The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs Gerald P. Boersma The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 256 pp. The Year of Our Lord 1943 is a remarkable and unconventional book. The volume focuses on Christian intellectual life in the year that saw the major reversal of fortunes in the Second World War. At this point the victory of the Allied forces was increasingly recognized as sure. This is the context in which Alan Jacobs tells the story of how prominent Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic envisioned the cultural reconstruction of Western civilization after the war. The subtitle of the book, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, articulates this common postwar aspiration. The five central dramatis personae that Jacobs casts for his drama are (1) Jacques Maritain, the influential Thomist theologian and personalist philosopher whose presence looms large in twentieth-century Catholic political and ecclesial life, (2) T. S. Eliot, arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century, whose writing on literature, education, and cultural life offer a traditionalist Anglican voice to the project of Christian humanism, (3) C. S. Lewis, the tireless Christian apologist who became the public voice of evangelical Anglican Christianity during the war and remained so until his death in 1963, (4) W. H. Auden, the English poet who during the war settled in America and whose jarring poetry is a scathing denunciation of postwar bourgeois sentiment, and (5) Simone Weil, who, in her short and anguished life, produced aphoristic, staccato-like philosophy—the amalgam of both her mysticism and political activism. Alongside these central figures, Jacobs invites many other contemporaneous acclaimed "Christian humanists" to make a brief appearance on stage. Already during the last two years of the war, the political and military leaders, captains of industry, jurists, and engineers of the allied forces began preparations for the reconstruction of life after the war. Jacobs's drama focuses on a series of thinkers less concerned with practical postwar considerations than "with a renewal of Christian thought and practice, especially in the schools of the Western world" (xii). These Christian humanists shared the conviction that a sufficient degree of responsibility for the horrors of the previous decade lay at the feet of an educational system indifferent to a Christian vision of the human person. An authentically human education was vital, therefore, to reconstruct a civilization from the ashes of totalitarian violence. At the outset, Jacobs narrates the history of two intellectual societies, each on one side of the Atlantic, founded to debate the relation between faith and the social order. The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, established in 1940 at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York [End Page 658] by its president Louis Finkelstein, gave formal expression to a concern, harbored by many educators, that positivism (in the sciences) and pragmatism (in the world beyond the laboratory) were morally vacuous, endemic to American education, and woefully ill-equipped to educate a democratic citizenry at war with a totalitarian regime. The conviction that eternal realities—justice, truth, goodness, and beauty—can be known and rationally defended was more important to America's war effort than the state of her munitions and battalions. On the other side of the Atlantic a similar gathering met in London, convened by J. H. Oldham; they gave themselves the name "Oldham's Moot." This conversation, which ran from 1938 to 1947, included cultural avatars such as T. S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, Alec Vidler, Christopher Dawson, Walter Moberly, and John Middleton Murry. The question of the definition of "culture" and, more particularly, the place of Christian faith in such culture animated the discussions at Oldham's Moot. Jacques Maritain played a decisive role in advancing a particular Catholic version of "Christian humanism." Catholic humanism was envisioned as a response to the humanism first advanced in the Renaissance and culminating in its vicious expression in the Enlightenment. For Maritain, the tale of modern humanism is a narrative of decline, in which an anthropocentric, stunted humanism took root, displacing authentic humanism...