In December 1942, writing a foreword to an English translation of The Twilight of Civilization, Jacques Maritain commented on the apparent despair of his title: “If twilight ushers in night, night itself precedes day. And in human history it often happens that the first rays of a dawn are mingled with the twilight.” This was his hope. Perhaps “the present trials endured by civilization” prepare the Western world for “a new humanism,” which can in turn help bring about “the renewal of civilization.”1 The Terry Lectures he gave at Yale were, then, a looking-forward to what might be done when the long night of Europe is over and the day comes again, bringing the light in which one can work.
In the opening moments of his first lecture, on January 14, 1943, Maritain moves with remarkable swiftness to identify the issues that must underlie any valid account of what education is and what it does. The first step he takes in this endeavor is to identify his own period as, to borrow again a phrase from Mark Greif, “the age of the crisis of Man”: education, Maritain asserts, “cannot escape the problems and entanglements of philosophy, for it supposes by its very nature a philosophy of man, and from the outset it is obliged to answer the question: ‘What is man?’ which the philosophical sphinx is asking.”2
Therefore, he says, in thinking about education, we must choose between the two generally possible pictures of Man, that offered by science and that offered by religion, more particularly Christianity. And if we opt for the scientific picture, we shall soon find ourselves at sea, since “to ask what is the nature and the destiny of man”—I assume that the invocation of Niebuhr’s recent book of that title is deliberate—is to attempt “to draw from [science] a kind of metaphysics,” which runs contrary to the nature of science. The theoretical result would be “a spurious metaphysics disguised as science and yet deprived of any really philosophical insight”—that is, a metaphysics that claimed a scientific warrant without the power to justify itself scientifically. Even worse would be the practical result: “a denial or misconception of those very realities and values without which education loses all human sense or becomes the training of an animal for the utility of the state.”3
That a putatively, but not actually, scientific model of the human being would transform us into animals trained “for the utility of the state” is a constant theme of writers in this period: obviously it generates the governing allegory of Orwell’s Animal Farm. But less than the animal is the numerical: thus Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen,” written in March 1939, just after his arrival in the States, presents an inscription dedicated thus:
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)
The model is of course the creation of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a practice that began in England after the Great War and spread to France and the United States. John Keegan, in his magisterial account of that earlier war, suggests that the victors’ refusal to allow Germans to honor their own dead in a similar way was instrumental to the growing resentment in Germany that led to the rise of Hitler. Indeed, Hitler and his propagandists referred to him as “the living embodiment of the ‘unknown soldier.’ ” But the rest had to be content to be numbered rather than named among what the Cenotaph in London calls “The Glorious Dead”; and Auden imagines a future in which every citizen, as well as every lost soldier, can aspire to no more than numerical identification.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.4
It is against the animal and numerical modes of accounting for human beings—two ways of “losing all human sense”—that Maritain wants to resist by grounding education in a commitment to personalism. “To say that a man is a person is to say that in the depth of his being he is more a whole than a part and more independent than servile. It is this mystery of our nature which religious thought designates when it says that the person is the image of God.”5
Maritain was very aware, when speaking to his American audience, of the great tradition of American individualism, so a key distinction Maritain makes at the outset of his lectures is that between the individual and the person. An individual, in Maritain’s usage, is merely a material individual, “a fragment of a species, a part of the physical universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we must obey.” (The individual is, to use a phrase C. S. Lewis makes much of in his great lecture on “Membership,” a member of a set, interchangeable for all practical purposes—emphasis on “practical”—with other members of the same set. Or, in the language that Auden often uses, the individual belongs to nature, whereas only persons dwell in history.6)
Maritain does not want to deny that human beings are animals, and that their animal nature may be taken into account and in certain respects trained. What he wants to deny is that our animal nature is the whole of us. “A kind of animal training, which deals with psychophysical habits, conditioned reflexes, sense-memorization, etc., undoubtedly plays its part in education: it refers to material individuality, or to what is not specifically human in man. But education is not animal training. The education of man is a human awakening.” And what one awakens to Maritain calls aspiration, and what the human person aspires to is freedom. Though Maritain acknowledges that some attention needs to be given, in education, to enabling people to make a living—“the children of man are not made for aristocratic leisure”—he believes that “this practical aim is best provided by the general human capacities developed” through education. “Thus,” Maritain writes, “the prime goal of education is the conquest of internal and spiritual freedom to be achieved by the individual person, or, in other words, his liberation through knowledge and wisdom, good will, and love.”7
Like Lewis and Weil, Maritain is concerned that too much emphasis can be placed on subordination to what Weil calls the social Beast. While “it is obvious that man’s education must be concerned with the social group and prepare him to play his part in it,” and therefore it is true in a sense that “[m]an finds himself by subordinating himself to the group,” nevertheless, “[t]he ultimate end of education concerns the human person in his personal life and spiritual progress, not in his relationship to the social environment.” It is vital, Maritain believes, to grasp “that man has secrets which escape the group and a vocation which is not included in the group.”8
It is not easy for Maritain to say exactly how important education is to human freedom. On the one hand, he wants to insist that “for man and human life there is indeed nothing greater than intuition and love,” and moreover that “neither intuition nor love is a matter of training and learning.” We all know this, which is why, as he points out, “there are courses in philosophy, but no courses in wisdom.” That is because “wisdom is gained through spiritual experience,” which in turn is why “the saints and martyrs are the true educators of mankind”—not the teachers. And yet Maritain nevertheless wants to insist that, though intuition and love cannot be taught, “education should be primarily concerned with them.” The best summary I can make of Maritain’s subtle argument goes like this: Though intuition and love cannot be taught directly, it is the task of the teacher to help form young people so that when the opportunity comes, outside of school, for them to acquire intuition and love, they will be prepared to do so. Teachers, then, play a pivotal role in the building and sustaining of meaningful human culture: if they do not intervene in young people’s lives, in the indirect yet distinctive way that only they can, the culture will surely, if slowly, fall. Therefore “it is . . . with the art of medicine that the art of education must be compared.” Doctors heal “by imitating the ways of nature herself in her operations, and by helping nature, by providing appropriate diet and remedies that nature herself uses, according to her own dynamism, toward a biological equilibrium.” When this method is understood, it will become clear that “medicine is ars cooperativa naturae, an art of ministering, an art subservient to nature. And so is education.”9
In Maritain’s account, what the well-educated person is healed from is bondage—bondage to “bad energies.” He talks throughout Education at the Crossroads about freedom: “Education must center on the development and liberation of the individual person.” “The task of the teacher is above all one of liberation. To liberate the good energies is the best way of repressing the bad ones.”10 But it is vital to distinguish between this radical freedom and “the mere freeing of the material ego.” The radical freedom which is so vital to the person can only be achieved with “discipline and asceticism, as well as the necessity of striving towards self-perfection.” If you ignore that and focus on freeing the material ego, then “instead of fulfilling himself, man disperses himself and disintegrates.” But as bad as this false notion of freedom may be, promoting anarchy rather than freedom, it is perhaps less tragic than the “despotic conception” that moves “first to take out our heart, with anesthetics if possible, and next to replace it by some perfect organ standardized according to the rules of what everyone ought to be . . . . Instead of a genuine human personality, sealed with the mysterious face of its creator, there appears a mask, that of the conventional man or that of the rubber-stamped conscience, ‘incorporated.’ ”11
In these lectures, Maritain spells out this vision for education with particular reference to the impediments he sees to its realization—impediments in the form of these two alternative conceptions of what education is for, or, more precisely, what education is meant to produce. The despotic model he associates with the deformations of totalitarianism; the anarchic model with the Western democracies at their worst, which is to say, when they are unable to conceive of freedom as anything other than the absence of constraint. If we remember that Maritain was speaking at the moment of the Casablanca Conference, when the American entry into the war on both fronts had permanently altered the balance of military power in favor of the Allies, his double focus makes sense. The despotic European present was even then giving way to a possibly anarchic American future, something that Maritain saw with particular clarity as he took temporary refuge in the New World while awaiting the material death and—he devoutly hoped—spiritual resurrection of the Old.
