1.Beevor, The Second World War, p. 438.
2.Churchill is quoted, for instance, in John Keegan, The Second World War, p. 310.
3.James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, p. 748.
4.The “Six Pillars of Peace” were announced in the May 31, 1943 issue of Christianity and Crisis and were further articulated in subsequent issues.
5.Warren, Theologians of a New World Order, p. 102.
6.Fitzgerald, Human Voices, p. 58.
7.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 85.
8.“The abolition of educational privilege by disposing of culture at bargain prices does not admit the masses to the preserves from which they were formerly excluded but, under the existing social conditions, contributes to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric incoherence.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 130. But then Hayek: “Socialists, the cultivated parents of the barbarous offspring they have produced, traditionally hope to solve this problem by education. But what does education mean in this respect? Surely we have learned that knowledge cannot create new ethical values, that no amount of learning will lead people to hold the same views on the moral issues which a conscious ordering of all social relations raises. It is not rational conviction but the acceptance of a creed which is required to justify a particular plan. And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognize that the task they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values. It was in these efforts to produce a mass movement supported by such a single world view that the socialists first created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists have made such effective use.” Hayek, ‘’The Road to Serfdom,’’ Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, vol. 2, p. 142.
9.Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 27.
10.Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” Essays, p. 291.
1.McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, p. 135.
2.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 51.
3.Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot: A Life, p. 253.
4.Lewis, Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, pp. 271, 234.
5.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 198.
6.Auden, “September 1, 1939,” Selected Poems, p. 95.
7.Quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil, p. 353.
1.Merton, The Secular Journal, p. 130. Auden described his experience in an interview with Alan Levy, “On Audenstrasse: In the Autumn of the Age of Anxiety,” New York Times Magazine, August 8, 1971, p. 10+. I have written in more detail about Auden’s cinematic experience in the Appendix to my book What Became of Wystan.
2.From Golo Mann’s contribution to W. H. Auden: A Tribute, ed. Stephen Spender, p. 102.
3.Auden, “Law Like Love,” Collected Poems, pp. 260–62.
4.Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 3–22.
5.Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, p. 33. By the phrase “the rules of the game,” I mean to refer to Jean Renoir’s peerless film of that name.
6.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 11.
7.Auden, “September 1, 1939,” Selected Poems, pp. 95–97.
8.Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, p. 272.
9.Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, p. 278, where the full text of Cranmer’s prayer is also cited. Lewis probably knew it from The Remains of Thomas Cranmer, Collected and Arranged by H. Jenkyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1833), p. 186.
10.Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, p. 251.
11.Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” The Weight of Glory, p. 52.
12.I have relied heavily in what follows on James Gilbert’s Redeeming Culture, especially chap. 4, “A World without John Dewey.”
13.Edward Purcell, in the first chapter of his superb study The Crisis of Democratic Theory, gives a thorough account not only of the Hutchins/Adler program but also the resistance it spawned among faculty at Chicago. In the spring of 1934, there were great debates on campus in which Adler’s influence was deplored by a scientist named Anton Carlson. Three years later, Carlson had been elected President of the American Association of University Professors and delivered a presidential address attacking “neophyte administrators” who try to make universities in their own image—an obvious reference to his university’s thirty-five-year-old president. Hutchins at the same time made equally oblique and yet obvious references to Carlson: in a 1934 essay called “The Issue in the Higher Learning,” he wrote, “The gadgeteers and the data collectors, masquerading as scientists, have threatened to become the supreme chieftains of the scholarly world . . . . Our bewilderment has resulted from our notion that salvation depends on information.” Hutchins, “The Issue in the Higher Learning,” p. 178. Thus a bold (and therefore oversimplified) distinction between technological data and humane wisdom was being drawn at the University of Chicago several years before the war made it a topic of much wider interest.
14.Hutchins, “What Shall We Defend? We Are Losing Our Moral Principles.”
15.Dewey, “President Hutchins’ Proposals to Remake Higher Education.” Hutchins denied that he was seeking so definitively to impose, which led to this sardonic reply by Dewey: “The tone and substance of President Hutchins’ reply would lead one to suppose that after all he was not raising or meaning to raise any fundamental issue. I must ask his forgiveness if I took his book too seriously.” Dewey, “Was President Hutchins Serious?”
16.Gilbert, Redeeming Culture, pp. 75, 79.
