IV

RELIGION AND POLITICS

by

MAURICE B. RECKITT, M.A.

Editor of Christendom
Author of Faith and Society, &c.
 IV
RELIGION AND POLITICS

T HE title under which I am to write is

one calculated to arouse in any author
sentiments at once of alarm and of consola-
tion. And for the same reason. For if it is
alarming to realize that one is expected to
provide illumination upon an issue that has
baffled many of the £nest minds in Christian
history, it is at least comforting to reflect that
one can hardly be censured for failing to settle
a problem which never has been, and probably
never can be, effectively solved. It has been
said that Christians are free to feel that the
problems that beset them are insoluble-on
condition that they help to solve them. It
is in such a spirit that I approach my task to-
night. There has never been a century which
had not its own problem of Church and State,
though there have been some which failed to
recognize the fact. And that there will ever
be a century in which this problem will not
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
recur can only be believed by those who hold
that it is at once desirable and possible for
the one authority to swallow the other.
Such persons have doubtless always existed.
Some would be inclined to number Boniface
VIII among them; and we can be certain
that, from a somewhat different angle, Lenin
was another. In countries farther west than
Russia a superficial deference to religion,
employing a very different vocabulary from
that characteristic of workers upon the ' anti-
God Front', might issue in results not dis-
similar in essence from those sought by the
followers of Jaroslavsky. There are more
ways of killing a cat than choking it with
cream; but if there are more ways of killing
a Catholic Church than by smothering it with
concordats, this might quite conceivably be
one of them. Let us listen to the concilia-
tory accents of the Chancellor of the German
Reich:
National Socialism [says its protagonist] has con-
tinuously given assurance of its determination to
place the Christian Churches under State protection.
The Churches on their side cannot doubt for a
moment that they stand in need of State protection,
and only by means of it are they in the position to
fulfil their religious mission. Yes; the Churches
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RELIGION AND POLITICS

exact this protection from the State. The State must,
however, on its side, demand from the Churches that
they as well, from their side, will contribute that
share of the support which the State needs for its
assistance.

It has become a little clearer, twenty months

since these words were spoken, what is implied
by this sort of protection-a protection not
unlike that which the American gangster
forces upon his luckless clients at a consider-
able fee. The Protestant Churches in Ger-
many, which had no resources with which to
pay such a fee, have found themselves 'taken
for a ride' as victims of gangsters are liable
to be, a ride which is likely to end, like that
historic one by the banks of an African river,
'with the smile on the face of the tiger'.
But however secular forces may design
to suppress or to emasculate ecclesiastical
authority, no authentic Christian voice can
ever express a parallel ambition. For within
whatever limits Christian opinion throughout
the centuries has formulated its ideas upon
political authority, it has never deviated
plainly or for long from the conviction that
that authority, equally with its own, is of
divine origin. And it is important in this
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
day of returning paganism to appreciate that
this judgement was pronounced in respect of
political government at first relatively indiffer-
ent but soon violently hostile to all who took
and stood by the Christian name. How far
this acceptance of State authority was due to
the exalted mood of disciples eagerly await-
ing the early return of their Master is, of course,
an interesting question, which I cannot stay
to examine. Moreover, the apostle by whom
this doctrine of respect for the political function
was most plainly formulated was a man
intensely proud of his citizenship in the
empire in which it was in that day supremely
embodied. Yet it seems incontestable that,
despite the adherence of many from the sub-
merged classes who had no reason from their
personal experience to love the powers that
were, the Church under the Roman Empire
never wavered, as a whole, from two convic-
tions. On the one hand political authority
existed in its own right, and was to be respected
while it confined itself to its own functions.
On the other hand it was to be resisted, if
need be to the death, when it demanded not
respect but worship, and exacted the sub-
ordination not only of the individual per-
12.0
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
sonality, but of the spiritual association. It
is of the very highest significance for the
issues of to-day that the early Christians
suffered under the laws against collegia which
sternly repressed the growth of autonomous
associations within the absolute state, and
that they were held to defy the majestas of
the empire when they refused to concede
worship to its deified embodiment. After
some seventeen centuries we have reached a
time when Christian martyrdom for precisely
analogous reasons once more presents itself
as a possibility. For, as we shall see later on,
the greatest of all revolutions, the Christian
Revolution, is, in a Europe no longer domin-
ated by even a nominal respect for Christian
principles, in danger of being undone.
My point at the moment, however, is that
there is no escape for the Christian Churchman
from the problems surrounding conflicts of
ecclesiastical and political loyalty by the simple
method of asserting that the State, being
merely a secular contrivance, cannot in any
circumstance command an authority compar-
able in validity to that of a divinely com-
missioned Church. I hope you will forgive
me if I quote briefly at this point from a
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

