M. MARITAIN'S HUMANISM
The True HnmanIsm. By Jacques Maritain: (Bles: 7s. 6d.)
It will be observed that M. Maritain has little sympathy for those who seek anything in the nature of a restoration of bygone systems. He speaks of " the fundamental irreversibility of the movement of history." The Church does not die, but civilisations die. " That is how it is with the civilisation of the Middle Ages," and again, " it is impossible to conceive that the sufferings and experience of the modern age have been useless."
The conception of a rigid Christian temporal order with, as its ideal, an organic unity in civilisation itself, is' rejected, and in an interesting aside M. Maritain suggests that it was the use of secular means for spiritual ends (which the mediaeval theory justified, if it did not actually require),. which led, to those conceptions of State right and totalitarianism from which we suffer today. For the-rise of these theories to a new popti- larity, brief enough, probably, in the eyes of history but " of fearfully long duration to those who must bear their weight," the responsibility lies at the door of Liberalism, which destroyed spiritual unity, the throne and the altar, and has left us (to quote myself instead of M. Maritain) nothing but Strube's little man facing his bankers. Neither party finds the prospect sufficiently congenial. Both seek better security in a " planned " or rationalised world in which their lost spirituality, in the one case, and their lost conception of functional service in the other, can be regained as members of a party, a class, a race or a corporation.
Against this drab ideal, fraught, as we know, with such menac- ing consequences to human liberty, M. Maritain sets up the conception of a secular Christian temporal order, the conception not of God's Holy Empire over all things but of a holy freedom of the creature whom Grace unites to God. The institutional framework of such a world must be "a pluralist commonwealth."
This conception should have been, but unfortunately is not, the main subject of M. Maritain's book. The author never uses a concrete when it is possible to use an abstract term. This habit deprives his analysis of the historical development and culmination of Western European society of much virtue and makes his essay in political reconstruction almost valueless. To talk of the "renewal and revivification of the family type of economy and ownership utilising the resources of mechanisation and co-operation " carries us nowhere. Nor. are we much helped when informed that the author is "above all thinking of an organic heterogeneity in the very structure of civil society.". No doubt it " towards the perfection of the natural liw and of Christian rectitude that the pluriform juridical structure of the city would be orientated " and it may reassure some to learn that " the positive pole of its direction would be an integral Christianity," but . we wish to know " how," and many who do not share M. Maritain's faith will also wish to know " why."
... M. Maritain is more valuable on the relation of Church and State in the future, drawing a useful contrast between his own conception and the mediaeval conception, on the one hand, in which the State has a ministerial function in relation to the Church and the ends of salvation, and the liberal theory, on the other hand, under which the State has no spiritual obligations. He sees the temporal, order of the future autonomous- in--its. own sphere; Ivor -king- in-free-accord THE true humanism, according to M. Maritain, will be a theo- centric humanism, and, as a step towards it, he holds that the bourgeois man, " the pharisaic and decadent product born of the spirit of Jansenism or Puritanism and that of-rationalism," must be liquidated. The reason given is that " a whole nomirv= alist and idealist metaphysic is latent in him. Hence, in the- world he has created, the pre-eminence of the sign : of opinion in political life, of money in the economic sphere."
" Socialism," M. Maritain holds, " was a protest uttered by the human conscience, and of its most generous instincts, against evils which cry to heaven . . . It has loved the poor ... Yet the deception it has caused among men is for all that the more bitter." Socialism has failed because it is not rooted in an integral humanism Man can only be changed by changing himself in accord with vital and internal principles. " A vitally Christian social renewal will thus be a work of sanctity or it will be nothing," but it will need a sanctity wholly different from that of the Middle Ages, a sanctity which has '" turned its energies on the things of time." - -
with " an agent of a higher order," the Church. This attempt to proitide, an institutional framework for the activities of a - State at once lay and Christian opens an interesting line of thought, but even here we are left with an impression of vagueness.
It is true enough that a " change of heart " must precede any effective reform, that a new social order based on "integral humanim " cannot be imposed from above by any dictator, not even by the mediaeval Papacy. The need for the leavening of the political and economic leaders by a lay apostolate of devoted citizens may thus be in sober fact a necessity of Christian progress, but is this more than a. truism? Unless the assumptions of the Enlightenment on the one hand and of Totalitarianism on the other can be effectively challenged and their influence destroyed by a new intellectual crusade, Christianity will not prevail.
The serious doubt left in the reader's mind by M. Maritain's book is whether he has an undivided mind on these subjects. Does not this spate of carefully guarded generalisations conceal a feeling that the destruction of the present social order at the hands of some kind of totalitarianism will be, on the whole, a good thing ? That the destruction of the bourgeoisie is a necessary prelude to the re-energising of Christianity : that the lay apostolate of Christ, like the Communist and Fascist movements, must start on the land and in the streets ?
The reader of this review will not have failed to notice that M. Maritain swallows lock, stock and barrel many of the assumptions on which totalitarianism has flourished, and particularly- those which have given the Marxist version its spiritual energy. The arbitrary division of society into " the exploiters and the exploited," the legend of a " working class " corresponding to the Trade Unionist minority of the active citizens of the State, are in fact conceptions which bear no relation to the realities of a modern society. The propertyless State is; unfortunitely, likely to become a reality, but it will not be a State in-Which property is aggregated into a few hands and the vast majority are exploited for the benefit of the few, but a State where there is no property at all, and where liberty is lost not through enslavement or exploitation but through the diffusion of responsibility to the point where every man is his brother's keeper. It is this tendency which is producing everywhere, and in some -countries has 'already produced, that chaos which gives dictators their opportunity to build on the foundations of despair.
M. Maritain seems unaware of these facts. The typical employer today is the insurance company, not the individualist exploiter : the little man today wears a bowler, not a, cloth cap :_ the typical bourgeois is not a liberal politician hut an economic planner : and all three Of them are saying just the same things about the nineteenth century economic order that M. Maritain is saying. In other words, M. Maritain is in the movement : his dyes praeclari are just his own Version of those enlightened parties who have sprung up in Italy, Russia and Germany to organise Utopia. The formlessness of his political ideas corresponds exactly to the formlessness of the schemes locked in the minds of Lenin, of Hitler- and of Mussolini. Fine words, but buttering no bread for starving men ! Humanism does not cease to be humanism for being labelled " true " or " integral." DOUGLAS JERROLD.
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