h

crusade. cLSlums,ysaid Mrs. Coney, are

made by people, not by plaster and bricks.
She won a Freedoms Foundation award,
President Johnson cited the Indianapolis
plan in his own national crime report,
and Mrs. Moore, who is coordinator of the
crusade, and, incidentally, mother-in-law to
her co-author was an invited speaker at
Mrs. Johnsons anti-crime luncheon in January.
A short way to summarize the EvansMoore study would be to say that the Mayor of Indianapolis never invited Indianapolitans to revolt, and that Indianapolis relies less on the bulldozer, thc drawing
board, and the exuberant flow of steadily
depreciating dollars from Washington than
on the non-material, or if you like spiritual,
elements of the total environment.
Reviewed by C. P. IVES

Seed and Harvest

The Peasant of the Garonne, by

Jacques Maritain; translated from the
French, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and
Vinston, Inc., 1968. 277 pp. $6.95.
THE Peasant of the Garonne may be a spectacular curtain fall for Maritains career
as a Catholic philosopher and public figure,
but the drama he helped write and perform
is far from ended. I speak of the drama
of Modernism, still of modest proportions when Pius X condemned it sixty years
ago (in Maritains youth), but since become a hurricane threatening the Church
with collapse. The philosopher himself, triumphant for two generations, turns now into a pathetic figure like all those who unleash a movement and live to see it follow
its own destructive logic. His disciples, and
their disciples, call him old incompetent

and worse. In the Church, as outside, the

revolution devours its children. When he
lives long, its father too.
Compared to the new-breed Catholics,
Maritain is, of course, a disciplined thinker
writing i n a precise language, combining
the philosophers careful distinctions with
the insights of faith. Yet, all told, this style
did more to smuggle equivocal theses into
contemporary Catholic thought than all the
rest of the neotheologians with the exception of Teilhard de Chardin. His present,
at times vehement and biting, attacks on
new-style Modernism (compared to which,
he writes, the original version was a mere
hay-fever) hide an old intellectual ambiguity. The new breed, primitive science-worshipers, look at the Church as an embodiment of historical errors, a biological laggard on the road to the last mutation, a
socwlogical ghetto compared to the Secular City. Add up these charges, and you get
the aggwrnamento ideology. But forty
years ago Maritain, in elegant and erudite
language, had already prescribed the aggwrnamento to the Church, like a self-assured Mirabeau to a weak Louis XVI.
What irony that he must now mock those
who genuflect before the World, the Teilhard-cultists, the prelates devoutly reading
Freud, the Catholic families discussing sex
around the dinner table, although only a
few years ago they banned such talk from
the bedroom.
What was Maritains own aggwrnamento
like? He welcomed the de-Christianized,
de-sacralized civilization which terminatcd
the Christians alleged benefits from a
Church linked with the secular power. The
liberal-capitalist bourgeoisie made use of
the Church as a bank insuring property
and police force protecting it, he wrote in
The Person and the Common Good. The
new era will bring a salutary breeze, dispersing the miasma of equivocation: in the
de-Christianized milieu Christians will have
no special protection, will act on their own,
injecting love and charity into society and
the body politic. The latter will be democratic, pluralistic; the common good will
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be above the Christians particular good.

Brotherly friendship will be the leading
principle; to what extent will depend on the
Christian as citizen.
This was the thesis of Integral Humanism by which Maritain, a follower of Maurras until the latters condemnation by the
Vatican (1926), rehabilitated himself in
the eyes of the Catholic Left. The rehabilitation was well deserved; it is both instructive and frightening to compare Maritains
texts with those of Rahner, Kiing, Metz,
Cardonnel, Chenu, Adolfs, the priestly phalanx of the Churchs merciless persecutors.
Like the plant in the seed, so is their thesis
contained in Maritains thought, with jargon and malice added.
To be sure, the present book strikes a
rather different son de cloche in important
respects. It finishes off Teilhard, making
use of Gilsons irrefutably commonsensical
arguments; reminiscent of Les Degrts du
Savoir, it uses scalpel-sharp reasoning in
its critique of ideosophy from Descartes
to Husserl; and it restores normalcy to the
subject of faith in transcendental God. Yet
. . yet, in its essentials, even in accidentals, it too suffers from the old equivocations. Why should we be informed at the
outset that there are three genuine revolutionaries left, President Eduardo Frei of
Chile (a Christian Democrat whose Party
may well serve as a wider gateway to communism than Cuba), Saul Alinsky, the
professional radical from Chicago, and
the author? Que vu-t-il chercher duns cette
galtre?-unless,
incited by an urge which
I do not hesitate to call intellectually obscene, he wants to play to the end the Catholic enfant terrible. Then, the by now famous passage in which he designates the
archetype of the Left as the Sheep of Panurge, and of the Right as Ruminators of the
Holy Alliance-concluding
that he always
felt nearer the first in political matters,
nearer the second (alas!, he adds) in religious ones. Too late to teach him that we
either follow the politics of our religion, or
the religion of our politics. Tertium non da-

tur, not even for pra,matists and opportunists.