17.It is interesting to see how rarely any of the parties to this debate, and indeed any of the figures who feature in this book, reflect seriously and openly on the fact that a nondemocratic regime, Stalin’s Soviet Union, was an indispensable ally to the democratic West in its struggle against the Axis powers. It is as though there were an unspoken agreement to maintain a discreet silence on the matter. In one of the few public comments made by one of my protagonists, Eliot wrote, “A considerable time must elapse before we can draw any illustration from Russia. Russia is a rude and vigorous country; it is also a very big country; and it will need a long period of peace and internal development. Three things may happen. Russia may show us how a stable government and a flourishing culture can be transmitted only through élites; it may lapse into oriental lethargy; or the governing élite may follow the course of other governing élites and become a governing class” (Christianity and Culture, p. 118). Eliot also, notoriously, wrote to George Orwell, on behalf of his fellow directors of Faber and Faber, to decline to publish Animal Farm: “we have no conviction . . . that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.” See a facsimile image of the complete letter here: Flood, “ ‘It Needs More Public-Spirited Pigs.’”
18.Hook, Out of Step, p. 337.
19.Hook, “The New Failure of Nerve.” This essay is immediately followed by another making virtually the same argument in different terms: Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism In Extremis.”
20.Buchman, Remaking the World, p. 46. For a detailed and insightful treatment of Buchman’s career, see Boobyer, The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman.
21.Vidler, Scenes from a Clerical Life, p. 119.
22.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 23.
23.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 343.
24.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 83.
25.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 538.
26.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 41.
27.Buller, Darkness Over Germany, pp. 2, 193, 190.
28.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 141.
29.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 439.
30.Clements, The Moot Papers, pp. 358, 141. It can be seen from the title of a paper that Mannheim delivered to the Moot, “Planning for Freedom: Some Remarks on the Necessity for Creating a Body Which Could Coordinate Theory and Practice in Our Future Policy,” that he associated such planning with the creation of the Order. In his magisterial history Postwar, Tony Judt comments that at war’s end the one thing everyone agreed on was that the future needed to be planned (pp. 67–70); but all of this seems foreign to Eliot in his Idea of a Christian Society; he does not seem to have considered how his ideas should or might be implemented.
31.Clements, The Moot Papers, p. 602.
32.Manent, The City of Man, p. 48. Perhaps this is a good point at which to note that the twentieth century produced a very wide range of critiques of modernity—and reassertions of the legitimacy of modernity. The reassessments of modernity from the Christian perspectives treated in this book are but a tiny subset of that larger body of assessments. For a useful overview of these critiques and countercritiques, see Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, especially the section of chap. 1 called “The Crisis of Modernity.”
33.The chief weakness of Greif’s book is his limited understanding of Christian thought. It is therefore useful to read, in conjunction with Greif and as a kind of corrective to his work, Samuel Moyn’s Christian Human Rights. The current book was well under way when Moyn’s extraordinarily penetrating work appeared, so I was both pleased and disconcerted to discover that, as I begin my story in January 1943, Moyn begins his in December 1942, with a declaration by Pope Pius XII on the dignity of the human person. “Amplifying the importance of human rights before a vast public, Pius’s statement . . . recrafted the meaning of the principles it merely claimed to recall to importance. It made what had been secular and liberal into a set of values that were now religious and conservative. And it provided an inkling of how Christians would come to defend the postwar democracies they later founded in Western Europe, which were religious and conservative in nature.”
34.Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 28–29.
35.Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 7.
1.For an excellent survey of the history of these terms, see Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism.”
2.Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, p. 10.
3.Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical notes. Volume II. The History of Creeds. See the full text here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/creeds2.v.ii.i.html. The key passage:
And not only can faith and reason never be opposed to one another, but they are of mutual aid one to the other; for right reason demonstrates the foundations of faith, and, enlightened by its light cultivates the science of things divine; while faith frees and guards reason from errors, and furnishes it with manifold knowledge. So far, therefore, is the Church from opposing the cultivation of human arts and sciences, that it in many ways helps and promotes it. For the Church neither ignores nor despises the benefits of human life which result from the arts and sciences, but confesses that, as they came from God, the Lord of all science, so, if they be rightly used, they lead to God by the help of his grace.
4.Aeterni Patris, “On the Restoration of Christian Philosophy.” See the full text here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html. The key passage:
While, therefore, We hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind, We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences. The wisdom of St. Thomas, We say; for if anything is taken up with too great subtlety by the Scholastic doctors, or too carelessly stated—if there be anything that ill agrees with the discoveries of a later age, or, in a word, improbable in whatever way—it does not enter Our mind to propose that for imitation to Our age. Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others. Let the universities already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this doctrine, and use it for the refutation of prevailing errors. But, lest the false for the true or the corrupt for the pure be drunk in, be ye watchful that the doctrine of Thomas be drawn from his own fountains, or at least from those rivulets which, derived from the very fount, have thus far flowed, according to the established agreement of learned men, pure and clear; be careful to guard the minds of youth from those which are said to flow thence, but in reality are gathered from strange and unwholesome streams.