Maritain seems to be thinking that American educators must learn from the cultural collapse of Europe, not because they are likely to repeat the European mistakes, but because they may well commit others that arise from the very different but equally heedless momentum of their society. That is, what Americans need to learn from Europe’s catastrophe is the danger of failing to cultivate intellectual and spiritual aspirations beyond what one’s everyday culture encourages. In Europe, what had primarily impeded genuine education was a false and ultimately poisonous model of group identity—as manifested, for instance, in the belief in an intrinsically “German physics” that had led the Nazi regime to expel most of its Jewish scientists. In America, the chief impediment to genuine education was technocratic pragmatism. Both paths led, in their different ways, to the death of deep education and therefore, ultimately, to the death of genuine human culture.
Maritain believed that these challenges needed to be faced with moral clarity and intellectual energy because, at the moment when he was speaking, and on all political sides, education was assuming what he believed to be an unnaturally and inappropriately central role:
As a result of the present disintegration of family life, of a crisis in morality and the break between religion and life, and finally of a crisis in the political state and the civic conscience, and the necessity for democratic states to rebuild themselves according to new patterns, there is a tendency, everywhere, to burden education with remedying all these deficiencies.12
In a properly functioning society, those other institutions (family, church, politics broadly conceived) play a role in forming persons for service to the community and for their own inner flourishing. But those institutions had been gravely damaged by those anarchic and despotic forces that he sees as enemies to true personhood. It is surely unfair to expect education to heal such vast and complex afflictions, especially since the very attempt “involves a risk of warping educational work”; moreover, as we have seen, Maritain believed that “the saints and martyrs are the true educators of mankind.” But in these exceptional circumstances “extraneous burdens superadded to the normal task of education must be accepted for the sake of the general welfare.”
It is, however, vital not to accept these “extraneous burdens” on behalf of the state and its interests: “the state would summon education to make up for all that is lacking in the surrounding order in the matter of common political inspiration, stable customs and traditions, common inherited standards, moral unity and unanimity.” But if education is recruited by the state “to compensate for all the deficiencies in civil society,” then “education would become . . . uniquely dependent on the management of the state,” and as a direct consequence “both the essence and the freedom of education would be ruined.” The well-educated person will always and necessarily, in an age afflicted by both anarchic and despotic tendencies, be in tension with the surrounding society: “The freedom enjoyed by education . . . will not be a quiet and easygoing, peacefully expanding freedom, but a tense and fighting one.” There will be, especially in the years following the war, a danger of shaping people not in a “truly human” way, but rather making them merely into “the organ of a technocratic society.” He sums up this element of his argument in a passage that might have been written by Simone Weil:
Technology is good, as a means for the human spirit and for human ends. But technocracy, that is to say, technology so understood and so worshipped as to exclude any superior wisdom and any other understanding than that of calculable phenomena, leaves in human life nothing but relationships of force, or at best those of pleasure, and necessarily ends up in a philosophy of domination. A technocratic society is but a totalitarian one.13
* * *
“Technology is good,” says Maritain, knowing that he will be accused of saying that it is not. And near the end of the Riddell Memorial Lectures, which he gave in Newcastle at almost the precise moment that Maritain was completing the Terry Lectures, C. S. Lewis says, “Nothing I can say will prevent some people from describing this lecture as an attack on science. I deny the charge, of course.”14 But when reading these writers, it is impossible not to suspect that their suspicions of science and technology run deeper than they are willing to acknowledge. That is to say, the development they trace in their accounts of social and intellectual history—from the creation of the scientific method, to an increasingly powerful set of technologies, to technocracy or rule by those who command the machines—certainly appears inevitable. It is hard to imagine how technocracy might be undone without the undoing of modern technology itself. And that would not be a matter merely of taking away machines, even if such direct action were possible. What J. R. R. Tolkien, who thought in these respects much as his friend Lewis did, called The Machine is an ideology, a set of unconfronted assumptions deeply embedded in human psyches and social structures alike. And indeed what distinguishes Lewis from Maritain in their thinking about technology is just this, that Maritain treats technological modernity as an explicit philosophy, whereas Lewis understands that it functions most powerfully in its subterranean mode. In treating scientism and technocracy, Lewis becomes a Nietzschean or Foucauldian genealogist, a subtle tracer of hidden histories.15
His key insight into this genealogy may be found in the bravura introduction to his history of English poetry and prose in the sixteenth century, a book that he agreed to write in 1935 but did not complete until 1953. Along the way he condensed some of that project’s major themes into the 1944 Clark Lectures at Cambridge, and those themes overlap strongly with those of his novel That Hideous Strength, which he began at the end of 1942, just as he was writing the Riddell lectures. As was typical of Lewis—his friend Owen Barfield once commented that “what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything”—he was, just as the war’s momentum permanently shifted, working out a single set of ideas in multiple genres and for multiple audiences. It is therefore helpful to explore The Abolition of Man in conjunction with these other texts that are so closely related to it. And the one that makes the key argument most pointedly is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama.16
The book’s introduction is entitled “New Learning and New Ignorance,” and in it Lewis strives to sketch the many and powerful intellectual cross-currents in the age whose literature he was tasked to write about. One of the most interesting moments comes when he describes the beginnings of modern science, which, he points out, is a chapter in the history of magic—or, if you prefer, magic is a chapter in the history of science. (In a similar vein, the American historian Lynn Thorndike published, between 1923 and 1958, eight magisterial volumes on the History of Magic and Experimental Science.) Lewis states forthrightly that “the serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve.” The method of science, Lewis continued,
is no doubt contrasted in our minds with that of the magicians: but contrasted only in the light of the event, only because we know that science succeeded and magic failed. That event was then still uncertain. Stripping off our knowledge of it, we see at once that [Sir Francis Bacon, one of the founders of experimental science] and the magicians have the closest possible affinity . . . . Nor would Bacon himself deny the affinity: he thought the aim of the magicians was “noble.”17
What lies at the heart of this “affinity”? “Both seek knowledge for the sake of power (in Bacon’s words, as ‘a spouse for fruit,’ not a ‘curtesan for pleasure’), both move in a grandiose dream of days when Man shall have been raised to the performance of ‘all things possible.’ ” What we now call magic and what we now call science find their place “among the other dreams of power which then haunted the European mind”—including those of Machiavelli.
It has often been said of Bacon that he advocated “putting Nature on the rack” in order to extract her secrets by torture. As Peter Pesic has argued in a series of essays, this is not quite right: it was Leibniz who spoke of “the art of inquiry into nature itself and of putting it on the rack—the art of experiment which Lord Bacon began so ably.” But Bacon often wrote of nature as Proteus, the shape-shifting god, and noted that if you wished to get the truth out of Proteus, “the only way was first to secure his hands with handcuffs, and then to bind him with chains.” Human “art”—by which Bacon means something like “ingenuity”—“endeavours by much vexing of bodies to force Nature to its will and conquer and subdue her.”18 This is what Lewis means by “dreams of power”: not submission to an ordained place within a God-made cosmos, but the pursuit by the world’s apex predator of “all things possible.” We are back within the realm of force, to which all of us are subject, as described in the Iliad.
