to have Christ “take possession” of us is the true path. As she wrote in her notebook in 1941 or 1942, “The errors of our time come from Christianity without the supernatural. Secularization is the cause—and primarily humanism.” This is not a movement that can simply be reversed: “Humanism and what has arisen out of it, is not a return to antiquity, but a development of poisons that are internal to Christianity.” These poisons cannot be neutralized; they must be purged. To say this is still to think in terms of the human being, “the human being as such,” to whom we owe some debt; but one must not place the human being at the center of discourse and understanding, for that is poisonous.21
Similarly, Auden in “New Year Letter,” the long poem he wrote in the first months of 1940, sees the humanistic as a mode of comfortable optimism. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, some people dreamed that that “political upheaval / . . . / realised the potential Man, / A higher species brought to birth / Upon a sixth part of the earth.” But those who sat down to read the writings that had inspired that revolution “found their humanistic view / In question”: Marx “brought / To human consciousness a thought / It thought unthinkable.” Genuine revolution in all its modes repudiates the comforts of any “humanistic view,” and such comforts cannot now be restored.22
Indeed, Maritain is the only one of our dramatis personae for whom the concept of humanism is straightforwardly compelling. After two essays on the subject written around the time of his conversion to Christianity, each of which is both ambivalent and ambiguous, Eliot effectively abandons the term; and for Lewis, a scholar of the early modern period, it is a technical term used to describe an intellectual and literary movement for which he has little use or respect.23 But as I noted at the outset of this chapter, all of them are engaged in projects of thought that arise from the humanist movement of the Renaissance and its reconfiguration in the aftermath of the encyclicals Dei Filius and Aeterni Patris. All of them believe that, to borrow once again Mark Greif’s useful phrase, that they are living in “the age of the crisis of Man,” and that that crisis can only be resolved by the restoration of the specifically Christian understanding of the human being as such. All of them would have endorsed, generally speaking, though perhaps not without slight amendment, John Milton’s great statement in “On Education,” which he in turn had derived from the early Christian humanists: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” And they also share the conviction that this restoration will not be accomplished only, or even primarily, through theology as such, but also and more effectively through philosophy, literature, and the arts. It is through these practices, which I believe are best called “humanistic,” that the renewal—or if necessary the revolutionary upheaval—of Western civilization will be achieved. That was the project that these figures, in the various ways and with their sometimes fierce disagreements, shared.