5.Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, p. 22. This brief book—really no more than a pamphlet—was essentially the founding document, the rule of life, for Eric Gill’s great but, thanks to his own wickedness, deeply flawed experiment in community and art-making at Ditchling in East Sussex. One of the first books published by Gill’s St. Dominic’s Press (in 1923) was a beautifully designed and lovingly made edition of Maritain’s little treatise. For the details of this influence, see Fiona McCarthy’s Eric Gill. It is also noteworthy that Gill’s last book, which appeared in the year of his death, was published in a series called Christian News-Letter Books, another project of J. H. Oldham’s and a kind of offshoot of the Moot. Eric Vidler edited the series; Oldham’s own book The Resurrection of Christendom was the first in the series, and Middleton Murry’s Europe in Travail was the second. Gill’s contribution is called Christianity and the Machine Age (1940). It is not a very good book—its claim that “from a Christian point of view . . . the idea of the Machine Age [is] not only absurd, but damned” (p. 66) is perhaps its entire message—but that Gill should choose this topic, and that Oldham and Vidler should believe it important for a series “designed to assist thought upon the relation of the Christian faith to present problems,” are telling points.
6.Gilson’s career oddly paralleled Maritain’s: they would consistently pursue very similar ideas, though they rarely acknowledged each other and were often at odds. Maritain was born in 1882, Gilson in 1884; Maritain died in 1973, Gilson in 1978. Each was a Catholic layman, each devotedly married. They now seem almost two halves of one whole, though Maritain was a far more public figure, while Gilson was known primarily to scholars.
7.Maritain, Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, vol. 2, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World, and A Letter on Independence, p. 45.
8.Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization, p. 4. The book is an English version of lectures that Maritain gave in Paris just before the outbreak of war, in February 1939. The first chapter, from which I have quoted, is called “The Crisis of Modern Humanism,” which suggests the extent to which the book participates in what Mark Greif has called the “discourse of man.” (See note earlier on Greif’s Age of the Crisis of Man.)
9.Maritain, The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, vol. 2, pp. 161, 167, 170.
10.“Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzche, and Freud . . . . All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting . . . . [All three] represent three convergent procedures of demystification.” Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 34.
11.Maritain, The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, vol. 2, p. 173.
12.Maritain, The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, vol. 2, p. 196. It is questionable whether this is a fair and accurate rendering of Barth’s position; in recent years, a number of theologians have seen Barth as a kind of Christian humanist, though a rather different kind than Maritain. One of Barth’s most incisive and provocative statements in this matter is his essay “The Christian Message and the New Humanism,” where Barth claims that the core of any Christian humanism is a doctrine of the “humanity of God.” For a fuller treatment of these issues, see John Webster’s characteristically incisive essay “Rescuing the Subject: Barth and Postmodern Anthropology.”
13.Maritain, The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, vol. 2, p. 197.
14.Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization, p. viii.
15.These biographical details are taken from Voderholzer’s Meet Henri de Lubac, especially the chapter entitled “World War II and Intellectual Resistance.”
16.de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, p. 24.
17.Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 53. Examination results for the agrégation may be found at the Ressources numériques en histoire de l’éducation website: http://rhe.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/?q=agregsecondaire_laureats
18.Auden, “Second Thoughts on Kierkegaard,” Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, p. 362; Sontag, “Simone Weil.”
19.Pétrement, Simone Weil, p. 534.
20.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 27.
21.Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 115, 163. The debts we owe to “the human being as such” are the subject of The Need for Roots, which we will consider later.
22.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, p. 214.
23.For Eliot, see “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt” (1927) and “Second Thoughts about Humanism (1928), in Selected Essays; for Lewis, see English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, pp. 18–32. Lewis also wrote in a letter to Douglas Bush of Harvard, “I take a less favourable view of the Humanists than you. I’ve never quite forgiven them for killing live Latin and erecting the mausoleum of Ciceronianism over its corpse.” The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2, p. 475.
1.Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics, p. 52.
2.Niebuhr, “Thomism and Mysticism.”
3.Schlesinger, “Reinhold Niebuhr's Long Shadow.”
4.In Remembering Reinhold Niebuhr: Letters of Reinhold and Ursula M. Niebuhr, p. 284.
5.Auden, “Tract for the Times,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, pp. 108–9. A few months later, Auden would review Niebuhr’s massive The Nature and Destiny of Man for The New Republic, and that work he praised straightforwardly: “The Nature and Destiny of Man is the most lucid and balanced statement of orthodox Protestantism that we are likely to see for a long time” (p. 134).