book which it is not unnatural for me to

regard as satisfactorily summing up the matter,
in that I wrote it myself:
The fundamental problem for the Christian-or
more precisely perhaps for the Churchman (of what-
ever denomination)-arises from the fact that, while
he acknowledges loyalty to a body which exists ex-
plicitly to concern itself with the supernatural end
of man, he finds not only that some further organ-
ization is necessary to promote the justice and secure
the happiness of society, but that the proper func-
tioning of that organization is highly important pre-
cisely from the supernatural standpoint. Not only
cannot he be indifferent to it, he is bound to be
earnestly concerned with its means and with its ends.
. . . Christian thought has, on the whole, appreci-
ated that the State exists just as certainly-if it might
hesitate to add ' just as much'-for the good life of
man as does the Church. It is in this sense that the
claim often made on behalf of the State-as distinct
from any specific office-bearer therein-that it is
divinely ordained, has found wide acceptance from
Churchmen of every age-Honour to the State while
it pursues its legitimate functions is in harmony with-
and indeed a logical consequence of-the Christian
aim, which involves in its dependence upon the
regulative principle of the Kingdom of God, the
consecration of all corporate life, and the' valuation'
of the individual therein and thereby. The point
has been admirably stated by Dr. Temple:
'Society is essentially a Fellowship of Persons
. . • and this is the arena wherein the moral and
spiritual destiny of mankind is wrought out. . . .
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 RELIGION AND POLITICS
If, then, we believe in any Divine suzerainty of the
Universe, we shall find here a sphere of divine
activity; and to whatever has over this society an
authority vindicated by society's own need of such
authority, we shall not hesitate to attribute a Divine
origin and a Divine right.' 1
Here we have, I think, the rational basis
for what has certainly been the Christian tradi-
tion in this matter. What is known as the
Gelasian theory dates back to the fifth century,
and according to this the two authorities,
ecclesiastical and political, are aspects of a
single unity, are in essence complementary,
are each divine in origin and supreme in their
own spheres. Neither can claim authority
over the other with respect to its specific
functions. For ten centuries the great politi-
cal problems of Europe centred round the
application of this theory, and, as you know,
an equilibrium was never reached. It was
indeed the failure to resolve the great political
dualism of Papacy and Empire which went
far to undermine that basic unity of the
Respublica Christiana which was an axiom to
both contestants. With the fifteenth century
that unity disappeared in society, as indeed
1 Christianity and the State, pp. 89-90, quoted from
Faith and Society, pp. 2.41-;.
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

unity disappeared from the Christian com-

munity itself. The secular power emerged
as an entirely distinct and separate function.
But if it operated in dangerous isolation from
religion, it did not, speaking generally, so
operate as to obliterate the autonomous life
of the ecclesiastical authority, and it did
subsume the validity-at least in theory-of
the Christian interpretation of the destiny of
man. As Dr. Carlyle has said:
In the modern world it may sometimes seem as
though the Temporal Power had established its
supremacy, but this is only an illusion; and indeed
with the recovery of the sense of the rights of the
individual personality during the last four hundred
years, the claim to supremacy has become impossible,
for the truth is that the principle of the independence
of the Church is only one form of the demand for
freedom of the individual personality.l
Despite the essentially secular character of
the Humanist ideal in its various forms since
the Renaissance, I think this judgement is true
of the trend of events down to our own day.
The State has not for any long period at a time
sought to sweep aside religion from its spiritual
throne in order to ascend thereto itself. But
we seem to be face to face at any rate with
1 Medieval Political Theory in the West, Vol. V, p. 455.
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RELIGION AND POLITICS

the possibility of a new situation. Politics
have for long been disastrously secularized.
But secularized politics, unsatisfactory as they
may be, while they are played out against
a background of Christian values, do leave
open certain opportunities through which the
impact of religion may be brought to bear.
A completely se<;ularized state claiming to
dictate its own social values is quite another
matter. And it is this eventuality of a ' brave
new world' which we have to face as the
most probable upshot of the social tendencies
now in the ascendant. This possibility is still
masked in England by the increasing anachron-
ism of an Established Church, closely and
indeed almost inextricably entangled with the
constitution, with the apparatus oflocal govern-
ment, and with the social traditions of the
countryside. It is such facts as these, at least
as much as any sentiment which can be defi-
nitely identified as religious, which lead to
our habitual references to ourselves as a
Christian country. But it is extremely doubt-
ful whether such a vestigial Christianity is
capable of standing the strain of a mass emotion
or a practical emergency which appeared to
make it advantageous, for one reason or
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

