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 willingne...