6.Lewis, “First and Second Things,” God in the Dock, p. 281.
7.Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, p. 46.
8.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 67.
9.Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, p. 50.
10.Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, pp. 51, 56.
11.Lewis, “Christianity and Culture,” Christian Reflections, pp. 13, 28, 36.
12.Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, pp. 22–23.
13.See my discussion of the origins of the Narnia stories in that first year of the war in The Narnian, pp. 233–35.
14.Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” The Weight of Glory, pp. 58–59.
15.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 220.
16.Auden, untitled essay in Modern Canterbury Pilgrims, p. 41.
17.Quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 188.
18.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 188 (on Chester) and 201 (on Richards).
19.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 192.
20.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, pp. 229–30.
21.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, p. 198.
22.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, pp. 232–33.
23.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, p. 236.
24.T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, p. 4.
25.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, p. 236.
26.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, p. 238.
27.Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poems, p. 240. Williams explores the Augustinian phrase in Descent of the Dove, p. 66.
28.Auden, “Jacob and the Angel,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 38.
29.Auden, “James Joyce and Richard Wagner,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 118.
1.Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” Collected Poems, pp. 271–74.
2.Auden, “In Tine of War” XII, Selected Poems, p. 78.
3.Auden, “Lecture Notes,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 162. This is one of a series of collections of pensées Auden wrote for Commonweal magazine under the name “Didymus.” The apostle Thomas, familiarly known as “Doubting Thomas,” was known as Didymus, the twin.
4.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 214.
5.Williams, Descent of the Dove, p. 107. “Messias” is Williams’s characteristically idiosyncratic name for Jesus.
6.Eliot, introduction to Williams, All Hallows Eve, pp. xiii–xiv.
7.Clements, The Moot Papers, pp. 55, 114.
8.Lewis, “The Inner Ring,” The Weight of Glory, p.143.
9.Lewis, Perelandra, p. 14.
10.Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 46.
11.Lewis’s preface to George MacDonald: An Anthology, p. xxviii; The Screwtape Letters, p. 1.
12.Maritain, The Prince of This World, p. 7. Only three hundred copies of the pamphlet were printed. I was able to see one—inscribed to Etienne Gilson—at the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, and took down the quotation from it.
13.Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 54.
14.Lewis, The Weight of Glory, in the book of that name, p. 31; Auden, “The Poet of the Encirclement,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 198.
15.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 18.
16.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 21.
17.Auden, “Augustus to Augustine,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 231. Auden himself was an enthusiastic user of Benzedrine at this time.
18.Auden, For the Time Being, pp. 30–33.
19.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 53.
20.I owe this insight to Edward Mendelson, who also pointed out that this masking of the serious with the broadly comic is characteristic of Thomas Pynchon as well.
21.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 54.
22.Auden, For the Time Being, pp. 57–58.
23.Lewis, Perelandra, p. 70.
24.Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, pp. 593–94.
25.Clarke, Childhood’s End, p. 154.
26.Clarke, Childhood’s End, p. 72.
27.Clarke, Childhood’s End, p 198.
28.Lewis, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 3, Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963, p. 392.
29.Spufford, Backroom Boys, p. 9.
30.Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 99.
1.Maritain, We Have Been Friends together, p. 75. The conclusion Jacques and Raïssa reached about the “pseudo-intelligence” of the human mind in a naturalistic cosmos is developed at greater length by C. S. Lewis in “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism,” the third chapter of his 1947 book Miracles. (This is the chapter that, famously, underwent a severe critique by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and was revised for the second edition of the book, published in 1960.)
2.McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, p. 151.
3.Quoted in McInerny, The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, p. 151.
4.See Soulez and Worms, Bergson, chapter 11.
5.Weil, “The Iliad: or the Poem of Force,” 5.
6.Weil, “The Iliad: or the Poem of Force,” p. 27.
7.Weil, “The Iliad: or the Poem of Force,” p. 18.
8.Weil, “The Iliad: or the Poem of Force,” p. 30.
9.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 44.
10.Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books,” God in the Dock, p. 202.
11.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 45.
12.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 47.
13.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 48.
14.Williams, “The Imposition of Belief,” chap. 5 in Descent of the Dove.
15.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 48.
16.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 53.
17.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 47.
18.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 48.
19.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, p. 51.
20.Weil, “The Iliad: or the Poem of Force,” p. 30.
21.Calder, The People’s War, pp. 108–9.
22.The Poems of T. S. Eliot, pp. 213–14.