The third and last chapter of The Abolition of Man begins with the idea of the human “conquest of Nature”:
“Man has Nature whacked,” said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. “No matter,” he said, “I know I’m one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is winning.” . . . I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?19
And the conclusion that Lewis comes to almost immediately is this: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” Lewis makes this claim because the most powerful technologies are never universally distributed, but are always in the hands of some powerful few—who typically use them in order to maintain and extend their control over the many. The airplane is an amazing invention, but at the time Lewis wrote, airplanes were being used to bomb people who neither owned nor controlled airplanes.
Those with the most complete control over technology Lewis calls, bluntly enough, the Controllers, and the chief purpose of the concluding chapter of The Abolition of Man is to ask what moral commitments are likely to direct the decisions of the Controllers. His answer is that the Controllers of our time have adopted an account of what human beings are—a theory of Man—that undercuts every possible motive for action except the “dream of power.” The argument is structurally identical to the one he would make a couple of years later in his book Miracles, in a chapter called “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” There he argues that if human reason is a product of the blind, undirected forces of natural selection, and unrelated in any necessary or intrinsic way to the way things actually are, then we cannot trust the claims made by the use of human reason, including the claim that human reason is a product of the blind undirected forces of natural selection. Naturalism, then, says Lewis, undoes itself. In the same way, he argues in Abolition, the claim that “traditional moral values” are but socially constructed—Lewis does not use the term, which is a recent coinage of course, but it is what he means—and unrelated in any necessary or intrinsic way to the way things should be, to a universally binding moral law, undercuts any ground on which the Controllers might justify their rule except that of “might makes right.” For if all values are socially constructed and in relation to Nature arbitrary, then even the claim that some act is necessary for the perpetuation of the human race is also arbitrary. For why should the human race survive? Lewis’s term for the natural law is the Tao, and his term for those who have rejected its authority the Innovators, and we are all required, he argues, to choose one of those two paths: “Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike.”20
Lewis is at pains to insist that this abolition of an objective and absolutely binding standard of value—which is also in effect “the abolition of Man”—has not just happened among the evidently monstrous like the Nazis. We may discern the loss of the Tao even in everyday language: “Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate antisocial elements.” (Lewis’s treatment of these linguistic phenomena, which he does in his fiction as well, is identical to the critique offered by George Orwell in Animal Farm, 1984, and “Politics and the English Language.”) “Many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany.”21
Such is the conclusion of Lewis’s lectures; but he had begun them by discussing what he calls The Green Book, a high-school-level textbook. And this returns us to the matter of education, because for Lewis the effect of The Green Book, whatever the explicit intentions of its authors, is to undermine any belief, not primarily that some thoughts are true while others are false, but rather that some feelings are appropriate and adequate to a situation while others are not. And Lewis thinks this undermining is very dangerous indeed.
In the key passage, Lewis notes that the book’s authors, whom he calls Gaius and Titius, “quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall,” in which Coleridge hears two tourists comment on the waterfall, one calling it “sublime” and the other “pretty.” Coleridge agreed with the first. Gaius and Titius, as quoted by Lewis, interpret the event thus:
When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall . . . . Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime,” or shortly, I have sublime feelings . . . . This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.22
Lewis’s response to these claims begins with the note that Gaius and Titius have, though they are not aware of it, set themselves quite apart from Coleridge. For while Coleridge surely would have acknowledged that sometimes people indeed speak of their feelings rather than of the object they are nominally attending to, he did not think that such a condition was either necessary or good. For Coleridge, the tourist who says that the waterfall is “pretty” simply has not perceived the waterfall properly, whereas the one who calls it “sublime” had said something correct: “The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more ‘just’ or ‘ordinate’ or ‘appropriate’ to it than others.”23 Kant in his Critique of Judgment had defined the absolute sublime as that in relation to which everything else seems small, but of course there are also degrees of sublimity, and the proper response of a human being to a mighty waterfall is to be cognizant of its size and power, and indeed to feel its magnificence and our corresponding smallness.
For Lewis, the further point to be made here is that such proper response is not inevitable: it does not come naturally to all of us—as can be seen in the tourist who called the waterfall “pretty”—but often must be the product of careful training. And, Lewis goes on to argue, one of the primary objects of pedagogical attention, especially in a child’s early years, will be the training of such responses: “St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind or degree of love which is appropriate to it . . . . The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.”24 But of course this training will not occur if the teachers do not believe that any given emotional response is any more or less valid than any other. Note the close relationship between this argument and my earlier description of what Maritain believed the teacher can accomplish: “Though intuition and love cannot be taught directly, it is the task of the teacher to help form young people so that when the opportunity comes, outside of school, for them to acquire intuition and love, they will be prepared to do so.”
That Hideous Strength is simply and straightforwardly an incarnation in fiction of the ideas that Lewis explores in his Clark Lectures, in The Abolition of Man, and in the talks on “The Inner Ring” and “Membership” mentioned earlier. Lewis even at some points quotes himself, or nearly enough. In “The Inner Ring,” Lewis writes, “Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things”; in That Hideous Strength, he writes,
This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.25
In Abolition, he writes, as we have seen, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument”; in the novel, a very wicked man says, “You know as well as I do that Man’s power over Nature means the power of some men over other men with Nature as the instrument.”26
The character spoken of in that first quotation from That Hideous Strength, and spoken to in the second, is Mark Studdock, whose descent into an inferno of evil is one of two major strands of the novel’s plot (the other being his wife Jane’s ascent to a far higher life than she had previously known). Immediately after the wicked man, named Filostrato, speaks to Mark about what “Man’s power over Nature” means, he conveys Mark to a kind of inner chamber where the inmost secret of his organization—or what he claims and believes to be the inmost secret—is revealed. It may be a lesser secret; it may be irrelevant to the organization’s deepest purposes. But in any event, Mark is floored by what he sees, and by the increasingly explicit threats of violence against him if he does not obey the commands of the leaders. And as Mark quakes in fear, Lewis comments,
It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honor to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.27
Lewis describes here the consequences of a comprehensive failure of moral formation, a failure that has left Mark utterly vulnerable to the draw of what appears to him to be the “Inner Ring” of Filostrato’s organization, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. Now he begins to see what N.I.C.E. is really like—but too late for him to withdraw from it. The heart of Mark’s problem is that he had never before this point suspected the intentions of those around him, at least not to the degree that he should have: he had had no firm evidence, but a better-trained heart would have been uncomfortable from the beginning. To one habituated to the Tao, the whole place would have had an unpleasant and unsettling odor. We should be reminded here of Maritain’s argument in Education at the Crossroads that certain vital elements of moral and spiritual formation cannot be straightforwardly inculcated but must nevertheless always be aimed at. None of Mark’s education has acknowledged this necessity.
The educational failure Lewis describes here is not one merely of schools, though indeed the formal educational system had failed Mark by allowing him to evade “the severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition” (the natural sciences, mathematics, and analytical philosophy on the one hand, the proper humanities on the other) and left him “a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge.” It is telling that the job N.I.C.E. finds for Mark to do is writing propagandistic op-eds for newspapers. But the failure is social as well: Lewis shares with Eliot (see, for instance, the latter’s eulogy of the famous music-hall performer Marie Lloyd28) the belief that the lower and upper classes have managed to retain and transmit some ethical orientation that the middle class has completely forgotten: “neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honor.”
Mark’s wife Jane, by contrast, whose education is little different than her husband’s, retains just enough residual understanding of the Tao that when she meets a genuinely holy man she is strongly drawn by who he is and what he stands for. (Jane’s receptiveness might be a function of what used to be called “female intuition,” but more probably is a result of her being the last in a long line of spiritual sensitives or clairvoyants. In any case, Lewis is openly dismissive of Jane’s intellectual stature and potential.) If Mark is drawn inexorably into a voracious Inner Ring, Jane is offered the possibility of genuine Membership. And gradually, hesitatingly, she accepts it, and is thereby saved from destruction. If Mark too finds rescue, that is less because of any inherent virtue than because of the mad overreach of N.I.C.E.
