Christian thinkers offered path to a humanist revival

In the spring of 1946, W.H. Auden came to Harvard to read a poem to the university’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter. Titled “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” the poem envisioned a postwar world in which, the war-god Ares having quit the field, public life would be dominated by a renewed contest between “the sons of Hermes” and “Apollo’s children” — the motley humanists against the efficient technocrats, the aesthetes and poets and philosophers and theologians against the managers and scientists and financiers and bureaucrats.

During his visit, Auden met James Conant, then the president of Harvard and a man associated with the Apollonian transformation of the modern university, its remaking as a scientific-technical powerhouse with its old religious and humanistic purposes hollowed out. “‘This is the real enemy,’ I thought to myself,” Auden wrote of the encounter. “And I’m sure he had the same impression about me.”

This anecdote appears near the end of “The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis,” a new book by Baylor professor Alan Jacobs. Auden is one of his main subjects; the others are T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, a group of religious thinkers whose wartime writings Jacobs depicts as a sustained attempt, in the shadow of totalitarian ambition and liberal crisis, to offer “a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich Christianity” as the means to a humanistic renewal in the West.

Jacobs also depicts their attempt as a failure, because in the end neither a Christian humanism nor any other has been able to withstand the spirit of Conant, the spirit of truthreplaced-by-useful-knowledge that rules today not just in Washington and Silicon Valley but in much of academia as well.

There was real growth in humanities majors beginning in the 1950s, and that indicator corresponded to a genuine mass interest in pursuits that now seem esoteric and strictly elitist — poetry and public theology, classical music and abstract impressionism, the Great American novel and the high theory of French cinema and more.

What sustained this temporary cultural moment, middlebrow and crass in all sorts of ways but still more successfully humanistic than our own? Three forces, in particular, that are no longer with us. First, there was a stronger religious element in midcentury culture.

Second, there was the example of a rival civilization, totalitarian communism, in which the Apollonian model had been pushed to its materialist-utopian conclusion and discovered only a ruthless, inhuman dead end. And third, forged in response to the communist threat, there was a sense of Western identity, Western historical tradition, that could be glib and propagandistic in a from-Platoto-NATO style.

This precise combination is not recoverable, but a hopeful road map to humanism’s recovery might include variations on those older themes. First, a return of serious academic interest in the possible truth of religious claims. Second, a regained sense of history as a repository of wisdom and example rather than just a litany of crimes. Finally, a cultural recoil from the tyranny of the digital and the virtual, today’s version of the technocratic, technological, potentially totalitarian machine that Jacobs’ Christian humanists opposed.