another, to throw the old faith overboard and

embrace a new one. A quarter of a century
ago, a religious realist, Dr. Neville Figgis,
urged Church people to 'give up playing at
being a majority' and face the facts of an
increasingly pagan situation. But the pagan-
ism of those days was still primarily a paganism
born of indifference, a paganism rather of fact
than of theory. What makes our situation
new is that men are not merely neglecting the
ancient altars; they are erecting fresh ones.
We are offered new gods for old. I Whether
or not man is, as Aristotle by a dubious trans-
lation is alleged to declare, a ' political animal "
he is certainly before this something more
fundamental- a worshipping animal. The
proletariat, the nation-state, the race are false
gods, but gods essentially they have become
in the contemporary world, which is weary of
the barren scepticism of the' enlightenment "
athirst for new enthusiasms, and hungry for
certitude. Nor are they the only gods accept-
able to the modern spirit. It is not perhaps
before any of these that Western democracy
I 'We are witnessing the dawn of a struggle not
between science and religion, but between the God-
religious and the social-religious' (Prof. Julian Huxley).
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 RELIGION AND POLITICS
will go down, but not inconceivably before
the god 'science', promising in return for
worship Efficiency, Hygiene, and great treasure
upon earth. New expert will be old politician
writ large.
The question then will not be how the
Christian can fulfil a civic duty in a community
defective in Christian values, but whether he
can find any role at all to play in one which
has plainly substituted values of another kind.
This is the problem which lies behind the
familiar 'hard cases' presented by advocates
of Divorce, of Birth Control, of Legalized
Abortion, of Sterilization, of indeterminate
sentences on those deemed (for whatever
reason) socially undesirable. I am not pre-
pared to assert that a purely negative resistance
to such proposals is adequate to the discharge
of Christian responsibility in the matter. We
ought to have something more constructive
to offer, in idea and even in practice, than is
characteristic of the dogmatic outlook in
regard to them, which is redolent too often
rather of panic than of principle. But it is
important to realize that such questions as
these are in a vital respect political; our
attitude to them must (or at any rate should)
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
turn upon what our theory of man's relation
to his Creator and to the community properly
is. For the Christian it is a fundamental
truth that man's political relation is not the
final truth about him. It is the relation of
the human personality, not to anything which
man has created, but to the Power which
has created him which is the essential basis
of Christian Politics. As a writer in that
admirable journal of the Dominican Com-
munity, Blackfriars,1 has well expressed it:
A man is more than a unit in a scheme, even
though the scheme be a human commonwealth.
There is something in him not subordinate to the
collective good, not related to its purpose only
through a place in the scheme of things. Created
to the image of God, destined to share in the inmost
life of the Blessed Trinity, man's noblest and most
characteristic interests set him above any arrange-
ment of creatures amongst themselves, economic,
political, or social. He is a person, sui juris, an
absolute in his way relative only to God. He is a
man before he is a citizen; he has rights before he
has uses; he is free to determine himself before he
can be treated as a producer.
When we speak of Christian civilization we
imply that such a standpoint is the prevailing
one, that it is accepted, consciously or uncon-
1 February 1934.
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 RELIGION AND POLITICS
sciously, by the preponderant sentiment of
society, and that it is not plainly contradicted
by the institutions in which men acquiesce.
The explicit repudiation of it would mean
the return of paganism, and the undoing of
that Christian Revolution, which alike in the
social as in the personal sphere, marks the
greatest turning-point in history. I will draw
once more 1 upon the journal from which I
have just quoted to expound what I think is
here involved:
Because the Christian Revolution was bloodless;
because its action was so unostentatious that even
contemporaries were scarcely aware of its existence;
because, finally, it was so thorough and far-reaching
in its effects that it has left us with no standard of
comparison with which we could adequately con-
trast post-Christian with pre-Christian society (for
subsequent social philosophies, even the most ex-
pressly anti-Christian, have been impregnated with
many of its ideals-;-Bolshevism itself is in many
respects a ' Christian heresy'), we are apt to forget
that such a revolution has ever taken place. Yet
the study of the social conditions of pagan antiquity,
as set forth in such works as Fustel de Coulange's
La Cite Antique, reveals the immensity of the trans-
formation which Christianity effected in civil society ;
a transformation so profoundly revolutionary that

1 Article by Victor White, G.P., on The Christian

Revolution, February 1934.
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
the ephemeral upheavals which we dignify nowadays
with the name of revolutions pale by comparison.
Weare not here concerned to detail the corruptions
and misery which, beneath the magnificent adminis-
trative efficiency of the Greek City-States and the
Roman Empire, infected pre-Christian society; we
are concerned only with the source of all those cor-
ruptions, the underlying naturalistic conception of
Society, with its corollary of the omnipotence of the
secular collectivity, which we rediscover, in a new
form, in Marxist theory and Soviet practice; the
conception which in effect repudiates the intrinsic
value of human personality and reduces it to a mere
functional utility in the political-economic machine.
The very idea of the Graeco-Roman State was
saturated with naturalism, that is to say with the
doctrine that visible and temporal realities are the
sole end of all human aspirations and efforts. Except
in a few esoteric philosophical and mystical circles,
which exercised little or no influence on public life,
it was impossible to conceive anything as superior
to the State. The State sufficed in all things and
for all things. It absorbed or tended to absorb
every human activity, and the individual had no
rights except to serve it. In theory the State was
an Absolute, in practice an all-devouring moloch. 1
Religion was yet more powerless than philo-
sophy to deliver men from the crushing power of
the State, for it was itself a State-concern. The
apotheoses of the Caesars were not so much an
empty sycophantic adulation as the formal recogni-

1 Prof. E. Magnin: L' Etat: conception paienne, con-

"ption chretienne (Paris, 1931)'
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RELIGION AND POLITICS

tion of a fait accompli; embodiments of the deified
State, the secular rulers were, when compared with
the remote divinities of Olympus, the real and ever-
present Gods of classical antiquity. ' The State was
everything; the individual nothing, for there was
no norm of human life and conduct independent of
the civil sphere.' 1

