El resurgimiento católico según Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt en un café de París, en 1935

 

Hannah Arendt: “Christianity and Revolution”  (1945)

(The Nation, 22/9/1945. En H. Arendt: Essays in Understanding, 1930-1945. Hartcourt Brace & Company, Nueva York, 1994, pp. 151-155)

 

While it is already obvious that the Christian churches in Europe had survived fascism, war, and occupation in their religious as well as their organizational aspects, it is still a question whether we shall see a general Christian and especially Catholic revival in French and international life. There is no doubt about the part played by various Catholic movements and individuals in the Resistance or about the impeccable attitude of the greater part of the lower clergy. This does not mean, however, that these Catholics have a political position of their own. At the moment it looks rather as if the old anticlerical passions are no longer alive in France–in contrast to Spain and probably Italy–and as if one of the most important issues in French domestic politics since the days of the Revolution is about to depart quietly from the political scene.

We have witnessed one wave of neo-Catholicism revival after another since the period of fin de siècle decadence by which they were partly engendered. It started at the time of the Dreyfus Affair with the famous “Catholics without faith,” who later developed into the Action Françoise, were condemned by the Pope in 1926, and ended by bowing before their real master, Mr. Hitler. With their boundless admiration of organization for organization’s sake, they were the degenerated disciples of de Maistre, the great champion of reaction and greater master of French prose. And one must admit that they brought into the dead boredom of reactionary theories the violence of polemic and some passion argument.

The “Catholics without faith” loved the church–which is still the greatest example of authoritarian organization and as such has withstood two thousand years of history […]

But side by side with these dilettantes of fascism there sprang up a very different Catholic revival movement, whose greatest representatives were Péguy and Bernanos in France and Chesterton in England. […] What these men hated in the modern world was not democracy but the lack of it. They saw through the appearances of democracies which might be more accurately described as plutocracies and through the trimmings of a republic which was much more a political machine. What they sought was freedom for the people and reason for the mind. What they started from was a deep hatred of bourgeois society, which they knew was essentially anti-democratic and fundamentally perverted. What they fought against always was the insidious invasion of bourgeois morals and standards into all walks of life and all classes of the people. They were indeed struggling against something very ominous, which scarcely a socialist–whose political party, according to Péguy, “is completely composed of bourgeois intellectuals”–clearly realized, namely, the all-pervading influence of bourgeois mentality in the modern world.

It is a remarkable phenomenon, and something to start our progressives thinking, that as far as polemics go these Catholic converts or neo-Catholics have come out as victors. There are no more devastating, amusing, or better-written polemics against the host of modern superstitions, from Christian Science to gymnastics as a means of salvation, to teetotalism, and Kirshnamurti, than Chesterton’s essays. It was Péguy who discovered and defined the essential difference between poverty–which was always a virtue, for Roman republicans as well as for medieval Christians–and destitution, which is the modern plague reserved for those who refuse the pursuit of money and the humiliations of success. And it was, finally, Bernanos who wrote the most passionate denunciation of fascism–Les grandes Cimetières sous la lune–a knight without fear or reproach, unhampered by any admiration for “historical greatness” and untouched by any secret desire for the necessity of evil.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that none of these individuals was a great philosopher and that this movement did not produce a single great artist. Although both Chesterton and Péguy wrote good poetry, neither will be remembered primarily for his poems. With the exception of The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton’s novels are only another form of the essay, and Bernanos’s novels are of little interest. Nor was there among them a great theologian. The only neo-Catholic  of importance who ventured into this field was Léon Bloy–with rather crude and absurd results, which, theologically speaking, were always on the borderline of heresy and sometimes approached the borderline of bohemian Kitsch: he maintained, for instance, that women should be either saints of whores, for while saints may be forced by circumstances to descend to the level of the whore, and whores may always become saints, the honest woman of bourgeois society is lost beyond salvation.

