The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude

I

A completely or an originally irreligious civilization has in all likelihood never existed, but it is not, in itself, unimaginable; what is more important, the modern civilization of Western mankind, originally (and still, in part, actually) Christian, has revealed a trend of evolution towards a society in which, practically speaking, religion as a determining factor of private and public life is to yield its place to a nonreligious, immanentistic, secular moral orientation which may best be described succinctly as “humanitarian.” While such a prospect cannot but appall the believer, it has also evoked misgivings and apprehension in a good many nonreligious or not emphatically religious students of human civilization; nay, terrified some of them, perhaps, to an extent to which it could never terrify the believer himself. For it is precisely the nobler and more perspicacious kind of mundane thinker who is apt to be worried primarily about the fate of human civilization as such, than which he knows no higher thing. Yet it is a grave problem, and one that poses itself on a purely worldly level of thinking, how far an irreligious civilization can subsist at all, or how soon it is bound to degenerate into a state of barbarism: in other words, whether humanitarianism is essentially capable of maintaining itself in actual reality or is fated to defeat its own ends, thus marking but a brief transition towards disintegration and anarchy—coupled, of necessity, with new phenomena of tyranny and new forms of gross and superstitious creeds widely dissimilar to its own mental world. It goes without saying that the rise of Communism and of Fascism—most characteristically, however, of Nazism—is entirely calculated to impress the observer as premonitory signs (if not more) of just such a turn of evolution.

The problem I have indicated concerns the Catholic less directly and from a somewhat different angle, but concern him it certainly does. It is not only that we are interested in civilization as against barbarity; nor, merely, the greater freedom the Church may hope to enjoy under a tolerant humanitarian system as compared with fresh brands of virulent paganism and a totalitarian idolatry of secular power; it is also well for us to understand wholly and in all its implications the intrinsic inadequacy of humanitarianism, so as to be able to help our non-Catholic and non-Christian fellows towards a fuller understanding thereof. For secular preoccupations of a legitimate and dignified kind have often in history supplied valuable and important elements of society with the initial motives for their conversions to the Faith.

The sketchy remarks which follow, destined to throw some light on a very few aspects of the vast problem, are purely analytic in character, and in no way supposed to contribute directly to a historic prognosis or a cultural program. I may also observe that I intend to examine, here, the “humanitarian” attitude as contrasted to the “religious” attitude in general, rather than to the specifically Catholic one. By no means does this imply, however, any leaning towards the shallow and absurd view that all religions “teach essentially the same thing”; nor indeed the view that any kind of “religiousness” is necessarily better, or more consonant with the basic values of Civilization, than the irreligious attitude in its humanitarian form.

II

A few clarifications regarding nomenclature may seem advisable.

1

By a “religious attitude” we mean a corporate—or at least, a socially relevant—outlook on human affairs which contains a reference to a “higher” Power (or a system of such powers) underlying “cosmic” reality, and invested with a “claim” to determine, direct, or guide human thought and behavior. The term “higher” is meant to indicate an order of Reality qualitatively distinct from the natural order of things and events as experienced in the everyday existence of a given society, including even such unknown objects and forces as can at any rate be imagined as mere additional elements essentially fitting into the texture of natural reality. The word “higher” (for which “transcendent,” or, in a looser sense, “supernatural” may be substituted) also connotes...