In view of these considerations it becomes

clear, surely, that the antagonism between
Marxist Communism and Christianity is no
accident, due to the social apostasy of the
Church, whether in Russia or elsewhere. The
communist attacks upon the social record of
organized religion have only too much truth
in them, and no merely ecclesiastical loyalty
should lead us to resent them, however we
may be justified in correcting their exaggera-
tions. Religion, which, truly understood, is
the oxygen of society, preserving its vitality
from fatalism and materialism, has certainly
been degraded all too often into 'the opium
of the people '. But a social philosophy which
exalts the collectivity over the personality,
while it may stimulate 'the people' in their
mass emotions and aspirations, asphyxiates the
individual. As the idea of God is eliminated
1 Philipp Funk: Der Einzelne, die Kirche und der Staat-
in Mittelalter, in Hochland, Nov. 1933, p. 8.
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
"
from the sphere of human purpose, the creature
made in His image vanishes with Him. It is
not merely that the good of the whole takes
precedence over the good of individuals; such
a conception may in certain circumstances be
justifiable, and in a crisis inevitable. What we
have to face and to resist is a theory which separ-
ates the interest of the whole from that of its
parts and establishes it as a transcendent value.
For, as M. Maritain has so acutely observed:
The common good is a different thing from the
mere aggregation of particular goods, and is not the
peculiar good of a whole which (like the species,
for example, compared with individuals) relates only
to itself and sacrifices the parts to itself; it is the
common good of the whole and its parts, a good which
integrates particular goods to the whole so far as
they are communicable. . .. And this whole, not
being a substantial whole, like a living organism,
but a community of persons and families, ought to
have regard for the fundamental rights which natural
law confers on human personality and domestic
society. Otherwise it corrupts its own good. Every
individual, considered in his formal aspect as a con-
stituent part of the State, is ordered to that common
good of the State. But he is ordered in the first place,
as a person destined for immortality, to God Himself,
and on that score the State is but a means to him.
The communist theory, rejecting God, pro-
ceeds to depose man from his state as a
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 RELIGION AND POLITICS
spiritual being and to merge him in the'
'human species', like an animal. It is this"
which gives to it its essentially atheist character,
and not any proposals for the more efficient
ordering of an industrialist economy. These,
however, logically applied, will be found to
infringe upon the rights of personality-rights
already u~dermined from an opposite but not
essentially dissimilar quarter by the operations
of plutocracy, basing itself on an 'economic
law' independent (as it has loved to boast) of
moral considerations. Communism, Professor
Berdyaev has said, is what a decadent plutocracy
rots away into; it is a sequel, not an antidote
to capitalism. But it is not the only possible
sequel. We are not, on this occasion, con-
cerned with economics, and it would not be
appropriate to discuss the economic basis of
the new nationalist experiments which are
roughly characterized as Fascist. The matter
is complex, for Fascism is at once an instinctive
struggle of the political function to resume
control over an economic monster which has
got out of hand, and the harnessing of national-
ist sentiment and state power to that monster's
purposes. What I have to insist on at this
point, however, is the sufficiently obvious fact
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

that the State can erect itself as a Deity in

more names than that of the proletariat; and
that a readiness to permit the survival of
religious doctrines and ecclesiastical organiza-
tions on strictly limited terms does not funda-
mentally modify the fact that the philosophy
and the practice of a Totalitarian State involve
an encroachment of the temporal upon the
sphere of the spiritual, and a threat to the
integrity of Christian civilization.
This word 'Totalitarian' is something of
a mouthful, and if we are going to use it, as
I am afraid we must, we ought to be sure of
. what we mean by it. We mean, I take it, a
• conception of the State which regards its
authority as the sole source of all others;
which deems all other human associations as
legitimately existing only on terms which it
alone lays down and can change; and which
endows it with a life and purpose of its own,
to which all individual lives and purposes are
essentially and necessarily subordinate. There
is nothing new about such a conception. As
we have seen, it was axiomatic in the pagan
world, and it is significant that the seventeenth-
century philosopher who was known to his
contemporaries as ' the atheist Hobbes' revives
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RELIGION AND POLITICS

it in his Leviathan, in which the State is des-
cribed as a 'mortal god '. The phrase is
suggestive, but it is not strictly accurate. For
on the one hand it is precisely the assumption
that the State is not mortal, but lives on though
its citizens die, which is held to constitute
the sanction for its claims to have a more
than human value and significance; and on
the other, when we examine into the matter
we see that the State itself is not the god, but
the means of organizing the god's worship
and the engine of what are presumed to be
his purposes. Behind the State is the Pro-
letariat, the Nordic Race, or the National
Idea; and though there are some for whom
the apparatus of the Totalitarian State and its
service may exercise a fascination absorbing
in itself, as there are nominally religious people
who appear to find satisfaction in a mere
ecclesiasticism, no human organization can
remain vital or formidable for long which is
not animated by a spiritual force. And force
we must remember is none the less spiritual
for being evil, or evil for being spiritual. It
is a superficial mis-reading of affairs which
ascribes the root trouble of our age to a mere
materialism. Materialism may produce a civili-
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