N.I.C.E. is of course a technocratic organization. As one enthusiastic supporter of its endeavors says early in the book, “The N.I.C.E. marks the beginning of a new era—the really scientific era. Up to now, everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis.”29 That the organization’s ambitions are, as Maritain predicted, totalitarian goes almost without saying: its every action demonstrates its determination to seize absolute control of everything within its grasp; Lewis finds this aspect of its character so inevitable as to be uninteresting. What he wishes to emphasize about it—to return to the theme of an earlier chapter—is that it is demonic.
That is, while its leaders have become Controllers in relation to everyone around them, in relation to forces far greater than themselves, they are the Controlled. A few of them understand that they receive instructions from invisible but masterful beings they call the Macrobes; none of them understand, until it is too late, that the Macrobes are demons like Screwtape, but, it seems, far more powerful. In short, the Controllers are precisely like Mark Studdock: having received no moral education or having forgotten what they once knew—having set aside the Tao, which is to say, the only orientation that would have revealed to them the danger they were courting—they give themselves to forces they not only do not fear but do not even believe in, and are consumed. The scientist-magicians have dreamed their dreams and have conjured powers they cannot control. Thus those chilling words of Auden’s cited earlier: “The vanquished powers were glad // To be invisible and free; without remorse / Struck down the sons who strayed into their course, / And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.”
Lewis commented on these matters quite directly in The Screwtape Letters, and these words, perhaps, shall be a proper conclusion to the renewal of our demonological meditations. Screwtape notes that the official policy of “Our Father Below” is that the demons should conceal their existence, which has certain advantages—it enables the demons to make people into “materialists and skeptics”—but also certain disadvantages—primarily the inability to practice “direct terrorism” and to produce dark magicians. But perhaps, he muses, there may be ways to combine the two approaches: “I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy.” Eventually, he hopes, “If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls ‘Forces’ while denying the existence of ‘spirits’—then the end of the war will be in sight.”30
* * *
Auden’s feelings about Swarthmore were mixed. “Everyone is very nice but not very lively,” he wrote to a friend soon after his arrival in the fall of 1942. “The place is a dump without either a bar or a movie house and the trains are so bad that going to Philadelphia is an excursion.” The only place to eat in town was a little diner where the jukebox blared unremittingly: “I thought I’d go out of my mind if I heard ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ one more time.” A certain Quaker abstemiousness still permeated the college’s culture at that time, and Auden wrote to Ursula Niebuhr, “My seminar on Romanticism starts tomorrow. Quakers or no Quakers, I shall serve bread and cheese and beer at four o’clock.”31 But the quietness of the place also offered him the opportunity to continue the complete remaking of his intellectual equipment that he had begun when he came to America in 1939.
It was while teaching at Swarthmore that Auden completed his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, and wrote almost all of what may be his masterpiece, The Sea and the Mirror. That poem’s subtitle, “A Commentary on The Tempest,” disguises its ambition: it is, as he told Ursula Niebuhr, a poem about the relationship between Christianity and art, and therefore corresponds in curious yet important ways to the poem Eliot was writing at the same time: “Little Gidding.” Though Eliot was twenty years older than Auden, an elder statesman of poetry rather than a Young Turk, their poems share a valedictory air.32
When Eliot is confronted, in the Dantesque second section of “Little Gidding,” by the specter of “some dead master,” “a familiar compound ghost / Both intimate and unidentifiable,” that figure says to him that “our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe”—speaking in the past tense, as though marking Eliot too as one of the dead. (Eliot was Auden’s editor at Faber and Faber, and when he visited Eliot there, he typically found him playing patience at his desk. When Auden asked him why he liked the game, Eliot replied, “Because it’s the nearest thing to being dead.”33) The ghost then advises Eliot how to bring his work and his life to a conclusion—“Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age / To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort”—and the poem’s famous final lines address “the end of all our exploring.”
Auden, in his mid-thirties, would scarcely be expected to sound such a note, and yet in choosing Shakespeare’s aged magician Prospero—who at the end of The Tempest says that he will break his staff and drown his book and retire to Milan, “where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (V.i.)—as his protagonist, he enters the same environment of feeling. And there is no question that Auden identifies with Prospero, who, in this “Commentary,” tells Ariel that he “knows now what magic is: / The power to enchant that comes from disillusion.”34 Auden had come to understand that his own poetic magic, a magic that had captivated the English poetic world in the previous decade, had hidden from him his own disillusionments; and he had come to believe that to have any real hope of seeing himself and his world truly, he needed like Prospero to break his staff and drown his book. Looking back on the great change in Auden’s career, Seamus Heaney commented, shrewdly and incisively, that Auden in his reinvention of his poetic self wished to ensure that his verse “keep a civil tongue”—in all senses of the word “civil”—but “the price of all this is a certain diminution of the language’s autonomy, a not uncensorious training of its wilder shoots.”35 This is more than fair, and one can sympathize with any reader who laments the training, indeed often the rigorous pruning, of those shoots. Auden’s more civil, and civic, and broadly religious (in the etymological sense of religio) later verse is not to everyone’e taste.
These attempts by Eliot and Auden to articulate a disciplined Christian poetics, a role for poetry within the broader framework of the Christian life, are beyond the scope of this book; but it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these poets were pursuing these matters alongside the more public meditations that we explore here. As Auden wrote in the first months of 1942, “To be living in the greatest revolutionary epoch since the Reformation means . . . that the external conflict of classes and nations and political systems is paralleled by an equally intense internal conflict in every individual.”36
If The Sea and the Mirror is the one major work that belongs wholly to Auden’s Swarthmore years, the place and the period mark a kind of hinge or pivot in Auden’s career. More than a decade later he would write of his time spent on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples as one characterized by “hoping to twig from / What we are not what we might be next,” and the less romantic venue of Swarthmore was that for him also. He completed For the Time Being there; there he began his last long poem, The Age of Anxiety; and in the midst of all that, he even gave thought to what it means to be a teacher, and what it means to be educated.
The talk he gave on January 15, 1943—the second day of the Casablanca Conference, and the day after Maritain had given the first of his Terry Lectures at Yale—is called “Vocation and Society,” and it seems slight and casual but is not. He begins by using a scene from The Magic Flute—by this point Chester Kallman had taught him to make opera central to his aesthetics—to critique the vacuity of ordinary middle-class life (as we have seen Eliot and Lewis do).
To all of us the gods offer a similar choice between two kinds of existence, between remaining Papageno the lowbrow, and becoming Tamino the highbrow. What they permit to none of us, is to be a middlebrow, that is, to exist without passion and without a willingness to suffer.37
And to bring this immediately home to his audience, comprised largely of students, he continues by noting that the middlebrow “does not wish to become wise, only to be wise, to graduate cum laude.” He thereby drives a wedge between the quest for genuine wisdom and the desire to be academically (and then, of course, socially and economically) successful.
