Читать книгу Scholasticism and Politics - Jacques Maritain - Страница 8

To examine all the problems raised by the preceding considerations would try the reader’s patience: they are in fact infinite. Let us eliminate, first of all, the problem of the chances of realization, near or remote, of an integral humanism such as I have tried to characterize. It is clear that the world’s trend toward barbarism, now passing before our eyes at an accelerated speed, seems singularly unfavourable to such an occurrence. But the essential thing, if not for our dearest human interest, at least for our philosophy, is to know whether this true humanism answers to the tendencies of the creative forces which act in history simultaneously with the forces of degradation and disintegration, and more or less masked by them. If so, it will be necessary that the true humanism have its day, even though it be after a night of several centuries, comparable to the night of the early middle ages.

Next, it is proper to remark that the crisis of civilization, as it appears to-day in the concrete, is very far from being reduced to an opposition between the ‘pure’ forms and tendencies of which I spoke in the first part of this chapter.

Moreover, if we consider that complex ensemble of forces which we may call, in a general sense, totalitarian, we need to make a very neat distinction between their principle in the pure state, and the realizations which they have or will produce in this or that place, and in which the contingency, resistance and germination of life occasion all sorts of mixtures and, sometimes, attenuations.

Then, finally, it is just to say that in many aspects communist totalitarianism, on the one hand (totalitarianism of the social community), and, on the other hand, fascist totalitarianism (of the political State) or national socialism (of the racial community),—these two opposed families of totalitarianism present profound analogies and even phenomena of osmosis: not only in the order of political techniques, but in the order of principles themselves. Yet between these principles and these philosophical roots there are profound differences. I will summarize here what I have said in another essay.

In spite of the belligerent pessimism imprinted on it by Marxism, communism has as metaphysical root an absolutely optimistic philosophy of man, that great optimistic mysticism which began with rationalism and was continued by the Encyclopedists, then by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then by utopian socialism, on the one hand, and Hegelian philosophy, on the other. Practically, it denies that man is a creature of God, because it is unwilling to recognize in man that which comes from nothingness. Because of this optimistic basis, it does not profess to be totalitarian; the totalitarian principle is immanent in it as a vice and fatality, which is not avowed.

Fascism on the contrary has as metaphysical root an absolute pessimism of a rather voluntaristic and Machiavellian sort. Practically, it denies that man comes from the hands of God, and that he maintains within him, in spite of everything, the grandeur and dignity of such an origin. This pessimism, which invokes incontestable empirical truths, turns these truths into ontological lies, because it is indifferent to the fact that man comes from God. Then it despairs of man—I mean of the human person, the individual person—in favour of the State. Not God but the State will create man; the State by its constraints will oblige man to come forth from the nothingness of the anarchy of the passions, and lead an upright and even heroic life.

As for national socialism, it also makes a most fundamental mistake concerning the nature of man, since in practice it basically refuses to see in man the creature and image of God, and it uses man as zoological material: man must serve the apotheosis of the telluric, primitive and divine (demonic) element which is developed in him and by him, that is to say, in his blood and by his predestinated blood, in such a way that a quite apparently combative optimism, which is trust in force, is added to a fundamentally pessimistic conception of human nature.

Because of this pessimism, which dispenses with any hypocrisy concerning the dignity of the human person, national socialism and fascism proclaim themselves totalitarian, and the totalitarian principle is raised up by them as a shield and standard.

In a word, looking at these two opposed kinds of totalitarianism, at these two opposed faces of the same evil, we might say that practically, existentially, here we have an atheism which declares that God does not exist and yet makes its own god of an idol; and there an atheism which declares indeed that God does exist, but makes of God himself an idol, because it denies in act, if not in word, the nature and transcendence of God; it invokes God, but as a spirit-protector attached to the glory of a people or a State, or as a demon of the race.

These remarks were made to avoid confusion. I would return now to the purely anti-Christian position of which I spoke at the outset, and which it would be better to call ‘anti-Christ’, because it is less a question of doctrinal opposition to Christianity than of an existential opposition to the presence and action of Christ at the centre of human history. To be brief, it is on the problems of the religious significance of racism and communism that I would say a few words. In this section I shall not speak of fascism, because, for various reasons on which there is no time to dwell, the religious or mystical dynamism of fascism is feeble (on the one hand, the resistance of the Catholic Church puts a considerable check to the pagan mysticism of Empire; on the other hand, the idea of the State lends itself less readily to serve as substitute for the religious communion than does the idea of the racial Community); however, because of that, it is difficult for fascism not to be influenced in this domain, by forms that are more virulent.

