Scholasticism and Politics. Jacques Maritain

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.

      III

      CHRISTIAN CONSCIENCE AND THE WORLD

      A characteristic of the humanism, which I call integral, would be that, far from being limited to the élite, it would care for the masses, for their right to work and to a spiritual life, and for the movement which brings them, we may say, to an historically full age. On the social significance of such a humanism, I will simply say that in my opinion it should assume the task of radically transforming the temporal order, a task which would tend to substitute for bourgeois civilization, and for an economic system based on the fecundity of money, not a collectivistic economy, but a ‘personalistic’ civilization and a ‘personalistic’ economy, through which would stream a temporal refraction of the truths of the Gospel.

      This task is joined to a thorough awakening of the religious conscience, and I wish to insist for a moment on this point. One of the worst vices of the modern world is its dualism, the dissociation between the things of God and the things of the world. The latter, the things of the social, economic and political life, have been abandoned to their own carnal law, removed from the exigencies of the Gospel. The result is that they have become more and more unlivable; at the same time, Christian ethics, not really carried out in the social life of people, became in this connection, I do not say in itself or in the Church, I say in the world, in the general cultural behaviour, a universe of formulas and words; and this universe of formulas and words was in effect vassalized, in practical cultural behaviour, by the real energies of this same temporal world existentially detached from Christ. Such a disorder can be cured only by a renewal of the profoundest energies of the religious conscience, arising in temporal existence.

      On the other hand, modern civilization, which pays dearly to-day for the past, seems as if it were pushed, by the very contradictions and fatalities suffered by it, toward contrasting forms of misery and intensified materialism. To rise above these fatalities we need an awakening of liberty and of its creative forces, we need the energies of spiritual and social resurrection of which man does not become capable by the grace of the State or any Party pedagogy, but by a love which fixes the centre of his life infinitely above the world and temporal history. In particular, the general paganization of our civilization has resulted in man’s placing his hope in force alone and in the efficacy of hate, whereas in the eyes of an integral humanism,