To have a vocation, Auden says, is to be in a state of “subjective requiredness”: your vocation is something you are required to do, but the requirement comes from within. You are the one who is called, not necessarily anyone else, and likewise you alone are the discerner of the call. “For this reason Vocational Guidance is a contradiction in terms. The only reasons another can give me why I should adopt this career rather than that are that I should be more successful or happier or it pays better, but such matters are precisely what I must not think about if I am really to find my vocation.”38
But the freedom to shun “Vocational Guidance” and seek my own calling is not something that I can take for granted. Indeed, in many societies it is impossible. Fascism, Auden argues, refuses to acknowledge any place for subjective requiredness: in its social model, what is required is always objective, imposed from without by the State. Fascism further contends that no given society, at least in the world of the modern, highly armed nation-state, can flourish unless the only requiredness is objective and state-determined. Confronted by this view, Auden replies, the Western democracies must “defeat our enemies in the field,” yes, but also disprove their implicit (and sometimes explicit) “assertion that . . . war is the natural state of an industrialised society, by proving that a peaceful society can function under modern conditions. For those of us who are concerned with education, this means that our first problem is what, if anything, can we do to make a sense of vocation the normal instead of the exceptional thing.”39
In other words, a humanistic education that encourages students to think vocationally is in itself a refutation of Fascism—perhaps one of the more lastingly powerful refutations imaginable. Enemies defeated on the field of battle can rearm and resume hostilities, as the Germany that lost in 1918 had done. But a model of the state cannot be so easily revived if its ideas are conclusively refuted by the flourishing of persons in a radically different social structure. In his lecture, Auden was asking the undergraduates of Swarthmore to seek their own vocations not only for themselves but also for the sake of democracy.
At the end of his talk, however, he introduces a new and complicating thought—a destabilizing one in many respects. Is democracy, after all, sustainable? Or, to put the question more precisely, and as it was often put in the debates surrounding Finkelstein’s Conference, is it self-sustaining? Auden echoes a famous essay by E. M. Forster in offering “Two Cheers for Democracy,” but he withholds the third cheer for rather different reasons than the atheist Forster had. “Two cheers for Democracy,” says Auden: “one because it admits vocation, and two because it permits contrition. Two cheers are quite enough. There is no occasion to give three. Only Agape, the Beloved Republic, deserves that.”40 What he would later call “our dear old bag of a democracy” is sustained, not by itself, but by belief in something deeper and greater than itself. So Auden concludes his talk not with those cheers, but with the reading of a few lines of a very recent poem.
Just four months earlier, T. S. Eliot had published “Little Gidding,” the last of his Four Quartets, and Auden finished his talk by reading the poem’s concluding lines, culminating in this famous affirmation:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.41
Auden sometimes expressed ambivalence about Eliot’s poetic achievement and influence, but not on this occasion. He called Eliot “the greatest poet now living, one in whom America and England may both rejoice, one whose personal and professional example are to every other and lesser writer at once an inspiration and a reproach.”42 And it was surely Eliot’s calm vision of an ultimate restoration of all broken things that called forth Auden’s highest praise.
Auden’s vision, then, is of a vocation-based education sustained by a democratic polity, and a democratic polity sustained by Christian faith. This vision stood (as did Maritain’s in Education at the Crossroads, as did Lewis’s in The Abolition of Man) against the commanding power of the nation-state, against pragmatism, against modern technocratic canons of efficiency—against Weil’s Social Beast.
* * *
The last three of the Four Quartets appeared in the New English Weekly, a periodical edited by a literary and Christian entrepreneur named Philip Mairet. With the encouragement and interlocution of Mairet, Eliot began, in late 1942, to articulate some of the convictions that he had reached in conversations within the Moot and within an even more informal organization called the Chandos Group, because it typically met at the Chandos Restaurant. (Mairet was involved in this group too.) Its purpose was to seek “certain absolute and eternal principles”—which is to say, Christian principles—“of true sociology.”43 Stimulated by the Chandos conversations, Eliot began to think that what was needed, even prior to reflections on a “Christian society” or a “Christian Britain,” was some more general conceptual framework—some elementary and yet flexible definition of the objects of inquiry. So, in the first weeks of 1943, just as Maritain was delivering his Terry lectures, and Lewis his Riddell lectures, and Auden his talk on “Vocation and Society,” Eliot published a series of essays under the general title “Notes toward the Definition of Culture.”
Later in the year, Eliot and Mairet convened still more meetings, at St. Anne’s Church in Soho, to explore the question of how “culture” should be defined, and these meetings helped him to refine his concepts. He eventually published Notes toward the Definition of Culture in book form in 1948, but the book does not differ in its basic framework from the original essays, so I think it is acceptable, even at the risk of time travel, to treat the finished product of 1948 as a reasonably faithful account of what Eliot was thinking in early 1943.
Eliot says at several points in the book that he is writing not as a poet or a critic but as a sociologist—thus showing his debt to the interests of the Chandos Group—though he does not seek to define “society” but rather “culture.” This decision stems in part from conversations going on around him in which much debate about how to shape and form culture is accompanied by a complete lack of interest in what the word means: “I have observed with growing anxiety the career of this word culture during the past six or seven years.”44 It is perhaps odd that, though claiming to be a sociologist, Eliot does not define “society” or explain precisely how culture is to be distinguished from it. We have to guess, but it seems reasonably evident that for Eliot culture is comprised of the meaning-bearing elements of society. At one point he says, “Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”45
This description clearly calls into question the relationship between culture and religion, and Eliot’s chief difficulty in Notes is to negotiate this relationship. With the neurotically discriminating hypersubtlety we have seen in his earlier writing on these topics, he wants to emphasize in certain ways the absolute indissolubility of religion and culture, while in other ways, and in other contexts, emphasizing the danger of treating them as simply identical. He is not perfectly clear on these matters, but I think he mistrusts the tendency to separate religion and culture for two reasons: first, it violates the sociological definition of culture that he uses throughout the book—again, he claims to be writing as a sociologist—and second, he denies that you can have genuinely healthy and sustainable cultural developments that are not related to a healthy practiced religion. Conversely, he mistrusts the tendency to unify the two because this leads all too easily to the conflation of religious duties with patriotic and economic (in the sense of the oikos, the household) impulses.46
Two contrasting separatist errors, Eliot argues, must be avoided: the belief “that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion”; and “the belief that the preservation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture.”47 He tries to avoid these errors, and also those of simple unification, by describing culture as the incarnation of religion: the embodiment in a wide series of practices, from harvest festivals to fox-hunting, of a set of core beliefs, convictions, and obligations. “Bishops are a part of English culture, and horses and dogs are a part of English religion.”48
And yet it would not be a good sign if bishops were nothing more than culture, and horses and dogs occupied the heights of religious practice: “when this identification [of religion and culture] is complete, it means in actual societies both an inferior culture and an inferior religion.”49
I have expressed my frustration with the vague evasiveness from which Eliot’s prose too often suffers, but I do not believe he is evading anything here, nor is he any more vague than necessary. “The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications.”50 His difficulty can be better understood if we reflect on his use of the term incarnation to describe culture’s relation to religion. At the end of the chapter in which he proffers this word, he says, “While I am aware of the temerity of employing such an exalted term, I cannot think of any other which would convey so well the intention to avoid [mere] relation on the one hand and [absolute] identification on the other.”51 It is perhaps useful here to trace the term back to its theological usage: the complications introduced into the doctrine of God by saying that God became Man are indeed very similar. The Athanasian Creed says, “And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.” Eliot argues that we may not confound the persons by treating religion and culture as merely and simply identical; nor may we divide the substance by treating them as capable of completely independent development. To make either mistake is to fall into sociological heresy.
Having established these coordinates, Eliot then sets out to reflect on the conditions that must be in place in order for culture to rightly embody the religion of a given society. This will require establishing further coordinates, primarily involving the elite who will be charged, either implicitly or explicitly, with the direction of the culture. (This is the burden of chapter 2.) In brief, Eliot considers the differences between a hereditary aristocracy in which elite status is conferred by birth and, alternatively, something like a meritocracy.52 His primary argument is that while the elite may not be confined to any particular social class, that does not make them any less the elite, the shapers and directors of culture. Eliot insists that even a wholly classless society will still have an elite, and that that elite will have the chief burden of transmitting culture. A failure to recognize the role of the elite will eviscerate our social criticism.