Let us consider, first, the racial principle in its pure state. From the point of view of the nexus of ideas, it appears that racism is, as we said, above all an irrational reaction. Think of the actual status of scholars in the country which seemed to have vowed forever to venerate them: racism is a protest of the man in the street against the scholar! More profoundly, it is a pathological protest, nourishing itself on the most absurd pedantry (but, in such case, the more absurd the pedantry, the more efficacious it is), a pathological protest of nature, with all its forces of vitality and ferocity rising out of the depths of mother-earth, with its needs of health and power and physical beauty, with the implacable rage which can exalt instinct when the spirit betrays itself and becomes engulfed in animality, a protest against the messengers of the absolute and the transcendent who have not sufficiently shared the miseries of human kind.

For we should recognize the punishment wreaked upon this primacy of the ideal unfaithful to itself, and, so far, artificial and hypocritical, which was the great vice of the Kantian nineteenth century and which we may call a clericalism of the reason. The world of elementary values in nature, of physical courage, of simplicity, no matter if brutal and gross; of that sort of natural, if cynical, candour by which the animal is not ashamed to exist nor has need to justify existence; the world of primitive feelings, of pacts such as exist even in the horde, of the instinct of physical solidarity such as exists among robbers, of the need of being together and feeling together such as exists even in the great herds on the prairies—this world can indeed be disciplined by true wisdom, which does not despise it and which turns it toward transformations of the spirit. But against false wisdom which humiliates and deceives it, some day or other it takes terrible revenge.

A mystic hatred of all intellectual or moral subtlety, of wisdom and all asceticism, is thus developed; and at the same time a powerful religiosity, the natural religiosity inherent in the human substance down to its elementary physical fibres. God is invoked, but only in virtue of the testimony, if I may say so, of these elementary fibres and of the desire of nature written in the biological elements of the human being; and (because of the basic reactional process which I indicated) He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love—excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God, and yet do not know God. The idea of God is affirmed, and at the same time disfigured and perverted. A God who will end by being identified with an invincible force at work in the blood, is set up against the God of Sinai and against the God of Calvary, against transcendent Being, He who is and who dwells in inaccessible glory, against the Word who was at the beginning, against the God of whom it is said that He is Love. We are facing, not a pseudo-scientific atheism, but, if I may speak thus, a demonic para-theism which, while declining wisdom, is open to every kind of occultism, and which is not less anti-Christian than is atheism.

Of course, if it were not perverted thus, the testimony I just spoke of, that of the natural desire of God inherent in the elementary physical fibres of the human being, is in itself authentic and valid. I mean here something still deeper and more elementary than the desire of nature which intelligence awakens in the will, and through which every intelligent creature aspires, in so far as intelligent, to know the cause of being such as it is in itself. There has been many a quarrel between Thomists and non-Thomists, and even between Thomists and Thomists, concerning this desire of nature; some have sought to minimize it, to render it conditional and inefficacious to such an extent that, finally one might say, St. Thomas spoke of it only to say nothing, or allowed himself to be swept away by lyrical emotion, which is seldom the case with him. Others have sought to magnify this desire of nature and to make St. Thomas say much more than what he says, so much so indeed that finally St. Thomas is made to appear the disciple of Mr. Maurice Blondel, a noted French philosopher, or of Father Rousselot, a brilliant French Jesuit; and it is thought that intelligence aspires to the vision of the divine essence, as if specified by this object, as the only truly real knowledge. To my mind, St. Thomas simply wants to say that it is natural for intelligence: (1) to desire to know its object unveiled; (2) to desire to know the causes; and that it is therefore natural for intelligence, knowing things, to desire to know, unveiled and in itself, the cause of things. But as thus desiring, intelligence knows not what it wants. Grace alone tells it the name of what it thus desires, which is to see God as He sees Himself.¹

If I may be pardoned for this digression, it is not this desire of nature, proper to every intelligent creature in so far as it is intelligent, which I spoke of when touching upon racist religion. For, indeed, it is not with the creature in so far as it is intelligent, that we are here concerned, but rather with the creature in so far as it is stupid. Let us say that we are concerned with the creature in so far as it is animal, as it is made of flesh and blood. But even on this level, at these animal depths, there is still a desire for God, and it is this desire I spoke of. Does not St. Thomas tell us in his Treatise on the Angels, that it is natural for every creature whatsoever, intelligent or not, living or inanimate, to love God more than itself and to tend to its proper good by virtue of this love of its transcendent Whole? Thus, the hen not only loves its chicks and not only loves itself; it loves God more than itself. The plant tends towards God before tending towards light and air. The stone gravitates towards the centre only by virtue of its natural tendency towards God, of its natural ‘love’ of God. And our eyes crave for light and our smallest physical fibres crave for life, by virtue of their profound tendency towards God, and of their ontological desire for God. Such is the elementary tendency which explains racist religiousness; because it grows from the most physical and least rational roots of being, because it is blind, it can easily let itself be deviated as soon as it passes into the zone of rational life; in fact, it is this elementary desire, which being perverted, causes the growth of demonic para-theism which I have mentioned above.

Will this elementary desire be able some day to free itself from the unregulated affective forces which set it against the testimony of the spirit? If so, on what conditions? And by what processes? Well, in any case, racism as it exists and acts in reality to-day and in the minds of to-day will have been swept away.