23.Quoted by Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s New Life, p. 110. Eliot’s claim of Englishness was accompanied by his constant awareness that the claim was not necessarily reciprocated. Donald Hall, in his Remembering Poets, mentions visiting Eliot at Faber, probably around 1960, and having a uniformed employee comment that “Eliot was an extremely pleasant gentleman, and did I know, that he was actually an American gentleman?” (p. 87) It was as “the American gentleman” that he was always known. It is typical of Eliot’s comfort with ambiguities that, when he wrote a letter to the Christian NewsLetter in 1945 and signed it “Metoikos”—resident alien—he could have been referring either to his place in English society or to his status as a Christian, since a version of that word is used to describe Abraham, the traveler and sojourner, in Acts 7:4.
24.Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets, p. 17. The poem was originally published as part of a special supplement of the New English Weekly, but it proved so popular that in September Faber and Faber published the poem as a one-shilling pamphlet. Gardner also quotes a letter to Anne Ridler (March 10, 1941) in which Eliot comments, “The success of that poem is a little disconcerting: I find it hard to believe that a poem of mine which sells nearly 12,000 copies can be really good” (p. 109).
25.Churchill, Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat, pp. 177–78.
26.Eliot, “East Coker,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 190.
27.Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” The Weight of Glory, p. 49.
28.Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 198. One of the prayers to be used at sea reads, in part,
O ETERNAL Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end: Be pleased to receive into thy Almighty and most gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the Fleet in which we serve. Preserve us from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy; . . . that the inhabitants of our Island may in peace and quietness serve thee our God; and that we may return in safety to enjoy the blessings of the land, with the fruits of our labours, and with a thankful remembrance of thy mercies to praise and glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Eliot would also surely have known the “Naval Hymn” written in 1860 by William Whiting:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
29.Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 1048.
30.I was somewhat comforted to discover, when reading Douglas Murray’s Aldous Huxley: A Biography, that Huxley had some years earlier noted, in a letter, the same tendency in Eliot’s prose: “I never knew a writer who spent so much time explaining what he didn’t mean to say and then at last saying so little” (p. 277).
31.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, pp. 4, 6, 13, 18, 38, 40, 56, 59.
32.“Towards a Christian Britain,” p. 166.
33.Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 199.
34.Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot (commentary), p. 892.
35.Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 258.
36.Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 261.
37.Gordon, Eliot’s New Life, p. 97. Cf. Edward Mendelson in Early Auden, p. 172:
In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest force of repression both in the mind and in the state. Outside romanticism, repetition has a very different import: it is the sustaining and renewing power of nature, the basis for all art and understanding . . . . Repetition lost its moral value only with the spread of the industrial machine and the swelling of the romantic chorus of praise for personal originality. Until two hundred years ago virtually no one associated repetition with boredom or constraint. Ennui is ancient; its link to repetition is not. The damned in Dante’s Hell never complain that their suffering is repetitive, only that it is eternal, which is not the same thing.
38.Eliot, “East Coker,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 188.
39.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 50. In almost every letter to Father Perrin, Weil professes her dislike of self-examination, but then examines herself further.
40.Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 46, 44.
41.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 64. It must be said that André did little to ease his sister’s sense of inferiority. For instance, in the spring of 1940, when he was in a French military prison—in consequence of “a disagreement with the French authorities on the subject of my military ‘obligations’ ”—he wrote a letter to his sister: “Some thoughts I have had of late, concerning my arithmetic-algebraic work, might pass for a response to one of your letters, where you asked me what is of interest to me in my work. So, I decided to write them down, even if for the most part they are incomprehensible to you.” Near the end of the letter he writes, “When I invented (I say invented, and not discovered) uniform spaces, I did not have the impression of working with resistant material, but rather the impression that a professional sculptor must have when he plays by making a snowman.” Letter translated by Martin Krieger in Doing Mathematics, Appendix D.
42.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 64.
43.Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 105–16.
44.Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 48, 54.
45.Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 52–53.
46.Weil, “The Romanesque Renaissance,” Selected Essays, pp. 52–53.
47.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 75.
48.Pétrement, Simone Weil, p. 481.
49.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 54.
50.Pétrement, Simone Weil, pp. 474–76. The fact that Weil returned to the church in Harlem repeatedly may suggest that it had some real impact on her. In this light, it may be useful to remember that when Dietrich Bonhoeffer first visited New York in 1930, his experiences at a church in Harlem were transformative for his understanding of Christian worship. See Marsh, Strange Glory, p. 115–18.
51.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 186.
52.Davenport-Hines, Auden, p. 206.
53.Lewis, Collected Letters, vol. 2, Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931–1949, p. 425.
1.Day, “Day after Day—January 1943,” pp. 4, 6.
2.https://www.koinoniafarm.org/brief-history/.
3.Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years” Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 5; Marsh, Strange Glory, pp. 340–44.
4.Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, p. 154.
5.Greene, Three Entertainments, p. 460.