zation dominated by stockbrokers, publicity

agents, and 'beauty specialists '. But the
Communist, the Nazi, and even the secret
dictators of our Central Banks derive their
relentless driving-force from the realm of ideas.
I must, I think, have made it plain how
completely I regard the Totalitarian State as
the enemy at once of religion and of civiliza-
tion. But I want to make it equally clear
that I do not look upon it merely as a ' black'
that has arisen inexplicably out of the snow-
white of the modern world. Every heresy
has in it elements of truth, and is the nemesis
of their suppression. Totalitarianism is the
revenge of the twentieth century for certain
great spiritual and social failures of its pre-
decessors. I will suggest briefly three respects
in which I believe this to be true. In the
first place it represents an instinctive struggle
to reinstate a common purpose over the
divisive forces of sectional egotism and insati-
ableness, which, nevertheless, escape, as I shall
suggest, by the international back door. In
the second place, it arises as the nemesis of
a passive and demoralizing conception of
- I Toleration, which, in the name of liberation,
has led men to turn their backs on truth and
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 RELIGION AND POLITICS
the solidarity born of a common aim. And
finally it is a natural consequence of the failure
of religion to be effectively' totalitarian' upon
its own plane, with an intelligible message for
every sphere of human life, the nationalist
state seeking, by a sort of sub-lunar mysticism,
to fill the vacuum which this failure of post-
Reformation Christianity has created.
The Totalitarian State, then, is in the first
place an attempt to override the divisive ele-
ments of modern society by a dogmatic re-
assertion of a common purpose which is held
to transcend them. The synthesis of medieval
Christendom, within which the group had a
moral significance in its essentially functional
and relative character, has been replaced by
the kaleidoscope of the modern world, with
its waze of purely self-regarding associations
-of merchant adventurers, of limited com-
panies, of financial monopolies, and even, in
certain aspects, of professional bodies and
trade unions on the one hand; and the in-
creasingly autonomous departments of know-
ledge and speculation on the other, pushing
out their explorations farther and farther from
any recognized 'base-camp' of civilization,
caring only for their own specific discoveries,
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

and proclaiming a sovereign significance for

them. These groups in the modern world
differ from groups as they should function in
a Christian society. Either they operate as
the mobilization of separate egotisms to achieve
a corporate selfishness, or, where they are
nominally disinterested, they yet tend to exalt
their own preoccupations, since there is no
accepted end to which their interests can be
subordinated and no agreed doctrine of man
by which their claims can be tested. There
is no accepted end because no sub-lunar end
can successfully establish itself as such. There
is no doctrine of man because there is no
doctrine of God.
The affirmation of the right of the individual
to self-expression as a moral personality, which
emerges in the medieval synthesis at its climax
in Aquinas and Dante, is valid and compa-
tible with a true sociality precisely because it
is founded on the basis laid in earlier Christian
centuries, as expressed in the Godward orienta-
tion of human order, and a social framework
manifesting a common solidarity which 'tied
in a living tether' the lord, the peasant and
the priest. But the modern group is, speak-
ing generally, atomistic, a collection of units
13 8
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
allied only for the realization of self-regarding
ends, and this is the logical upshot of a con-
ception of liberty first emerging triumphant
in the eighteenth century, when egotism began
its enfranchisement in politics, to complete it .
yet more formidably a little later in economics.
But it is the paradox of egotism that it out-
grows the capacity of the individual ego to
achieve a concrete expression of its passions,
and notably of its acquisitiveness. Its very
insatiableness forces it to ally itself with other
egos, and 'seven devils worse than the first'
develop that type of corporate conspiracy
which aims at, and often achieves, monopoly.
Men thus motived shelter behind anonymity
to increase their power and conceal themselves
alike from the assumption of open responsi-
bility for the consequences of that power, and
from the hatred of those upon whom they
batten. The limited liability company, the
'holding' company, the financial trust, the
debenture-holding bank, represent stage after
stage of this process of public secrecy and
irresponsible authority. But the most effective
form of anonymous power achieves itself
through escape from the national pale. Inter-
national organization represents anonymity
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 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
par excellence, and it becomes through Finance,
through control of essential materials, and
through the mighty and ubiquitous Armament
interest, the secret government of the world,
creating, by the laws of its being and as a con-
dition of its survival, the desperate emergencies
through which at once it governs and gains.
It is necessary to appreciate the existence
of this tendency in order to understand the
influences which, in reaction against it, are
giving rise to the opposite evil of the Totali-
tarian State, which is, in one very important
aspect, the struggle of man to recover a col-
lective control over his destiny, conceived as
a nationalist or a proletarian rather than a
supernatural phenomenon. In particular it
represents an instinctive effort to re-establish
political authority over economic forces which
have escaped from it and are mocking it.
But politics founded upon purely secular
assumptions are showing themselves impotent
to assert the human interest over the deter-
minist momentum of a massive and relentless
technology. The dictatorships framed to
master the conditions which are giving rise
to those prolonged emergencies which are
held to necessitate them, become distorted
140
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RELIGION AND POLITICS