Maritain is, then, visibly uncomfortable
in his new role as a quasi-Ruminator, and
so is the reader, not knowing whether Maritain has now come home or is still sailing
toward Utopia. A kind of democratic urge
prompts him to be on both sides of every
issue. He may, indeed, find it painful to
leave the arena of past battles without affixing his name to some serene synthesis, without reconciling in the practical order people speculatively divided. At the same
time he asks us to harden our convictions.
Dilemmas, ambiguities, doors left ajar. He
writes: We want peace on earth; so does
everybody. The question is, How?-when
the new breed, working feverishly on their
theology of insurrection and sex, are sweeping the Churchs Kerenskys into the dustbin of sacred history.
When finally all passages are weighed,
there is no discernible change frim Znteg a l Humanism to The Peasant of the Garonne. It is not the first time that a man,
subtle in philosophy, draws the wrong conclusions in the practical order, and persists
in both courses. Now, as in Les Degrts d u
Savoir, Maritain diagnoses brilliantly the
leftist sickness: exclusive trust in the speculative sphere, contempt for being. The
pure man of the Left, he notes again, detests being, always preferring, in principle,
what is not to what is. Yet, he performs
his nth leap into utopia: While the Christians ultimate end is not of this world,
Maritain keeps asserting, his mission today
is the temporal transformation of the developing world: guaranteeing human
rights and well-being for the individual,
and a supra-national organization for the
peace of mankind.
Note the paradox inherent in this temporal mission: Does it mean a re-Christianization of the milieu?-then
why did Maritain welcome the opposite? Or does i t
mean, which is more likely, that Society,
State, Mankind may now be trusted as
radically transformed? Indeed, this is what
Maritain always meant by democratic

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pluralism, while the new breed, in their

infantile style, speak of mankind come of
age. Both believe that the World is now
mature and that the Church may relax her
careful watch over institutions, public life,
the fabric of civilization, the texture of
morality. As an institution, she may now
retire, confining her duties to administering to private expressions oi the faith. For
one of two things: either the Church has
done her work well in two thousand sacral
years, and now the individual has internalized the Gospels-he
may now be trusted
to labor fruitfully without benefit of the
Churchs institutional support. Or (and
how many times did I hear progressive
priests and bishops add quickly this alternative) the Church has not succeeded in
did not abolcreating a good society-she
ish poverty, exploitation, class distinction,
racism, prejudices-then
she must step
aside, giving a chance to other ideologies
(sic), for example to socialism.
Rlaritain does not speak of socialism, but
bends his knees before Council and Pope
introducing the new age of progress in
evangelical awareness and an immeasurably significant renewal. We have definitively emerged from the sacral age. . . .
After sixteen centuries which it would be
shameful to slander but which have completed their death agony and whose grave
defects were incontestable, a new age begins ; the Church invites us
to recognize
all the dimensions of that homo integer of
whom the Pope spoke at the last meeting
of the Council. Free from the ties of
those who pretended to protect her, the
Church mirrors better the true face of God
which is Love. She spreads her wings of
light. Does this old man really not see
that these wings are being clipped away by
the Churchs own children, and that there
are now new Powers pretending to protect
her-with
their fingers on her throat?
,Does he not realize that the new secular
civilization, the one he still greets so enthusiastically and wishes to promote in the
company of Saul Alinsky, is post-Christian
not in the sense of post-baroque (another

. ..