All this leads, inevitably and as a kind of culmination of the whole book, to reflections on the role of education in creating or sustaining culture. Eliot begins by noting something I mentioned in the preface to this book: “During the recent war an exceptional number of books were published on the subject of education; there were also voluminous reports of commissions, and an incalculable number of contributions on this subject in periodicals.”53 Eliot adds to this flood with some trepidation, in large part because he knows that his views run strictly against its current: and that happens because the role he has assigned to the cultural elite is altogether unacknowledged, indeed is repudiated, by most other writers, and especially within the “voluminous reports of commissions.” In his first mention of this subject in Notes, he writes, “All that concerns me at the moment is the question whether, by education alone, we can ensure the transmission of culture in a society in which some educationists appear indifferent to class distinctions, and from which some other educationists appear to want to remove class distinctions altogether.”54 And it cannot surprise anyone to learn that Eliot thinks the transmission of culture is impossible if “class distinctions,” and more particularly the cultivation and sustaining of a genuine elite, are neglected.
One of Eliot’s chief concerns is that the “educationists,” assuming the part of what Lewis called the Controllers, will necessarily diminish the role of the family in education, within which Eliot includes moral formation. “In the society desired by some reformers, what the family can transmit will be limited to the minimum, especially if the child is to be, as Mr. H. C. Dent hopes, manipulated by a unified educational system ‘from the cradle to the grave.’ ”55 Dent had been since 1940 the editor of the Times Education Supplementand had written one of the most widely read of the many wartime books on education, A New Order in English Education (1942).56 The phrase “from the cradle to the grave” was associated with the Beveridge Report, also from 1942, which laid the foundation for the postwar creation of the National Health Service and other elements of a comprehensive welfare state, and Dent understood a new national educational scheme as necessarily and intimately related to this larger social program. All this simply appalled Eliot, who—to borrow Lewis’s language—foresaw education being detached from the Tao (which the family traditionally taught and transmitted) and turned over to moral “Innovators” like Gaius and Titius.
Little of the protest against such a model that Eliot registers in Notes is obviously derived from Christian thought: it arises from a kind of conservatism that was even then archaic. For instance, Eliot worries what such state-controlled education might do to the children of poor and uneducated parents: “to be educated above the level of those whose social habits and tastes one has inherited, may cause a division within a man which interferes with happiness; even though, when the individual is of superior intellect, it may bring him a fuller and more useful life.” He is, moreover, not convinced that every member of a society needs formal education: “A high average of general education is perhaps less necessary for a civil society than is a respect for learning.”57
When education has worked well in England, he asserts, such circumstances “were not brought about by equality of opportunity. They were not brought about, either, by mere privilege; but by a happy combination of privilege and opportunity . . . of which no Education Act will ever find the secret.”58 (This is a reference to the Education Act of 1944, mentioned in my preface.) This is as much as to say—in defiance of the nearly universal commitment to planning that Mannheim endorsed and that Tony Judt saw as one of the chief markers of the postwar world—that successful educational regimes can never be planned, can never be systematic, must inevitably be fortuitous when they exist at all. This is not a conclusion for which Eliot argues; it seems to be something closer to an axiom for him.
For Eliot, what is missing from the rhetoric of the “educationists” is an acknowledgement that they believe that “we have arrived at a stage of civilisation at which the family is irresponsible, or incompetent, or helpless; at which parents cannot be expected to train their children properly; at which many parents cannot afford to feed them properly, and would not know how, even if they had the means; and that Education must step in and make the best of a bad job.” But for Eliot, “the instructive point is this, that the more education arrogates to itself the responsibility, the more systematically will it betray culture.”59 It is striking at this stage, near the very end of his book, how powerfully Eliot veers from his habitual calmness of approach, detachment of style:
We know now that the highest achievements of the past, in art, in wisdom, in holiness, were but “stages in development” which we can teach [young people] to improve upon. We must not train them merely to receive the culture of the past, for that would be to regard the culture of the past as final. We must not impose culture upon the young, though we may impose upon them whatever political and social philosophy is in vogue. And yet the culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us. And we know, that whether education can foster and improve culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it. For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture—of that part of it which is transmissible by education—are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.60
Eliot knows he has lapsed into jeremiad here: His next sentence reads, “The previous paragraph is to be considered only as an incidental flourish to relieve the feelings of the writer and perhaps of a few of his more sympathetic readers.”
It is a curious and unsatisfying performance, to say the best that can be said. And what is most striking about it, in relation to the other critiques and models of education that we have been exploring in this chapter, is how utterly uninformed it is by distinctively Christian reflection. It seems, rather, the cry of a man who has traded in his egalitarian American birthright for a class-based British traditionalism that now seems to be dissolving just at the moment that he comes fully into his inheritance of it.
* * *
When the writings of the last months of Simone Weil’s life were collected in book form and published in English, in 1952, they appeared with an introduction by Eliot. He acknowledges at the outset that “the reader of her work finds himself confronted by a difficult, violent and complex personality”; he notes her tendency to “immoderate affirmations” and admits that these will surely “tax the patience of the reader.” But he exhorts us to master any impatience and keep reading. He centers his comments on an observation by Father Perrin: “Je crois que son âme est incomparablement plus haute que son génie” (I think her soul is incomparably greater [or, more literally and perhaps better, higher] than her genius). Eliot does not think we should understand this as a disparagement of Weil’s intellect. Rather, one should read The Need for Roots in the conviction that Weil’s intellectual gifts were enormous, but also with the constant awareness that she died young and “had a very great soul to grow up to.”61
The writing that Weil did in the last eighteen months of her life, in The Need for Roots and in miscellaneous essays, circles endlessly around a single word, malheur, commonly translated in ordinary circumstances as “unhappiness,” but often rendered by Weil’s translators as “affliction.” It is not suffering (souffrance): In one essay Weil writes, “La plus grande énigme de la vie humaine, ce n’est pas la souffrance, c’est le malheur” (The greatest enigma of human life is not suffering, it is malheur). It is a kind of stamp or permanent inscription: “It takes possession of the soul and marks it through and through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery.” The form of malheur to which she calls particular attention is that created when force—as we see in the Iliad—reduces a person to a thing. To know that you have been reduced to the status of a mere thing and cannot undo this violation of your being—this, perhaps, is the experience of malheur. “In the best of cases, the one who is marked by [malheur] will only keep half his soul.”62
We who see others in the grip of malheur are obliged, first and foremost, to pay attention—to pay the same absolute attention that God deserves, and which, as we have seen, Weil did not think herself successful in giving. Love of God and love of neighbor—the twofold commandment that Jesus said summed up all the law and the prophets63—begins and in a sense also ends in attention. To attend to God is difficult because he is absent; to attend to the person marked by malheur is equally difficult but for the opposite reason: she is too present. Everything in us wants to turn away. It is this temptation that must be resisted. The Iliad is great, and is for us “a pure and lovely mirror,” precisely because it “never tires of showing us” the scandalous image of human beings transformed into things.
(In 1946 Auden recalled the poems—“versified trash”—that had been written about the Lidice massacre in 1942: by way of reprisal for the assassination of a German official, the Nazis executed every man in the village of Lidice, near Prague, and sent almost all of the women and children to the Chełmno concentration camp, where they were killed with poison gas. Auden could not “avoid the conclusion that what was really bothering the versifiers was a feeling of guilt at not feeling horrorstruck enough. Could a good poem have been written on such a subject? Possibly. One that revealed this lack of feeling, that told how when he read the news, the poet, like you and I, dear reader, went on thinking about his fame or his lunch, and how glad he was that he was not one of the victims.”64)
If God and the afflicted neighbor are opposites according to the logic of presence and absence, they are according to another logic precisely the same: they are silent. They do not and cannot communicate, through language, what it is like to be them. (“As for those who have been struck by one of those blows that leave a being struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them.”65) Attention, then, not speech, is the means by which understanding of wholly alien experience may be achieved. And to take on this costly obligation to attend, to forego the privilege of looking away or offering easy words, is a kind of spiritual poverty—one much to be desired.
