Heroism and Humanism

We did not await the interest aroused by the new Communist directives concerning socialist humanism to pose the problem of humanism. Since that time, this problem has become common talk and we may indeed be grateful for it, as questions of central importance are henceforth posed. One will no longer be able to say that the problem of man will begin to have a meaning only after the disappearance of the capitalist economy.

 

But one does perhaps not yet realize that to take a position on humanism obliges one to pose simultaneously many other problems.

 

By way of introduction to the considerations proposed in the present work, I would like here to draw attention to one of these problems. There is nothing that man desires so much as a heroic life; there is nothing less common to man than heroism: it is, it seems to me, the profound sentiment of such an antinomy which constitutes at once the tragedy and the spiritual quality of the work of M. André Malraux. I imagine that the question of humanism, of even socialist humanism, is not for M. Malraux a question without its difficulties.

 

May I add that neither to Aristotle did it appear an easy question. To propose to man only the human, he remarked, is to betray man and to wish his misfortune, because by the principle part of him, which is the spirit, man is called to better than a purely human life. On this principle (if not on the manner of applying it), Ramanuja and Epictetus, Nietzsche and St. John of the Cross are in agreement.

 

The remark of Aristotle’s that I just recalled—is it humanist, or is it antihumanist? The answer depends on the conception one has of man. One sees immediately then that the word “humanism” is an ambiguous term. It is clear that whoever uses it brings into play thereby an entire metaphysic, and that according as there is or is not in man something which breathes above time, and a personality whose most profound needs surpass the whole order of the universe, the idea that one forms of humanism will have very different resonances.

 

But because the great pagan wisdom cannot be cut off from the humanist tradition, we are warned in any case not to define humanism by the exclusion of all reference to the superhuman and by the denial of all transcendence. To leave the whole discussion open, let us say that humanism (and such a definition can itself be developed along very divergent lines) tends essentially to render man more truly human, and to manifest his original greatness by having him participate in all that which can enrich him in nature and in history (by “concentrating the world in man,” as Scheler said approximately, and by “dilating man to the world”); it at once demands that man develop the virtualities contained with hi, his creative forces and the life of reason, and work to make the forces of the physical world instruments of his freedom.

 

Thus understood, humanism is inseparable from civilization or culture, these two words being themselves taken as synonymous.

 

The preceding remarks seem to be hard to dispute. In fact, however, do not the humanist periods, in the diverse cycles of culture, present themselves in opposition to the heroic periods, and do they not seem as a decline of the latter into the human, or as a reconquest of the human over them, as a more or less general refusal of the superhuman? Is it, therefore, that humanism would be compatible with heroism, and with the creative, ascending, and truly organic moments of culture, only when it is engaged in a historical dynamism in which it remains unconscious of itself and hidden to itself, and in which even suffering closes its eyes on itself, and is borne in ignorance, man ignoring himself then in order to sacrifice himself to something greater than he? Can humanism disengage itself in its own right and be conscious of itself, and conscious at the same stroke of its own postulates, only in the moments of dissipation of energy, of disassociation and of descent, in which, to have recourse for once to that opposition of terms, “culture” becomes “civilization,” and in which suffering opens its eyes on itself—and is no longer endured? Can man know himself only by renouncing at the same time to sacrifice himself to something greater than himself? Human, all too human, proliferating in that “anarchy of atoms” of which Nietzsche spoke—is decadence in this sense a humanist phenomenon?

 

It may be that the answer is less simple than it appears to a certain facile aristocratism; it may be that certain forms of heroism permit one to resolve this apparent contradiction. Communist heroism claims to do so by revolutionary tension and the titanism of action, Buddhist heroism by pity and non-action. Another heroism claims to do so by love. The example of the humanist saints, for instance the admirable Thomas More, is from this point of view particularly significant. But does it show only that humanism and sanctity can coexist, or does it show also that there can be a humanism nourished at the heroic sources of sanctity? A humanism disengaged for itself and conscious of itself, which leads man to sacrifice and to a truly superhuman grandeur, because in that case human suffering opens its eyes and is borne in love—not in the renunciation of joy, but in a greater thirst, a thirst which is already joy’s exaltation. Can there be a heroic humanism?