Finally, if we take the point of view not only of the nexus of ideas but of society in the concrete, we see that racism is existentially bound to this demonic para-theism. Because in its reaction against individualism and its thirst for a communion, it seeks this communion in human animality, which, separated from the spirit, is no more than a biological inferno. In the metaphysics of society in the concrete, the god of the community of blood can only be the demon of the blood. Racial neo-paganism is thus lower than the paganism of classical antiquity, which was faithful to eternal laws and to the supreme Divinity. It brings into existence once more the lowest elements of paganism.

The account of atheism and communism calls for a like discussion. From the point of view of the connection of ideas, one sees that the genesis of communism in Marx is of the philosophical order; it proceeds from impulses derived from the Hegelian left and from Feuerbach; in Marx the theory of the alienation of work by private property presupposes de facto, before becoming first de jure, the Feuerbachian theory of the alienation of conscience by the idea of God.

And more profoundly, the discovery of historical materialism, as Marx conceived it, implies an absolutely atheistic position; because it implies a universal process of substitution of the dialectic of history for all transcendent causality, and for the universe of Christianity in general; it implies consequently an absolute naturalistic immanentism, by hypothesis exclusive of all divine transcendence.

For Marx, then, the historical and sociological action of religion works necessarily against the emancipation of the proletariat, because it is the action of a factor of the superstructure which is originally determined only by the need for justifying the economic exploitation of man by man.

If, as I think the case, the master-idea of historical materialism can be purified, so as to designate henceforth only the essential (but not principal) importance of material causality in history, it is on condition that it breaks with Marxism, and replaces the outlook of Hegelian dialectic by that of the fourfold causality of Aristotle.

This basic atheistic principle explains why the existence of class conflict (resulting from the capitalistic structure of our economy) gave rise in Marx to a theoretic and practical conceptualization turning the class-struggle into a gesture of atheism, I mean a moral secession fully accepted by the dispossessed class, by the accursed of the earth, from the political community, which, no matter how oppressive and inhuman its economic structure may be, holds its natural value from God. This same basic, atheistic principle also explains why, as the Webbs report, one of the deepest features of the new civilization worked out in the Soviet Republics is anti-godism; and why, as they also report, a formal pledge of atheism and of repudiation of every form of the supernatural is required in Russia of every adherent to the communist party, and even of every candidate for that party.

Are there yet other potentialities in Marxism? Because in Marx,—as I have just tried to explain, by reason of a presupposed atheism,—the social problem of the emancipation of the proletariat has in fact the priority over the metaphysical and religious problem, the class war over the anti-religious war, can we conceive within Marxism a development allowing a clearly affirmed dissociation between social theory and a materialistic conception of the world, and (on the other hand) a revision of the naive atheism which Marx derived from the nineteenth century? If so, on what conditions? And by what processes? Well, in any case, communism as it exists and acts in reality to-day and in the minds of to-day would have been wiped away.

This is plain to us if, taking the point of view not only of the connection of ideas but of society in the concrete, we see that communism is existentially bound to atheism. For if it reacts against individualism, if it thirsts for communion, it does so without finding a principle superior to anthropocentric humanism; quite on the contrary, it aggravates the latter and seeks this communion in economic activity, in pure productivity, which, considered as the locus proprius and homeland of human activity, is only a world of a beheaded reason, of reason without God. In the metaphysics of society in the concrete, the god of the industrial community can only be human reason as demiurgic and fabricating, the titanism of industry. Communism thus transforms Christian communion into an entirely temporal and despotic communion, which is to be achieved by the abolition of private property.

Under this heading of communism and racism, we may make a concluding remark. If it is true that in the dialectic of culture, communism is the final state of anthropocentric rationalism, we see that in virtue of the universality inherent in reason,—even in reason gone mad,—communism is all-embracing, and sets itself against Christianity by pretending to substitute for the universalism of the Mystic Body of Christ its own earthly universalism; whereas racism, on its irrational and biological basis, sets itself against Christianity by rejecting all universalism, and by breaking even the natural unity of the human family, so as to impose the hegemony of a so-called higher racial essence.

We see also that communism tends, quite in the line of industrialistic rationalism and of capitalistic materialism, toward a transformation of economics by annihilating the ultimate frames of bourgeois society, and that its directive elements are furnished it especially by the working population, whose thought a century of socialistic tradition has disciplined in a revolutionary direction. Racism, on the contrary, and fascism do indeed exert on the energies of bourgeois society a high revolutionary pressure, and they do detest capitalism, but—being above all reactional processes—they do not go on to a social transformation destructive of the ultimate machinery of capitalistic society. It is by another road, preferably by war, that they threaten its destruction. The masses on whom they depend belong especially to the middle classes on the path to proletarianism, classes whose affective mobility is very great. The personal magnetism of the leaders plays a major part: but the leaders could not make their enterprise succeed without the aid given them by strong privileged interests blindly anxious to safeguard their own position.