That searing meditation on malheur, and the possible responses to it, was probably written in Marseilles in the spring of 1942.66 A year later, in England, she returned to this theme, but playing it now in a political key: “Enslaved and oppressed Europe will not see better days, when she is liberated, unless spiritual poverty has first taken root in her.” And how might such spiritual poverty be encouraged? Weil, like Eliot, sees that the practices of the social elite are key to the spiritual and moral formation of the culture—but the practices she recommends are considerably stricter and more self-abnegating than anything Eliot had envisioned: “What is needed today is an elite to inspire the virtue of spiritual poverty among the ill-used masses; and for this it is necessary that the elite shall be poor not just in spirit but in fact.” That is, the European elite must not see the actual, material poverty that the war has brought to them as lamentable condition to be overcome as soon as possible, but must rather embrace it as a means by which to pursue a spiritual poverty that they can manifest to the masses. They must, to borrow and transfigure another of Eliot’s notions, incarnate poverty. Only in a spiritual renewal brought about by poverty may Europe be saved: “If we are only saved by American money and machines we shall fall back, one way or another, into a new servitude like the one which we now suffer.”67 Once again, we see the argument that entrusting technocracy with our salvation is a recipe for winning the war while losing the peace; but Weil’s preferred alternative to technocracy is far more radical than that proposed by any of the other figures studied in this book.
In the last months of her life, in London, Weil wrote so much that her biographer Simone Pétrement wonders how it was physically possible. Indeed, the workload she imposed on herself must surely have been incompatible with taking proper care of her body and therefore may well have hastened her death. The primary document that emerged from that period of frantic energy, the book known in English as The Need for Roots, but which she called Enracinement (Rootedness), is perhaps the most extreme, idealistic, and uncompromising statement by this most extreme, idealistic, and uncompromising of writers. Eliot described it as a young person’s book, not primarily in the sense that only a young person could have written it but rather in the sense that only a young person can read it: “This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed in the life of the hustings and the legislative assembly; books of the effect of which, we can only hope, will become apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation.”68
Eliot also wrote in that introduction of Weil that she “was three things in the highest degree: French, Jewish and Christian.”69 It seems likely that she would have agreed only with the first. Her rejection of Judaism was consistent and fierce. In a letter to the Minister of Jewish Affairs in the Vichy regime in October 1941, she wrote, “I do not consider myself a Jew, since I have never set foot in a synagogue, have been raised by my free-thinking parents with no religious observances of any kind, have no feeling of attraction to the Jewish religion and no attachment to Jewish tradition.” (As noted earlier, the following year when she was in New York she attended a synagogue for the only time in her life—a congregation of Ethiopian Jews.)70
The greatest blot on Weil’s thought and character is her extreme anti-Semitism. Many of her statements about Jews are nearly indistinguishable from the utterances of Hitler. Of the history of Israel, Weil wrote that “from Abraham onwards,” and only “excepting some of the prophets,” “everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!” Even the courageous resistance of the Jews to Roman tyranny is, bizarrely, portrayed by her as a vice: “The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile.” Her comment on the idea that the Jews are the Chosen People of God: “A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.”71
Weil’s hatred of Judaism centered on the idea of the Chosen People—which is to say, it bears a close kinship to her repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church’s practices of exclusion. For some to be chosen, others must remain not chosen; for some to be orthodox, others must be designated as heterodox. Such ideas are for Weil the logic of the Inner Ring writ in world-historical capitals. As she had said, insistently, in one of her letters to Father Perrin,
I should like to draw your attention to one point. It is that there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle to the Incarnation of Christianity. It is the use of the two little words anathema sit. It is not their existence, but the way they have been employed up till now. It is that also which prevents me from crossing the threshold of the Church. I remain beside all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, on account of those two little words. I remain beside them all the more because my own intelligence is numbered among them.72
Conor Cruise O’Brien has, I think, summed up this element of Weil’s thought with great clarity and concision. He comments that her “repulsion” at the idea of a chosen people
is a fundamental and abiding element in her mind and character. It could both carry her to strange extremes and stop her dead in her tracks. At one time it made it possible for her to counsel the acceptance of an anti-Semitic state in France as a lesser evil than war; at another it made it impossible for her to accept baptism into the Catholic Church. Both that acceptance and that refusal are significant expressions of what I call her antipolitics; her radical rejection of all limited associations.73
In an earlier chapter I described Lewis’s central distinction between the destructive power of the Inner Ring and the healing, restorative power of genuine membership in a genuine community. Weil did not in any way acknowledge such a distinction. To accept on any grounds “limited associations” is to worship what she called the Great Beast. In notebooks she wrote during her last months in France, she pressed this point repeatedly: “The collective is the root of all idolatry. This is what chains us to the earth . . . . It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social.” To accept a social meaning for the person is a form of “service of the false God (of the social Beast under whatever form it may be)” which “purifies evil by eliminating its horror.”
She hammers relentlessly: “The social order is irreducibly that of the prince of this world.” “Rootedness [enracinement] lies in something other than the social.” “Conscience is deceived by the social.” All belonging is idolatrous, evil, opposed to the message of Christ. Weil does not notice that Jesus tells his disciples, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables” (Mark 4:11). It is always, as I have noted, “those outside” with whom Weil identifies—outside the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, outside the magisterially defined boundaries of Christian orthodoxy—and it is those who police those boundaries from within whom she most energetically and angrily resists. For such policing to her was one of the manifestations of force and therefore a mighty contributor to malheur.74
It is in light of these considerations that we may consider a key passage in The Need for Roots:
How often, for instance, we hear the following commonplace repeated: “Whether Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Free-Thinkers, we’re all Frenchmen,” exactly as though it were a question of small territorial fragments of the country, as who should say, “Whether from Marseilles, Lyon or Paris, we’re all Frenchmen.” In a document promulgated by the Pope, one may read: “Not only from the Christian point of view, but, more generally, from the human point of view . . . ,” as though the Christian point of view—which either has no meaning at all, or else claims to encompass everything, in this world and the next—possessed a smaller degree of generality than the human point of view. It is impossible to conceive of a more terrible admission of religious bankruptcy. That is how the anathema sit have to be paid for. To sum up, religion, degraded to the rank of a private matter, reduces itself to the choice of a place in which to spend an hour or two every Sunday morning.75
This seems to contradict, quite directly, her resistance to orthodoxy—and indeed it may. It is often difficult to tell with Weil whether she is contradicting herself or making a point of great subtlety. This passage may be read to say that religious institutions, if they must exist at all, should manifest humility in deed, but should be uncompromising in proclamation. It appears that she did not mind the Church declaring unambiguously and unhesitatingly its beliefs; she minded the “spiritual totalitarianism” of what Charles Williams, again, called “the method of imposition of belief.”
In this she wished for religious institutions to be as she herself was. Father Perrin said of her that she was a person of the most extraordinary humility, but also that he had never seen her give an inch in an argument. Eliot, in his introduction to The Need for Roots, comments on this apparent paradox: “One is struck, here and there, by a contrast between an almost superhuman humility and what appears to be an almost outrageous arrogance.” He accounts for this by noting, shrewdly I believe, that “all her thought was so intensely lived, that the abandonment of any opinion required modifications in her whole being: a process which could not take place painlessly, or in the course of a conversation.”76 But it is not obvious that this particular complex of attitudes can be practiced at all by institutions.
