dent on its Christian antecedents. Humanism was, it is true, a return to nature, the rediscovery of man and the natural world. But the author of the discovery, the active principle in the change, was not the natural man ; it was Christian man, the human type that had been produced by ten centuries of ascetic discipline and intensive cultivation of the inner life. The great men of the Renaissance were spiritual men, even when they were most deeply immersed in the temporal order. It was from the accumulated resources of their Christian past that they acquired the spiritual energy to conquer the material world and to create the new secular culture. It is true that the disparity between the source and the object of their activity tended to produce a sense of strain and spiritual tension, which is perceptible in the work of typical Renaissance geniuses such as Shakespeare and Cervantes, as well as in definitely religious characters like Michelangelo or Campanella. But, at least in Catholic Europe, the two elements had attained to a relatively stable equilibrium by the end of the sixteenth century, and had an equal share in the development of the later Renaissance culture. The spirit of Christian humanism dominated the whole of the seventeenth century and manifested itself alike in the Baroque 96
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art of Spain and Italy and Central Europe, in the Jacobean and Caroline literature of England and in the classical culture of France. This religious current which runs through seventeenth-century culture cannot be set aside as a reactionary or negative phenomenon, for it lies at the heart of the higher civilisation of the time and is responsible for some of its greatest achievements. Indeed, when in the eighteenth century this equilibrium was destroyed by the final victory of the naturalistic and rationalist tendencies, it involved the fall of the Renaissance culture itself. The new humanism of the Enlightenment was lacking in the vitality and spiritual depth of the earlier type. The one-sided rationalism of the Encyclopaedists pro-voked the one-sided subjective emotionalism of Rousseau and the Romantics. And though both rationalism and romanticism were in a sense the heirs of the Renaissance tradition, neither of them was the true representative of the earlier humanism. Rationalism had lost its spiritual inspiration and romanticism lacked its intellectual order and its sense of form.
Thus the disappearance of the Christian element in humanism has involved the loss of its vital quality. If we attempt to resuscitate it on a purely naturalistic foundation, we may get something like the humanism of Anatole France, C.N.A. 97 G
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but we shall certainly not recover the creative humanism of the Renaissance period. This is admitted by the protagonist of the new humanism, Professor Babbitt, who fully realises that every culture is a spiritual order and that humanism is only possible if we throw over naturalism and return to spiritual principles.
But, while he recognises that the very survival of Western civilisation depends ” on the appearance of leaders who have rediscovered in some form the truths of the inner life and repudiated the errors of naturalism,” he is unwilling to make a complete return to the metaphysical and religious foundations. He prefers a kind of spiritual positivism based on the accumulated moral wisdom of the great historic traditions-Greek, Buddhist and Confucian. His desire to be ” modern and individualistic and critical “
causes him to shrink from committing himself absolutely to that which is eternal and universal.
Yet without such an affirmation, no true spiritual order is possible. Each of the great spiritual traditions to which he appeals rested on a metaphysical foundation, and if this is removed their moral order falls with it. Even Epicurus himself had to pass beyond the ” flammantia moenia mundi ” before he could bring peace to the minds of his disciples. By his insistence on the critical and individualistic attitude, Pro-98
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fessor Babbitt is taking his stand on the weakest point in his position. The tradition of critical individualism still survives ; indeed the modern intellectual has carried it to its extreme limits.
But this excess is a last desperate reaction against the all-pervading pressure of a collec¬
tivist civilisation. In the days of Voltaire the critic was leading a victorious advance against the routed forces of the old order; today he is fighting for his very existence against the ruling tendencies of the age. It is easier to restore a spiritual purpose to civilisation than to reverse its tendency towards collectivism and solidarity.
To a critic like Babbitt, Christianity is unacceptable on account of its weakness during the last two centuries against the dissolvent forces of rationalist criticism ; but this type of criticism is already losing its power. The modern criticism of organised religion is in part the survival on a lower cultural plane of the rationalist thought of a past age, and in part a reaction against the romantic and individualist forms of religion that were characteristic of the nineteenth century or at least of the post-Reformation period.
But Christianity in itself is in no way bound up with the individualist culture that is passing away. It was in origin a religion of order and solidarity which throve in an atmosphere of anonymity and collectivism. It was not itself 99 G2
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responsible for the dying down of classical culture, the loss of civic liberty and the inaugura-tion of the regime of compulsion and state socialism, which were, on the contrary, the necessary consequences of the inherent inconsistencies and weakness of the later classical culture itself. But it was able to accommodate itself to conditions in which a purely secular type of individual culture must inevitably perish.
And it seems possible that Christianity may survive modern humanism in the same way that it survived ancient Hellenism. However seriously Christianity is threatened by the materialism and mechanicism of modern civilisation, it is in a much stronger position man the tradition of critical intellectualism, which can find neither a material nor a spiritual basis in the new conditions of life. The latter belongs essentially to the culture of a leisured class—not the new plutocracy of millionaires and leaders of industry, but the privileged classes of the old Europe, whether bourgeois or aristocratic, who stood outside the economic arena. This class has already practically disappeared, and its civilisation and ideals of life are bound to disappear in like manner. The choice that is actually before us is not between an individualistic humanism and some form of collectivism, but between a collectivism that is purely 100
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mechanistic and one that is spiritual. Spiritual individualism is incapable of standing out against the collectivism and standardisation of modern life : it is only by a return to spiritual solidarity that modern civilisation can recover the spiritual principle of which it stands so greatly in need.
It will no doubt be objected, by the modernist and the medievalist alike, that there is a fundamental and insurmountable contradiction between the Christian ideal of spiritual freedom and the scientific determinism and materialism that are inherent in the new order. But we must make a distinction between the metaphysical determinism of the dogmatic materialist or ” naturalist ” and the physical determinism of the scientist, which is nothing but a recognition of the uniformity of physical laws within their proper limits. And what is this but the Hellenic belief in the existence of a universal cosmic order, which was accepted by the Christian Fathers as a necessary consequence of the creative activity of the Divine Word, which orders and disposes all things in number and weight and measure ?
Consequently the material organisation of the world by science and invention is in no sense to be refused or despised by the Catholic tradition, for to the Catholic philosopher no less 101