of his ambiguous terms), but in the sense

that Comte and Feuerbach meant it?
To quite a large extent, Maritains years
in the United States concretized his views
on the happy equilibrium of secular civilization. He saw here what he took for a neutral society in which, nevcrthcless, the
Churches, and the Christian ethos generally, have created a tolerant milieu, hence a
genuine testing ground for the Iwmo integer and his humanism. His Reflections on
America (1958) expressed the belief that
in the United States, the starting ground
for a new Christian civilization, everything points to a fraternal society : the
healthy mixture of capitalism and socialism, the amicable competition of ideologies,
the mutual jealousies preventing any one
group from acquiring a monopoly, finally
the working class, unlike Frances, securely
church-going.
But, of course, the problem of Maritain
goes far beyond this declaration of love for
this country. (He went so far as to see in
the American urge to build, demolish, then
build again a Christian non-attachment
to worldly things.) Maritain, and after him,
taught by him, the new breed, postulate an
ideal society in which Christians should insist only on the essentials (of faith and doctrine) , but may concede the non-essentials
(all that constitutes civilization proper) to
Society or the State brought under democratic control. But the question is precisely this: Why the confidence in, the conversion to, the World? Can the World, can civilization remain neutral, with the Church
in an enclave, holding her own? Or, to put
it i n blunt, Bernanosian language, is modern civilization not a conspiracy against
man, an earthly paradise to whose gates
we will arrive debased? The de-Christianized world is not merely indifferent to
Christianity, not even merely hostile to it ;
it is a world expressly designed by antiChristian, anti-spiritual forces, it is a Secular City, a non-Church.
To say this is not to succumb to some
morbid social pessimism, but to discard the
belief that democratic pluralism, and the

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secular civilization blessed in its name, are

Christian in inspiration and objective. Just
as Maritain is now superseded by the lay
and ecclesiastical shock-troops (one of their
militants calls him a pimp for Christianity) , so is secular democracy overwhelmed
by the Worlds fundamental atheism, today
and always, of totalitarian inspiration. How
much more Christian, how much more realistic is Romano Guardini writing in The
End of the Modern World: In this anonymous world the God-centered man is a lonely traveler, homeless and unprotected.
Reviewed by THOMAS
MOLNAR

The Dostoevskian Mythos

Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, by

Konstantin Mochulsky ; translated by
Michael -4. Minihan, Princeton, N . J . :
Princeton University Press, 1967. xxii 4687 pp. $10.00.
KONSTANTIN
MOCHULSKY, a Russian &migr6 teaching at the University of Paris,
wrote this book in 1942 and published it
in 1947. For years the work has been
known and praised by Slavic specialists,
and its appearance now in English can only
be welcomed.
Mochulsky approaches the work of Dostoevsky from every possible angle; he gives
us much of Dostoevskys biography; something of literary process and the conditions
in which he worked; something of literary
history, influences, and critical comments
and reactions. Dostoevsky is evoked for us
by the documents of the age: the reminiscences and diaries of contemporaries, his
own and others, letters and lengthy excerpts
from his articles, short stories and novels.
The study is criticism, biography, and lit-

erary history. It is also, in its interpretations, metaphysics, symbolism, and mythology.

It is the scholar and the historian that
one notices first in reading the study, but
there is another Mochulsky and he has left
his mark on the book. There is the MOchulsky whose father was a professor of literature and who taught Russian literature
for many years at the University of Paris:
the academic with the habits of documentation and historical and biographical causation. And there is the Mochulsky who was
brought up in the feverish and even hallucinatory atmosphere of Russian literary
cenacles in Moscow and St. Petersburg in
the first decades of the twentieth century.
Literature and religion at this time were
mixed by mystical exaltation, and the world
and literature were looked upon as symbolic codices of real-er realities. In prose
another Russian 6migr6, Viacheslav Ivanov, was the high priest of these symbolic
revelations and his influence on Konstantin Mochulsky is pervasive in this study.
The same extravagant mythologizing and
symbolizing that marred Viacheslav Ivanovs magnificent work on Dostoevsky has
marred even more this study by Mochulsky.
The 6migr6 always leads an abstract life,
but when he is brought up on abstractions,
he leads a life of double jeopardy.
Anyone who is acquainted with the prose
literature of the years 1900-1918 in Russia
will have no trouble in recognizing the atmosphere of the era in the following quotation from Mochulskys book on Dostoevsky, as well as the influence of Viacheslav
Ivanov : Dostoevskys art is symbolic like
every great art. His mystical realism penetrates the veil of appearances to the essence of things. This quotation is moderate and almost meaningful. Others are
not. Mochulsky speaks of the heroine of
The Idiot, Nastasya Fillipovna, in these
terms: On the metaphysical plane his heroine is the image of pure beauty, seduced
by the prince of this world and waiting
in her dungeon for a liberator. The soul of
the world, the beautiful Psyche--existing
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