Since the turn of the century these converts, it would seem, have felt that their proper field was politics and their task to become true revolutionaries, that is, more radical that the radicals. And in a sense they were right, right at least as long as they remained in the negative and took the offensive. It certainly was more radical to repeat that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich to enter into the kingdom of God” than to quote economical laws. When Chesterton describes the rich man who for the pretended sake of humanity has adopted some fancy new vegetarian rule as the man who does not go “without gardens and gorgeous rooms which poor men can’t enjoy” but has “abolished meat because poor men like meat’, or when he denounces the ‘modern philanthropist” who does not give up “petrol or… servants” bur rather “some simple universal things” like “beef or sleep, because these pleasures remind him that he is only a man”–then Chesterton has better described the fundamental ambitions of the ruling classes than have all the academic discussions of the functions of capitalist. And in Péguy’s endless repetition, “All evil comes from the bourgeoise”, is more elementary hatred than in the collected speeches of Jaurès.

With the whole of Western culture at stake once bourgeois rule had entered the path of imperialism, it is not surprising that the oldest weapons, the fundamental convictions of Western mankind, sufficed to show at least the extent of the evil. The great advantage of these neo-Catholic writers was that when they went back to Christianity they broke with the standards of their surrounding more radically than any other sect or party. It was their instinct as publicist which pushed them into the church. They were looking for arms, and were ready to take them wherever they found them; and they found better ones in the oldest arsenal than in the half-baked half-truths of modernity. Publicists and journalists are always in a hurry–that is their occupational disease. Here were arms that one could take up in a hurry; had not two thousand years proved their utility? The best among the converts knew from bitter experience how much more reasonable, if one accepted the single great assumption which Christian faith exacts than if one remained in the turmoil of modernism, which enforces every other day, with a maximum of fanaticism, another absurd doctrine.

There was something more in Christianity that its highly useful denunciation of the rich man as a wicked man. The insistence of the Christian doctrine on man’s limited condition was somehow enough of a philosophy to allow its adherents a very deep insight into the essential inhumanity of all those modern attempts–psychological, technical, biological–to change man into the monster of a superman. They realized that a pursuit of happiness which actually means to wipe away all tears will pretty quickly end by wiping all laughter. It was again Christianity which taught them that nothing human can exist beyond tears and laughter, except the silence of despair. This is the reason why Chesterton, having once and for all accepted tears, could put real laughter into his most violent attacks.

If this is the case of publicists and journalists among the neo-Catholics, the case of the philosophers is slightly different and slightly embarrassing. The point is that philosophers by definition are supposed not to be in a hurry. If one is to judge by the book recently published by Raïssa Maritain, it was not hatred of bourgeois society which brought the Maritains into the church–although M. Maritain was a socialist in his youth; it was, as Mme Maritain insists time and again, the need for “spiritual guidance”. At time of their conversion is probable that both of them, and not only Mme Maritain, “had by instinct an insuperable apprehension toward anything concerning political activity, in which I saw–and still do–the domain of what St. Paul calls the evil of time”. What separated them from Péguy–a former friendship broke up, strangely enough, because of their conversion–was precisely that they wanted first of all to save their souls, a preoccupation which played no great role in either Péguy’s or Chesterton’s Catholicism.

The Maritains became converts after having been exposed to the anti-intellectualism of Bergson. It is all to Jacques Maritain’s credit that Bergson’s attack on reason frightened him so much; the question is only whether a philosopher is allowed to seed shelter so quickly and so desperately. It is true that the teachings of the church still represent a stronghold of human reason, and it is quite understandable that in the day-by-day fight publicists like Péguy and Chesterton took cover as quickly as possible. They were no philosophers, and all they needed was a fighting faith. What Maritain wanted was one certainty which would lead him out of the complexities and confusions of a world that does not even know what a man is talking about if he takes the word truth into his mouth.

But the truth is a rather difficult deity to worship because the only thing she does not allow her worshipers is certainty. Philosophy concerned with truth ever was and probably always will be a kind of docta ignorantia–highly learned and therefore highly ignorant. The certainties of Thomas Aquinas afford excelled spiritual guidance and are still much superior to almost anything in the way of certainties which has been invented in more recent times. But certainty is not truth, and a system of certainties is the end of philosophy. This is the reason why one may be allowed to doubt very strongly that Thomism will ever be able to bring about a revival of philosophy.