into instruments for policing society so as to
prevent it falling to pieces altogether. But
the conditions persist, the emergencies remain;
and the dictatorships establish themselves in
their own right, generating a mythology and
a semi-mystical emotionalism to conceal, even
from themselves, their essential failure. State
authority swells into Totalitarian tyranny,
accumulating for itself every scrap of power
and prestige within its national borders, as a
psychological compensation for its impotence
to control forces, the effective operations of
which it lacks the resolution or the knowledge
to unmask and to restrain.
Fascism, then, is in one aspect an attempt
to impose a will of the whole over the sectional
.. and self-regarding wills of the parts. Ulti-
mately it must fail, not only because the
parts cannot be corraled and confined to the
national pen, but because no true will can be
imposed-it can only be evoked; and the
function of the State, I would argue, is essenti-
ally the evocation and co-ordination of spon-
taneous loyalties-the loyalties of family, pro-
fessional association, trade union, cultural
group and many more. It is significant that
alongside of totalitarianism~ Fascism nourishes
141
....
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
a principle that is potentially at war with it
-that of the corporate state ; and when the
Fascist dictatorships have developed from
their feverish and ruthless origins, they may
find themselves checked and, as it were,
civilized by the communal consciousness of
the very corporations which they have called
into being. What is likely, alas! to delay such
a development is the state of recurrent emer-
gency which we call 'crisis' imposed on
Europe by the interaction of economic dead-
lock and nationalist blood feud. 'Any fool "
we are assured, 'can govern in a state of
siege'; it is in such a state that the European
nations now find themselves, and it is perhaps
disproportionately difficult for wise men to
gain the ear of the populace in such circum-
stances. Moreover, if emotion has openly
deposed reason as the driving force of politics,
it is in no small degree due to the very poor
use reason has made of its constitutional
opportunities. Which reflection leads to the
second reason I suggested for the growth of
the Totalitarian heresy-the reaction from a
I
passive and demoralizing conception of that
toleration which, more perhaps than any posi-
tive idea, was the genesis of democratic theory,
142
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
having its end-product in the parliamentarism,
from the corruption, ineptitude and chicanery
of which all Europe is now in revolt.
The truth is that Toleration has imposed _ _ _ _
its unimpeachable respectability upon us a
great deal too long. Its very birth certificate
is a forgery. It was not bred, as it has loved \
to claim, by Freedom out of Courtesy, but
by Deadlock out of Exhaustion. Its true
name should have been Stale-Mate. More-
over, conviction had very much less to do
with its nurture than did indifference. It
grew to power by draining the vitality of
everything with which it came into contact.
Men brought to it the allegiance which they
no longer dared to offer to anything else.
'We can be at peace now,' they said, 'for we
have surrendered to Toleration our warring
faiths. This is very enlightened of us-
besides, it saves so much trouble. We will
respect each other's opinions, noW that we
have begun to doubt our own.'
It is necessary at this turning-point of his-
tory, when lethargic fictions will not avail us
any longer, to realize that the whole idea of
Toleration, as men have so far conceived and
realized it, has been scarcely anything more f
143
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
i than the veiling of a great capitulation of the
human spirit. The Middle Ages, so often
represented as a period of its unbroken bond-
age, constituted, on the other hand, successive
stages of preparation for its full release. The
Cluniac revival, the twelfth-century 'renais-
sance' which culminated in Abelard, above
all the baptized Aristotelianism of Aquinas
and Dante, laid a firm foundation for a future
of human solidarity and individual awareness.
The Renaissance dramatically enlarged man's
cultural achievement, the Industrial Revolu-
tion stupendously expanded his technological
one. Yet how disastrously has all this great
accumulated opportunity been frittered away
II. by man's empty 'broad-mindedness', his
weak agnosticism about the ends of human
order, and his irresponsibility to Truth-those
very things, indeed, of which, in the name
of Toleration, he has made a virtue.
Why is it that the 'free institutions' by
which we have traditionally set so much store
are going down like ninepins all over Europe?
There can be no single answer to this ques-
tion. But in so far as there can be such an
answer it consists in the fact that democracy,
true to its parentage of tolerant indifferentism,
144
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
has made a virtue of incertitude. Its mental
atmosphere has been a scepticism of the
validity of any opinion, and even of man's
qualifications for forming one. Mr. H. G.
Wells, as typical a prophet of the vestigial
enlightenment of his century as could be
found, has persistently undermined the founda-
tions of his own reasoning by a 'scepticism
of the instrument' outlined so long ago as
his First and Last Things. He does not con-
sider our minds to be appropriate for the
formulation of philosophical conclusions, and
thinks that in the future 'scientific men will
discuss philosophy only in moments of weak-
ness'. Mr. Bertrand Russell is capable of
even deeper dubieties than this. The' revolt
from dogma' began as a claim that men should
learn to think for themselves; it is ending
as a warning to them not to.
Need we wonder that a 'totalitarian' con-
viction should find it child's play to upset
such an apple-cart as this? And here we
come to the third reason for the growth of 1
the Totalitarian State-the failure of religion --,'
to be effectively 'totalitarian' upon its own
plane. The attraction of Communism in par-
ticular for many minds consists 1n precisely
145 K
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

that feature of it which is so significantly true

-the relation of theory about every aspect
of experience and existence to a central,
governing conception, a philosophical totali-
tarianism. All that is wrong about this in
Marxism is the conception itself. The idea
of an over-arching life principle, unfamiliar
as it has become in our centrifugal modern
world, is one to which man's mind has yet
to return, as the hunger of his spirit urges
him to do. It is ultimately a condition of
human solidarity. The attitude of the Com-
munist and the Fascist to religion, for example,
is not to be regarded as a merely capricious
exhibition of a power-complex. It is a logical
I necessity for the totalitarian state that the
Church should be either extirpated or sub-
jugated. Religion, instead of demanding a
polite toleration as if it were a collection of
\r casual opinions which could make no par-
ticular difference, should see in this challenge
an implicit acceptance of its own potentiality
once again to inspire civilization with a
solidarity spontaneous rather than imposed.
It is because it imposes a specious solidarity
by the mere bludgeoning of force and propa-
ganda that the totalitarian state must be resisted.
146
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
For civilization cannot reach its goals by these
short cuts. To desire a result is not enough;
we have got to earn our right to it; and just
as the old hope of human order has been
dissipated by the degradation of freedom into
indifferentism, so the new possibility of soli-
darity and justice must be founded on the
contributory consciousness of free individuals.
And this means that we cannot be satisfied
with the mere extinction of Toleration, such
as Communist and Nazi preach and practise,
but must strive for its re-birth in a form
appropriate to the responsible men and women
which, under the old liberal influences, we
had almost ceased to be. There is no other
worthy, as there is no other effective, reply
to the false totalitarianism of our age than
this.
The Toleration that is dying was passive
and sceptical. The Toleration that must be
born will be the reverse of this-its mood will
be that of faith and confidence and its pur-
pose constructive. It will know itself not as
a final value, but rather as instrumental to
the elucidation of truth and the achievement
of social assurance. Above all, it. ,:ill not!\
be based upon respect for the oplruons of!
147
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