This much is clear, however: institutions can do harm. They can uproot. And throughout The Need for Roots Weil assigns blame to educational institutions for the deracination she laments. Her analysis of this situation is, as was typical for her, more deeply historical than that of other critics—though building an argument along many of the same lines as the other figures we have studied. She points to the Renaissance as the period that “brought about a break between people of culture and the mass of the population,” a break that had the effect of “abstracting culture from national tradition.” However, to some degree it compensated for this by causing that culture “to be steeped in Greek tradition.” Weil, as an evident Hellenophile but also someone compelled by the Christian Gospel, has mixed feelings about this: as we saw in her essay on “The Romanesque Renaissance,” the later movement usually called the Renaissance offered a “faint, confused image . . . of man’s supernatural vocation”—but it was a genuine image nonetheless. When, in subsequent centuries, “links with the national traditions have not been renewed, but Greece has been forgotten,” something of great value was lost.
The result has been a culture which has developed in a very restricted medium, removed from the world, in a stove-pipe atmosphere—a culture very strongly directed towards and influenced by technical science, very strongly tinged with pragmatism, extremely broken up by specialization, entirely deprived both of contact with this world and, at the same time, of any window opening on to the world beyond.77
Thus, “what is called today educating the masses” is a matter of “taking this modern culture, evolved in such a closed, unwholesome atmosphere, and one so indifferent to the truth, removing whatever it may still contain of intrinsic merit—an operation known as popularization—and shovelling the residue as it stands into the minds of the unfortunate individuals desirous of learning, in the same way as you feed birds with a stick.” Such a model clearly cannot be called genuine education.
Returning to this theme late in the book, Weil echoes Maritain and Lewis in calling for an education that trains the sensibility and affections at least as seriously as it attends to the mind: “To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good—that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution.”78 We are back, then, to Augustine’s ordo amoris: education is a disciplining of the affections to make them “ordinate,” appropriate, and adequate to the circumstances.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis had written, “You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive,’ or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity.’ In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”79 Weil makes the same point by way of, ironically enough, a technological metaphor: “To want to direct human creatures—others or oneself—towards the good by simply pointing out the direction, without making sure the necessary motives have been provided, is as if one tried, by pressing down the accelerator, to set off in a motor-car with an empty petrol tank.”80
The chief problem for Weil is to understand what social institutions could be adequate to providing this kind of formation, especially given her insistence that every kind of collectivity is a manifestation of the social Beast. We know that she does not trust the institutional Church. Eliot had suggested that the family must be the essential source for moral formation, but Weil has little to say about the family except to note that the progress of modernity has effectively eliminated it as a constructive agent: “The family doesn’t exist. What nowadays goes by that name is a minute collection of human beings grouped around each of us: father and mother, husband or wife, and children; brothers and sisters being already a little remote . . . . From the point of view of the collectivity and its particular function, the family no longer counts.”81 It is impossible to tell whether she even regrets this diminishment.
We find, therefore, in Weil’s critique of education, a diagnosis without a prescription—or, to be more precise, a prescription without a delivery system. For she makes clear, first, what she believes to be the chief enemy of genuine education, and second, the general form that true education should take. About these matters she is consistent from the early pages of her book to the very end.
The enemy is technocracy: “it is inevitable that evil should dominate wherever the technical side of things is either completely or almost completely sovereign.” Weil accepts that “Technicians always tend to make themselves sovereign, because they feel they alone know what they are about”; this is a given. Those who are not technicians must therefore refuse to “allow them full rein.” But this we cannot do unless we keep “continually in mind a clear and absolutely precise conception of the particular ends to which this, that or the other technique should be subordinated.”82
And here is where Weil goes beyond those who would simply say (as Lewis does) that science is good, or (as Maritain does) that technology is good. She argues that an education worthy of the name must be “inspired by the conception of a certain form of human perfection”; and then, moving a step back in the logical sequence, that “the inspiration for such an education must be sought, like the method itself, among the truths eternally inscribed in the nature of things.”83 It is Platonist science, as it were, that she counsels.
The spirit of truth can dwell in science on condition that the motive prompting the savant is the love of the object which forms the stuff of his investigations. That object is the universe in which we live. What can we find to love about it, if it isn’t its beauty? The true definition of science is this: the study of the beauty of the world.84
To think otherwise is to identify science with the study—and therefore the worship—of “matter, blind force.” But by what means could people in general, as opposed to the odd peculiar individual like Weil herself, come to see, and be drawn to, this pursuit? What institutions could possibly teach us that true science is the study, by people oppressed by force, of the beauty of the world?
* * *
In the final pages of The Need for Roots—which is to say, at the very end of her brief life’s work—Weil returns to her skeptical interrogation of what I have called the neo-Thomist interpretation of history. “But a Christian civilization in which the light of Christianity would have illuminated the whole of life, would only have been possible if the Roman conception of enslaving people’s minds adopted by the Church had been cast aside.”85 It is important to recall here that she had told Father Perrin that “my own intelligence is numbered among” those things that cannot enter the Church because of those two words, anathema sit: she could not enter the Church because that would have been to accept intellectual “enslavement”—to, as she puts it in her essay on the Iliad, bow her neck to force. Those who embrace the High Gothic era as the high point in the history of the Church, who therefore endorse what she calls “spiritual totalitarianism,” have exchanged the suffering Christ for a version of Jupiter. “The Roman conception of God still exists today, even in such minds as that of Maritain”—one of her few explicit references to the philosopher with whom, as I have tried to show, she is often in implicit controversy.86
But the Church had not always and everywhere made such demands. There was at one time, especially in the south of France, and as we saw in an earlier chapter, a more generous accommodation at work. But “at the beginning of the thirteenth century, this civilization still in process of formation was destroyed by the ruin of its principal centre, that is to say, the lands to the south of the Loire, the setting up of the Inquisition and the stifling of religious thought under the sign of orthodoxy.”87
This stifling produced consequences that were massive, unforeseen—and inevitable, given the assumptions that underlay this “spiritual totalitarianism”: the very “conception of orthodoxy” is effectively, functionally, generated by “rigorously separating the domain relating to the welfare of souls, which is that of an unconditional subjection of the mind to external authority, from the domain relating to so-called profane matters, in which the intelligence remains free.” This distinction is, for Weil, utterly tragic, because it “makes impossible that mutual penetration of the religious and the profane which would be the essence of a Christian civilization.” A mind that is free only in some areas, having bowed its neck to force in others, can never be whole. Therefore “[i]t is in vain that every day, at Mass, a little water is mixed with the wine.”
At this stage, her writing became more fragmentary, aphoristic. She was working very quickly. Throughout the spring of 1943 her health had been declining, probably because she had been working at the Free French offices all day and writing all night. So much needed to be said; there was so much to do. In those last months, her whole life was work; it is significant that the last problem she raises in her unfinished book is the problem of labor, labor with and without dignity, which had concerned her all her life.
Eventually she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was taken to a sanatorium in Kent, where she insisted that she did not want, or deserve, more food than people in occupied France were likely to have. When she died of cardiac failure on August 24, 1943, the coroner ruled that “the deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.” The verdict was rashly and unfairly reached: her body was failing, and it is unlikely that even with the best care she could have held out much longer. She had always opposed to the force of the world the force of her own personality—she had heard the idea of grace freely given and freely, but such a notion was at the deepest levels of her being inaccessible—and so unequal a contest could not have lasted long.
She was thirty-four when she died. She was buried in the Catholic section of Bybrook Cemetery in Ashford, Kent, but did not receive—as an unbaptized person, could not have received—Catholic burial. A friend, Maurice Schumann, read prayers over her grave. She never entered the Church, and her body rests in a strange land. In death, as in life, she remained one of those outside.