6.Gilkey, Shantung Compound, p. 192.
1.Maritain, The Twilight of Civilization, p. viii.
2.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 4.
3.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, pp. 5–6.
4.John Keegan, The First World War, p. 6; Auden, “The Unknown Citizen,” Collected Poems, pp. 250–51.
5.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 8.
6.Lewis, “Membership,” The Weight of Glory, p. 164. On the pervasiveness in Auden’s thought of his distinction between nature and history, see Mendelson, Later Auden, pp. 310–14. Though there may be distinctively Christian reasons for critiquing the material and numerical notion of the “individual” in favor of some deeper and richer model, others made very similar arguments: for instance, Dwight Macdonald in “A Theory of Popular Culture,” which appeared in Politics in February 1944 and later was revised and expanded into his famous “Masscult and Midcult.”
7.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, pp. 9, 10.
8.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 15.
9.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 30.
10.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, pp. 34, 39. Here we might recall the disagreement between Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke about what counts as genuine liberation.
11.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 35.
12.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, p. 91.
13.Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, pp. 100, 102, 113, 115.
14.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 75.
15.In a long letter written probably in late 1951, Tolkien described his whole personal mythology or legendarium as “mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine.” The fallen person “will rebel against the laws of the Creator—especially against mortality,” which
will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective,—and so to the Machine (or Magic). By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of development of the inherent inner powers or talents—or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized. (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 145–46)
The resemblance of this account to Lewis’s views on magic and science will be immediately evident. In The Lord of the Rings, the chief personification of the lure of the Machine is the wizard Saruman, of whom Treebeard the Ent says, “He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment” (p. 473). By Tolkien’s own account (p. xxiii), he wrote this part of his novel in 1942, that is, at about the time that Lewis was thinking seriously about science, technology, magic, and power. It seems certain that the two of them, along with the other Inklings, talked much of these matters in the war years. It might also be recalled that Auden used the term “the Machine” in “New Year Letter.”
16.Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama is a volume in the Oxford History of English Literature series, which is why in his many complaints about it he always referred to it as his OHELL book. It was later retitled Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century.
17.Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, pp. 13–14.
18.In both of his key essays, “Nature on the Rack” and “Wrestling with Proteus,” Pesic quotes and extensively interprets the passages from Bacon and Leibniz I have cited here.
19.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 53–54.
20.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 73.
21.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 74. This argument should be compared with the one made by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and so strenuously objected to by Sidney Hook, that the Western democracies are more threatened by their professors than by Hitler.
22.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pp. 2–3.
23.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 15.
24.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 16.
25.Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p. 127.
26.Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p. 175.
27.Lewis, That Hideous Strength, pp. 182–83.
28.Marie Lloyd, Eliot wrote when she died in 1922, “is the expressive figure of the lower classes.” In her music and comedy, working people “find the expression and dignity of their own lives.” Such a gift is not available to either the aristocracy, who “are subordinate to the middle class, which is gradually absorbing and destroying them,” or to the middle classes themselves, who “have no such idol” as Marie Lloyd because they are “morally corrupt.” And even the lower classes, who have tragically just lost this “expressive figure,” may not last much longer, since their representative dramatic form is being replaced by the “cheap and rapid-breeding cinema,” which threatens to reduce the lower classes to “the same state of protoplasm as the bourgeoisie.” Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 407.
29.Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p. 36.
30.Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, pp. 31–32.
31.For these and other details of Auden’s time at Swarthmore, see Nicholas Jenkins’s “Introduction” to Auden’s lecture on “Vocation and Society,” pp. 1–14. He made his comment about the jukebox in Alan Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, p. 40.
32.For details about the character and purposes of The Sea and the Mirror, especially its exploration of the relationship between Christianity and art, see Arthur Kirsch’s introduction to his critical edition of the poem.
33.Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 204; Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 279.
34.Auden, The Sea and the Mirror, p. 6.
35.Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, p. 126.
36.Auden, “La Trahison d’un Clerc,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 148.
37.Auden, “Vocation and Society,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 176.
38.Auden, “Vocation and Society,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 177. Auden borrowed the term “subjective requiredness” from one of his Swarthmore colleagues, a Gestalt psychologist and German refugee named Wolfgang Köhler.
39.Auden, “Vocation and Society,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, pp. 178–79.
40.Auden, “Vocation and Society,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 182.
41.Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 209.