others, but merely upon their right to hold

I such opinions-a very significant distinction,
of which our traditional Toleration was seldom
. so much as aware. Further, it will not be
occupied with arranging terms for a truce to
controversy; its concern will be to determine
the spirit in which controversy may appear
as something at once obligatory and fruitful.
The lethargic magnanimity with which men
have agreed to differ about issues in regard
to which an enduring difference of views must
necessarily be inimical to social solidarity
should be recognized not as a sign of enlighten-
ment but as a counsel of despair. That' it
takes all sorts to make a world' is a salutary
reflection so long as it is a reminder to us of
the vast resources, spiritual, intellectual, physi-
cal, even temperamental, upon which humanity
has to draw. But the phrase is far more
commonly used to imply that the antipathies,
misunderstandings and divided aims which
separate men from one another and inhibit
the achievement of that sociality without which
humanity can never realize its spiritual destiny,
are something to which we can comfortably
reconcile ourselves as eternal. This is a sur-
render characteristic of the Toleration of yester-
14 8
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
day, for which its assassination to-day can
almost be regarded as a penalty as merited
as it was perhaps inevitable.
The Toleration of to-morrow will know
itself, then, not as an end, but as a means-
a means to the achievement of accepted goals
and purposes for which the hearts and minds
of men, refined by a single-minded controversy,
have won from, and in company with, each
other a free recognition. It is no valid objec-
tion to such an ideal to say that in practice it
can never be realized. Such a verdict, after
all, is purely a matter of speculation; the
point is that we should recognize that it is
to such an ideal that our efforts should approxi-
mate if democracy is to have any constructive
significance for the world. And this means
that we must set before us the hope of a
return of dogma, that dogma which is the
formulated assurance (whencesoever derived)
of pure hearts and hungry minds. For with-
out dogma there will be no end to that paralysis
of human order, that desperate scurrying to
and fro, without conviction and without hope,
of which our economic deadlock is but a
single aspect. Man has almost come to des-
pair of true assurance, he has not even thought
149
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
it quite respectable to hope for it. In such a
mood he is a prey to all false and strident
certitudes, such as our 'totalitarians' present
with such a parade of intellectualism and such
ruthless inhumanity. There is no other way
of resisting them, and of preserving in the
last citadels of Western culture the free
potentialities of mankind, than by restoring
faith in the reasonableness of faith, and pro-
claiming a new, constructive Toleration which
respects only Truth, and will be content with
nothing less.
It is quite literally vital to the authenticity
of religion and the integrity of the Church
that the pretensions of totalitarianism, whether
their sponsors approach us with threats of
persecution or, still more dangerously, bear-
ing gifts, should be unmasked and resisted.
But in resisting them we have at all costs to
beware of falling back upon the stale philo-
sophies of a secularist liberalism or the
hypocrisies by which the traditional mechanism
of allegedly 'representative government' in
plutocratic states is customarily defended.
The presumed congruity of Christianity and
formal democracy has been much too lightly
accepted by Christian people. We have got
15°
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
to remember that political 'enfranchisement'
developed at a most unpropitious moment of
history, when secular philosophies of progress
were triumphing over spiritual interpretations
of human purpose, and the depersonalization
of the individual was being accentuated by
the development of industrial slavery and the
spread of dehumanizing environmental con-
ditions. We have got to realize, further, that
the organization of 'majority rule' is apt to
present grave challenges to the Christian
demand for the respect of personality, and
becomes ever more menacing to truth and
freedom with the vast enlargement of the
technique of mass hypnotism through the
Press, the wireless and the scientific mobiliza-
tion of 'publicity'. Moreover, the applica-
tion of the democratic idea, even in theory,
has been sporadic, occasional and mechanical,
being excluded in principle from some of the
cardinal functions of society, e.g. Finance-
held to be 'above politics '-and from the
day-to-day experience of the office worker
and factory hand. The Church would be as
guilty of blindness and futility in identifying
itself with a system so radically defective, as
it often was in implicating itself with the
.151
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

privileged interests of the old oligarchies.