 

For my part, I answer Yes. And I wonder if it is not on the answer to this question (and on the grounds one gives for it) that depend above all the different positions taken by various men in face of the historical work which is taking place before our eyes, and the diverse practical options to which they feel themselves obliged.

 

I am well aware that for some people an authentic humanism can by definition only be an anti-religious humanism. My idea is quite the contrary, as will be evident in the following chapters. For the moment I would simply make two statements of fact on this subject.

 

In the first place, it is true that since the dawn of the Renaissance the Western world has passed progressively from a regime of Christian sacral heroism to a humanistic regime. But Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself: I call “transcendent” all forms of thought, however diverse they may otherwise be, which find as principle of the world a spirit superior to man, which find in man a spirit whose destiny goes beyond time, and which find at the center of moral life a natural or supernatural piety. The sources of Western humanism are both classical and Christian; and it is not only in the bosom of medieval times, but also in one of the least questionable parts of the heritage we have from pagan antiquity, the part evoked by the names of Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, and Virgil, “the Father of the West,” that the qualities which I have just mentioned appear. On the other hand, by the very fact that it was a regime of unity of flesh and spirit, a regime of incarnate spirituality, medieval Christendom embodied in its sacral forms a virtual and implicit humanism. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this humanism was to “appear” and to manifest itself—with the radiance of a beauty that was unstable, if not premature, for soon the discord between the medieval style of culture and the style of classical humanism (to say nothing of the diverse disfigurations which Christianity itself was to suffer, chief among which were Puritanism and Jansenism) was to mask and to keep hidden for a time the fundamental agreement between Christianity and humanism seen in their essences.

 

In those medieval times a communion, in one and the same living faith, of the human person with other real and concrete persons and with the God whom they loved and with the whole creation, made man, amid numerous troubles, fruitful in heroism and in activities of knowing and in works of beauty; and in the purest hearts a great love, exalting nature in man above itself, extended even to things the sense of fraternal piety. Then a St. Francis understood that, before being exploited by our industry for our use, material nature demands in some way to be itself familiarized by our love: I mean that in loving things and the being in them, man should draw them to the human rather than make the human submit to their measure.

 

On the other hand, and this is my second point, if we consider Western humanism in those of its contemporary forms which appear to be most emancipated from every metaphysics of transcendence, it is easy to see that, if there still remains in them some common conception of human dignity, of liberty and of disinterested values, this is a heritage of ideas and sentiments once Christian but today little loved. I fully appreciate, of course, that “liberal-bourgeois” humanism is now no more than barren wheat and a starchy bread. Against this materialized spirituality, the active materialism of atheism and paganism has the game in its hands. But cut off from their natural roots and transplanted into a climate of violence, disaffected Christian energies—in fact and existentially, whatever the theories behind them—do in part move men’s hearts and rouse men to action. Is it not a sign of the confusion of ideas and reaching throughout the world today, to see these formerly Christian energies helping to exalt precisely the propaganda of cultural conceptions opposed head-on to Christianity? It is high time for Christians to bring things back to truth, reintegrating in the fullness of their original source those hopes for justice and those nostalgias for communion on which the world’s sorrow feeds and which are themselves misdirected, thus awaking a cultural and temporal force of Christian inspiration able to act on history and to be a support to men.

 

For this Christians must have a sound social philosophy and a sound philosophy of modern history. Thus they would work to substitute for the inhuman regime in agony before our eyes a new form of civilization, which would be characterized by an integral humanism and which would represent for them a new Christendom, no longer sacral but secular or lay, on the lines we have endeavored to make clear in the studies brought together in this volume.

 

We see this new humanism, which has no standards in common with “bourgeois” humanism and which is all the more human because it does not worship man but really and effectively respects human dignity and does justice to the integral demands of the person, as oriented toward a socio-temporal realization of the Gospel’s concern for human things (which ought not to exist merely in the spiritual order, but to be made incarnate) and toward the ideal of fraternal community. It is not to the dynamism or the imperialism of race or class or nation that this humanism asks men to sacrifice themselves; it is to a better life for their brothers and to the concrete good of the community of human persons; it is to the humble truth of brotherly love to be realized—at the cost of an always difficult effort and of a relative poverty—in the social order and the structures of common life. In this way such a humanism can make man grow in communion, and if so, cannot be less than a heroic humanism.