Le Maritain en fuite

Jacques Maritain

I should preface this blog post by saying that I still deeply admire the French conservative idealists and intellectuals – Maritain, Mounier, Dru, Borne, Weil, Berdyaev – whose thought underpinned the earliest formations of the ideology that would become ‘Christian democracy’. However, that ideology is fatally flawed in that it was subordinate from the beginning to a Kantian-Hegelian rationalism which continues to guide it into ideological cul-de-sacs. I have indeed written a blog post like this before, but I feel that it requires some expansion. I said before that ‘Christian democracy can’t save America’; that premiss was far too modest. It is, after all, all too apparent to the more stringent Christian democrats that American culture is constituted in such a way that such Christian idealism as its founders had will always be an alien element within it. I mean something much more deep-reaching. It should more rightly be said, that it is doubtful Christian democracy can be saved from itself.

I have already established and developed the thesis advanced by Allan Carlson in his excellent book Third Ways, that the Christian democracy movement had a ‘fall’ in something like the Biblical sense, when its French and German forms consented, in the early 1950s, to water down its primary message in order to make itself a mass-political movement of the bourgeois centre-right. The bourgeois element was inimical to the Christian idealism of Berdyaev at the very least – inspired as he was by Léon Bloy. The bourgeoisie were, after all, the ones who crucified Christ – and who continue to crucify Christ in their hearts. And in trying to turn from the path of Christ onto the path of mass-political appeals, bourgeois parliamentary power and capitulation to big-business interests fundamentally aligned to American capital, they contravened the word of God that ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.’

The fundamental movement in this turn in Christian democracy, was to turn Christianity from a heart-directed conviction (so valuable to the thought of Berdyaev and Weil and Maritain!), into a civilisational signifier. They bourgeois-ified Christianity, in essence, by removing from its centre the risen Lord who trampled down death by His death, and settling instead upon the intellectual-philosophical and moral legacies of Western Europe which were the products of long centuries of concentrated Christian devotion – or, more crudely, upon the architectural and monumental historical legacies of Christian kings, emperors and armies. The creative, kenotic impulse which underlay an idealistic moment in European politics was quietly, but firmly, snuffed out.

Christian democracy, during this time, was able to retain its sanity and respectability, in large part, due to a rapprochement with the reigning spirit of the liberal political age. It espoused, fairly easily and conveniently, œconomic and scientific rationality and acknowledged the primacy of parliamentary structures and democratic rule. Centre-right, socially-conservative Christian politics in America existed comfortably alongside the classical-liberal tradition of American constitutionalism in large part due to the overarching threat of Cold War anti-communism, despite the antinomies between conservative and classical-liberal cultural priorities which were so obvious to, say, Canadian philosopher George Grant. The same phenomenon – albeit in an attenuated form, given the residual political independence of Europe and given the longer intellectual legacy of communitarian-conservative thought there – held true on the European continent. European conservatism of the Christian democratic variety did exist comfortably alongside German ordoliberalism, also developed during the 1950s, which furnished forth the model for a ‘social market œconomy’ in the capitalist European West.

In short, the threat of a monstrously and openly godless East – in the form of the Soviets – kept the outwardly (but not inwardly) godly West sane in its appearances. With the disappearance of that threat, however, and the disappearance of the outward pressures which had kept the inner contradictions of the bourgeois centre-right consensus under wraps, the cracks began to appear with much greater prominence. The Western European bourgeois centre-right, intellectually and politically headquartered in West Germany, largely acquiesced in the betrayal, subversion, bombing, dismemberment and sale of the Yugoslav experiment in worker ownership and œconomic democracy: an experiment which kept much more of its inward meaning, its ‘Byzantine’ radicalism, despite being under a godless communist government. If the accommodation of and identification with American capital was the ‘original sin’ of Christian democracy, then the destruction of Yugoslavia was Christian democracy’s ‘sin of Cain’.

With God, with Christ, absent from its centre, the antinomies of Christian democracy have become ever more pronounced in the meanwhile. Some Christian democratic parties, like the Christlich Demokratische Union in Germany, have wedded themselves more and more firmly to the neoliberal consensus in œconomics and the neoconservative option in foreign policy. Others, more recently – like Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party, have embraced the backlash politics of our nationalist moment. One end of the spiritual trajectory of Christian democracy in Europe is the athymic, reptilian, austerity-embracing miserdom of Angela Merkel; the other end is the simian, jowl-shaking, mouth-breathing, gut-bucket bigotry of Mateusz Morawiecki. The devolution of Christian democracy into both the bourgeois politics Berdyaev despised, and the fascism that Weil did so much to resist, by way of the very same political rationalism which was meant to provide a bulwark against the latter in particular, is indeed the final ironic twist.

As a partial corrective to the above narrative – I am not insensible of the historical sins of social democracy, either, which are of much earlier provenance than those of Christian democracy. But the one advantage the centre-left politics of the elder European establishment enjoys over the centre-right is that it isn’t weighted down with the old Cold War suspicions that any and every material effort to ameliorate the privation and debt of the toiling masses is, at bottom, a creeping communist conspiracy. (Hint: historically, it’s been quite the opposite.) Still, a ‘harder’ left approach (like that of Samir Amin, for example) is more amenable to considering the thick communal attachments that the modern rationalised œconomy does so much to uproot, as well as the specific, systemic deprivations faced worldwide by rural people – what used to be a strength of the Catholic distributists.

But amid this Luciferian absconsion of Christian democratic politics, there is still to be seen a deep, spiritual yearning for a common life which approximates justice and equity. Moreover, the centrifugal pulls of the body politic away from the centre in the directions of nationalism and communism are, in fact, warped expressions of this yearning. But the direction for this politics is not to be found in the old political rationalism – the world of wonkery and interest-group balancing and focus-group sloganeering. The impetus for this kind of public life rests instead in those post-colonial areas of the world where Christianity is not merely a civilisational husk, regarded as dry grass to be threshed for its rationalised kernels: to Africa, to Asia broadly considered, to the Balkans and Eastern Europe and Russia. We can and should still look to the leading lights of the Christian democratic moment in Western Europe as one of the great intellectual wellsprings of this kind of politics; however, we should recognise that the politics that has coöpted their names is en fuite and very far indeed from home.