Review: Alan Jacobs 'The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis'

The quarrel is not between Christianity and humanism.  It is between two conceptions of humanism.

The words are those of Jacques Maritain, quoted (p.42) by Alan Jacobs in his The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis (2018).  In many ways, Maritain's words stand at the heart of this insightful book.  As Jacobs states in the Preface:

The war raised for each of the thinkers I have named a pressing set of questions about the relationship between Christianity and the Western democratic social order, and especially whether Christianity was uniquely suited to the moral understanding of that order (p.xvi).

In the face of the rise of the totalitarian regimes, and the manner in which such ideologies could fascinate the mind and the imagination, Jacobs identifies and explores the articulation of a vibrant Christian humanist discourse, seeking to offer more substantive moral foundations for the Allied cause:

liberal instrumentalism, that willingness to defer ultimate questions as the price to be paid for getting along with one another, had left the democratic West unable to generate the energetic commitment necessary to resist the military and moral drive of societies that had clear answers to Quid sit homo? (p.34).

As Robert Maynard Hutchins - President of the University of Chicago - declared in his blistering 1940 critique of the damage done by pragmatism and positivism to the moral foundations of the Western democracies:

What is the basis of these principles of law, equality, and justice?  In the first place, in order to believe in these principles at all we must believe that there is such a thing as truth and that in these matters we can discover it ... In the great struggle that may lie ahead, truth, justice, and freedom will conquer only if we know what they are and pay them the homage they deserve (p.15 & 17).

This is the background to the renewal of Christian humanism witnessed in the years of war and struggle against Fascism.  Such humanism, however, could not be, in the words of Maritain "human nature as closed in upon itself or absolutely self-sufficient".  Jacobs continues:

Maritain believed that the humanism of the Renaissance, and still more the later interpretation of that movement by the key figures of the Enlightenment, celebrated and affirmed a truncated humanity, a sad parody, almost, of what human ought to be and can be.  What is needed, he insists, is the restoration of something lost since Thomas: a full humanism, an integral humanism (p.42).

Maritain's work was furthered by de Lubac, in his resistance to the Vichy regime, exposing atheistic humanism as the foundation of Nazism:

And so arose "atheist humanism" ... which sought to protect and extend human greatness by emancipating it from bondage to God.  But this, de Lubac argued, ended by unleashing bestiality and evil.  The Nazis were the logical culmination of the attempt to construct humanism without God (p.46).

Jacobs's analysis of Maritain and de Lubac, and of the critical voice offered by Simone Weil ("the proper counter-balance to Niebuhr", p.56), emphasizes how this renewal of Christian humanism was not merely an Anglo-Saxon project.  Nor, indeed, was it only the property of philosophers.  The role of C.S. Lewis in the project was as much about his "storytelling" as his polemical works, for in filling "his wartime stories with demons, transfigured and glorified souls, planetary Intelligences, unfallen beings radiant with wisdom and love" he was revealing "a great cosmic conflict between a righteous and loving God and all those who aligned themselves against righteousness and love" (p.62-3).

And then there are the poets, Eliot and Auden;

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 (p.144).

In one of the most striking quotes in the book, Jacobs notes Auden writing to a friend in 1942:

In 1912, it was a real vision to discover that God loves a Pernod and a good fuck, but in 1942 every maiden aunt knows this and it's time to discover something else He loves (p.63).

The "something else He loves" encapsulates the search for a deeper, more authentic moral order, what Auden articulated in a 1943 lecture as "a democratic polity sustained by Christian faith" (p.148).  There are echoes here, of course, of Eliot's The Idea of a Christian Society and Towards a Christian Britain, even amidst the considerable nuances Jacobs notes in both works. 

Jacobs gives an exciting account of a vibrant Christian humanism revived and renewed.  Was it, however, restored?  The answer to this question leads to the puzzle with this book.  Towards the conclusion of the book, Jacobs states:

But what starts to happen near the end of World War II is the embedding of personalist ideas within international institutions (p.186).

That "But" is rather odd.  After an immense struggle against a Fascism, embodying a culture of death, seeking to enslave humanity, why would it not be desirable for personalism - Christian humanism - to be shape the international order?  The answer Jacobs appears to give is that this was impossible.  In the final paragraph of the book he says:

Each of the writers I have studied here worked with astonishing energy to rescue their world for a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich Christianity, and to rescue that Christianity for their world ... But their prescriptions were never implemented, and could never have been: they came perhaps a century too late, after the reign of technocracy had become so complete that none can foresee the end of it while this world lasts (p.206).

I admit to being rather astounded on reading these words for the first time.  There is a staggering failure here to explore how the wartime renewal of Christian humanism bore considerable fruit.  International institutions, as Jacobs admits, bore signs of the influence of personalism.  Christian Democratic movements across Western Europe shaped new democracies and provided inspiration to those living under Communist dictatorships in the East.  In the United Kingdom, the welfare state was profoundly influenced by a Christian vision of the social order.  Post-1945, the Church of England experienced, in the words of historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, a "modest but unmistakable surge in church attendance".  And as Sam Brewitt-Taylor's superb Christian Radicalism in the Church of England & the Invention of the British Sixties, 1957-1970 convincingly demonstrates, Christianity had a "dominant position in British moral culture" for more nearly two decades after 1945.  In what could be a summary of the vision of Christian humanism, Brewitt-Taylor remarks, "'Christian civilization' was widely thought to provide the cultural foundations of British identity".  Brewitt-Taylor's work also offers an explanation as to how and why the renewed Christian humanism was undone.

Jacobs's book is an insightful, rewarding exploration of the renewal of Christian humanism in wartime.  The book's structure and dramatis personae is engaging.  This makes the conclusion all the more disappointing.  The failure to recognise the fruits of this renewal cannot but detract from the book's value.  What is more, it is difficult not to see it as also dangerously undermining the work and witness of those seeking in our own times to renew and revive a (much needed) Christian humanist vision.  Contrary to Jacobs's concluding assertions, such a renewal and revival can have significant cultural consequences.  It is certainly not "more realistic to choose the hope simple hope for miraculous deliverance" (p.206).  This is to ignore the insights of the thinkers reviewed by Jacobs in his book.  It is to abandon culture to the emptiness of a disordered humanism.  As Jacobs says of Maritain:

What was called for, in his view, was not a rejection of humanism but a reclamation of it (p.42).