42.Auden, “Vocation and Society,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 182. However inconsistent Auden may have been in assessing the quality of Eliot’s poetry, there was no one he admired more unreservedly. One of the talks given to Finkelstein’s Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life was one on “Primary Literature and Coterie Literature” by Van Wyck Brooks, which was highly critical of Eliot. Auden commented, “As for Mr Van Wyck Brooks, if I ever meet him, I shall slap his face for his remarks” (quoted in Jenkins, “Introduction,” p. 8). In a letter to Louise Bogan in April 1945, Auden said of Eliot, “I shall never be as great and good a man if I live to be a hundred.” Carpenter, W. H. Auden, p. 413.
43.Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, p. 223.
44.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 85.
45.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 100.
46.Though he does not say so, and may not be aware of it, the complications he explores here are dramatized brilliantly in the debate about Ivan’s article on church-state relations in The Brothers Karamazov, part 1, book 2, chapter 5.
47.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 102.
48.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 105. He had written on the previous page:
the reader must remind himself, as the author has constantly to do, of how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.
49.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 103.
50.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 103.
51.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 106.
52.He does not of course use that word, which was not coined until 1958, by Michael Young in his dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. As many have commented before, there are multiple and perhaps savage ironies involved in using that term seriously, given its origin, but it fulfills a function no other word quite manages to fulfill.
53.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 171.
54.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 120.
55.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 120.
56.Dent’s story is told briefly and crisply in his obituary in the Independent, February 12, 1995, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/harold-dent-1572842.html.
57.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 177.
58.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 179.
59.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 185.
60.Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 185.
61.Eliot, preface to Weil’s The Need for Roots, pp. vii–ix.
62.Weil, Waiting for God, pp. 117, 119.
63.“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37–40).
64.Auden, “Squares and Oblongs,” The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 346.
65.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 120.
66.Pétrement, Simone Weil, p. 460.
67.Weil, “A War of Religions,” Selected Essays, p. 218.
68.Eliot’s introduction to The Need for Roots, p. xiv.
69.Eliot’s introduction to The Need for Roots, p. x.
70.Pétrement, Simone Weil, pp. 443, 478.
71.Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 161, 162.
72.Weil, Waiting for God, p. 77.
73.O’Brien, “The Anti-Politics of Simone Weil.”
74.Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 164–67.
75.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 126.
76.Eliot’s introduction to Weil, The Need for Roots, p. ix.
77.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 42.
78.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 185.
79.Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 26.
80.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 186.
81.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 99.
82.Weil, The Need for Roots, pp. 200–201.
83.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 213.
84.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 258.
85.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 294.
86.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 274.
87.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 295.
1.Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, vol. 2, 1939–1948, p. 184.
2.Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 4.
3.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 3.
4.Letter to Elizabeth Mayer, May 9, 1945 (cited in Mendelson, Later Auden, p. 284).
5.Auden, For the Time Being, pp. 10–11.
6.On the status of this poem as a “Dream Quest,” see the introduction to The Age of Anxiety, pp. xxix–xxx.
7.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 83.
8.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 84.
9.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 85.
10.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 93.
11.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 100.
12.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 102. This is Deuteronomy 6:4: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” Edward Mendelson makes the illuminating point that—for good or ill or both—Auden does not think of Rosetta’s Judaism in ethnic or even sociological terms, but rather as a body of belief:
The poem does not mention Rosetta’s faith until she names it in her final speech, just as Malin says nothing about his Christianity until he returns to the solitude and silence that prompt his credo. The moral point of not identifying her earlier as a Jew is that the poem does not categorize her by ethnicity or race: her Judaism is a creed, and the poem takes no interest in it until she does. (Later Auden, p. 256)
13.Auden, The Age of Anxiety, p. 108.
14.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 64.
15.Auden, “Prime,” Collected Poems, p. 625.
16.Auden, “Homage to Clio” and “Compline,” Collected Poems, pp. 608, 638. On Auden’s “theology of the inarticulate human body,” see Mendelson, chap. X, “The Murmurs of the Body,” Later Auden.
17.Eliot, “Ash Wednesday,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 87.
18.Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot, p. 205.
19.“The Social Function of Poetry” began life as a lecture given in Norway in 1943. “What Is a Classic?” was spoken to the Virgil Society, of which Eliot was then president, in 1944. Both talks were revised and published as essays in 1945, and they are collected in On Poetry and Poets. The third essay stands alone.
20.Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Essays, p. 247.
21.Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 9.
22.Harry Levin, later to become a very eminent critic, was a senior at Harvard in 1932–33 when Eliot was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, and he later recalled that “his predictions for Auden’s future virtually constituted a laying on of hands.” Memories of the Moderns, p. 151.
23.Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 10.
24.Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 11.
25.I have used the term “Mandarin” here because Eliot’s proposal rhymes with the argument put forth by the coiner of that term, Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise, part 1, especially chapters 2 and 7. But Eliot does not quote Connolly.