The manifest decay of 'democracy' as we
now know it must not be allowed to com-
promise religion all over again, as has the
decay of former tyrannical and incompetent
systems of government.
Religious bodies and individual members of
them are called upon at this moment to display
a degree of discrimination, reality and sincerity
far superior to any that they can expect to
find exhibited by the community at large.
This is, perhaps, the greatest service which
religion, secularly considered, can now per-
form for a society which has wandered so far
from the old spiritual inspirations and sanctions
for communal living. It is not the business
of Christians to choose the lesser of two evils,
but rather to proclaim both to be the evils
that they are. We have not to rush like
Gadarene swine into the deep sea at the bid-
ding of a set of purblind fanatics because
some one has proclaimed that the devil is
hovering about in the opposite direction. We

I
have got to realize that a primary reason why
the world cannot solve its problems is because
it does not know how to state them, and it
1 cannot state them because the only terms in
152·
 RELIGION AND POLITICS

which they can ultimately be stated are the

terms of reality, which involve an acknow-
ledgement of the primacy of the spiritual.
The familiar antitheses of contemporary affairs,
Democracy or Dictatorship, Communism or
Fascism, Individual Enterprise or Planned
Economy, are false antitheses, since, when these
phrases are not mere empty catchwords, they
commonly indicate only different means for
achieving essentially the same thing, and that
something which a courageous and realist
politics would prefer to avoid. It is not, for
example, merely cynicism which has described
the programmes of our three political parties as
inviting society as a whole to choose between
being hung, drawn or quartered I
This then is the first piece of counsel which,
in conclusion, I would offer-to determine
that, as Christians, our evaluation of every
situation should be in terms of the spiritual
nature of man, of his human needs, and of
the earthly resources available to meet them,
and not according to the conventional cate-
gories of a distracted and bankrupt worldliness.
The basis for a Christian outlook on politics,
in short, is not any impossible attempt to
hallow a set of relations wrong or mistaken
153
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

in themselves, nor the pursuit of any purely

ecclesiastical interest, but the contribution of
a discrimination of political realities at once
disinterested and informed. The second sug-
gestion I would make is akin to the first,
namely, that we should arrive at our political
judgements having principally in our minds
not efficiency or the victory of a theory on
the one hand, nor the cause of a party or even
anyone nation on the other, but rather the
personalities of actual men and women. This,
you may think, is a very platitudinous observa-
tion. But if a truism is but a truth taken for
granted, it is for that reason the more easily
disregarded; and the alarmingly rapid elimina-
tion of civil rights in other countries, and the
monstrous growth of bureaucratic controls in
our own, suggest that respect for personality
-a respect ultimately dependent on Christian
philosophy-is by no means to be taken for
granted in these days. Without trespassing
upon economics we can surely say, to take
but a single example, that there is something
gravely wrong with the political temper of a
people when it can accept as normal and
natural the continued inquisitions into the
lives and circumstances of the poor which we
154
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
hold to be a necessary condition of their being
maintained in existence (though scarcely in
health) at all. Apart altogether from any
economic injustice or defiance of reality which
may be involved in such a state of things,
acquiescence in it as something permanent
suggests our resignation to a definite lowering
of the civil status of families and individuals
nominally free which must signify a decline
in the level of civilization. While maintain-
ing against every threat the civil rights of our
countrymen, which are menaced by many
tendencies in recent legislation and administra-
tive practice, Christian people must strive to
find means whereby the citizen and his family
may enjoy their share in the communal inherit-
ance of their country by right and not by
favour. So long as men and women are
implicitly required to apologize to public
officials every week for remaining alive with-
out contriving to be employed for someone
else's purposes, their citizenship cannot be any-
thing but a sham even to themselves, and
their spiritual vitality is as much lowered by
their situation as is their physical by its intoler-
able hardships.
Finally, I would suggest that we should
155
 FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES
recognize the necessity of seeing that the
specific Christian outlook upon the issues of
contemporary politics, national and local, is
not stifled by the mass opinion in which
Christian individuals are apt to find themselves
engulfed. To hope that our merely individual
insight and faithfulness will contribute to pro-
duce a Christian leaven to leaven a whole
lump of political-or, for the matter of that,
industrial-organization does seem to me to
leave very much too much to chance. I think
it is time that those who definitely and sincerely
seek to found their attitude to the whole of
life upon their Christian allegiance should come
together to do so whenever they find them-
selves, in workshop or office, within employers'
and professional associations, in local politics,
in county councils, and even-audacious as
the suggestion may seem-in Parliament.
This tactic, which, borrowing the vocabulary
of the Communist, we may describe as the
method of the cell, involves something more
than what is often rather vaguely called' bring-
ing the Christian spirit to bear upon our
common problems', which phrase I take to
mean the pressing forward of the obligation
to charity, reconciliation and forgiveness in
15 6
 RELIGION AND POLITICS
all human relations. This will always be
necessary. But it is something more positive,
more deliberately constructive that I have in
mind, though on this occasion I can only
leave it to your imaginations to suggest how
a new force might enter into our workaday
lives by the habitual coming together of men
determined to find out what Christianity could
enable them to achieve in company, by ex-
ample, by experiment and by the assumption of
a spiritual initiative against practical difficulties
or theoretical problems in regard to which
the ' man of the world' is so often fatalistically
resigned to be baffled and dismayed.
 F

FAITH THAT ILLUMINATES

Edited, with an Introduction
by
V. A. DEMANT
 MADE AND PRINTED BY
BUTLER AND TANNER LTD.
FROME AND LONDON

FIRST PUBLISHED IN MARCH 1935