26.Eliot, “What Is a Classic?,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 54. I cannot guess what work the phrase “the maximum of” is doing in that sentence, but apparently Eliot thought it was doing something.
27.Eliot, “What Is a Classic?,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 63.
28.Virgil, Aeneid, book 6, lines 605–12, 624–26.
29.Virgil, Aeneid, book 6, lines 1135–37.
30.“If a poet gets a large audience very quickly, that is a rather suspicious circumstance.” Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 11.
31.Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 8. One element noticeably missing from Eliot’s analysis: the rather obvious fact that the same language may be spoken in multiple countries.
32.Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, pp. 14, 13.
33.Eliot, “The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe,” p. 384.
34.Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” On Poetry and Poets, p. 16.
35.Eliot, “The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe,” p. 386.
36.Weil, The Need for Roots, p. 3.
37.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, p. 33.
38.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, p. 35.
39.Quoted by Maritain in Christianity and Democracy, p. 36.
40.Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, pp. 61–62.
41.See my account of this decline in “The Watchmen.” A similar diminishment of the role of theologians and other Christian thinkers in bioethics debates is traced by John H. Evans in Playing God?
42.Eliot, The Cocktail Party, pp. 184, 185.
43.Auden, “Under Which Lyre,” Collected Poems, pp. 333–38.
44.Levin, Memories of the Moderns, p. 152.
45.Quoted by Mendelson in Later Auden, p. 262.
46.Ansen, The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, p. 11. As Adam Kirsch notes in “A Poet’s Warning,” an essay about Auden’s delivery of the poem at Harvard,
Twenty-six thousand Harvard alumni had served in uniform during the war, and 649 of them had perished. The University itself had been integrated into the war effort at the highest level: President James Bryant Conant had been one of those consulted when President Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. William Langer, a professor of history, had recruited many faculty members into the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Now that the Cold War was under way, the partnership between the University and the federal government was destined to grow even closer.
As if to symbolize that intimacy, the 1946 Commencement saw honorary degrees awarded to the chiefs of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force. More questionable was the choice of that year’s Phi Beta Kappa orator: Byron Price, who had served as director of the federal Office of Censorship, in charge of monitoring press coverage of the war. Price used the occasion to deliver a rather ominous exhortation to “the man of letters,” whom he accused, 10 months after the war ended, of still not doing enough for national morale. “How often,” he asked, “shall the seeker find between these myriad covers an ounce of literary beauty, or a thimbleful of spiritual elevation? We are served a fare of dissoluteness and destruction. We are asked to sneer at man and regard him as no better than the worm. We are invited to improve our minds by studying the endless sagas of criminals and harlots, moving in sordid surroundings, and worshiping only the flesh.”
1.This book was first published in English under the title The Presence of the Kingdom (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), and under that title it remains best known. But it has recently been retranslated by Lisa Richmond with the more accurate title Presence in the Modern World, and that is the translation I will use here.
2.Ian Buruma, in his fine book Year Zero: A History of 1945, writes,
The desire to retrieve a sense of normality is one very human response to catastrophe; human and fanciful. For the idea that the world as it was before the war could simply be restored, as though a murderous decade, which began well before 1939, could be cast aside like a bad memory, was surely an illusion.
It was, however, an illusion held by governments as much as by individual people. The French and Dutch governments thought that their colonies could be repossessed and life would resume, just as it had been before the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia. But it was only that, an illusion. For the world could not possibly be the same. Too much had happened, too much had changed, too many people, even entire societies, had been uprooted. Nor did many people, including some governments, want the world to go back to what it had been. (pp. 7–8)
3.Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, pp. xvi–xvii.
4.From this Ecumenical Institute arose, in 1948, the World Council of Churches, one of whose leading voices, in its early days, was J. H. Oldham. The WCC effectively replaced the Moot at the center of Oldham’s activities in the years immediately preceding his retirement.
5.Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, pp. 12–13.
6.Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, p. 72.
7.Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, p. 73.
8.Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. xxv, 131.
9.Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. 286–87.
10.Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. 248, 86, 348.
11.A useful survey of Ellul’s influence, and shifting reputation, may be found in Samuel Matlack’s “Confronting the Technological Society.”
12.Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. xxvii, xxx.
13.Ellul, The Technological Society, p. xxxi.
14.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 64.
15.Auden, For the Time Being, p. 65.
16.Ellul, Presence in the Modern World, pp. 13, 14.
17.Lewis, The Great Divorce, pp. 145–46.
18.Maritain’s last major book, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, was published in 1953. Auden’s hope to become “a minor Atlantic Goethe” is registered in “The Cave of Making,” Collected Poems, p. 693.
19.Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird,” The Poetry of Robert Frost: “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing,” p. 120.