Can the Civilized Save Civilization?
FITCH, ROBERT E.
Can the Civilized Save Civilization? Principia Politica. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch ??????????????????????????????????????????????Professor of Christian...
...This is illustrated by the evolution of socialism and communism, which are "part of the deepest and purest stream of European civilization," and whose leaders "are committed by their social tradition to the application of reason and humanity to the affairs of state and society...
...319 pp...
...What they need then may be the fighting guts and the fighting faith that come from the "divine savagery" of a religious perspective...
...Perhaps the unique fascination of this book is that it exhibits an essentially eighteenth-century mind, with nineteenth-century manners, attempting to cope with twentieth-century problems...
...Nevertheless, he complains, even this superior equipment does not enable him to make sense out of the fifteenth chapter of Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians...
...He is able to survey the whole of the Old Testament--the Deuteronomic Code, the political histories, the concern of the prophets for justice within the nation and between nations--and tell us that he finds here only one specific instance of political or social thought...
...Woolf then goes on to point out affinities between a secular authoritarianism and a religious one, between Moscow and the Vatican and Calvin's Geneva, between the scholasticism and the casuistry of the theologians and the ideology and propaganda of the Communist oligarchs...
...That is the horror of it, all right...
...He does not even perceive that the rationalizing of the gods which he celebrates in the Greek dramatists coincided, in almost chronological precision, not with the rise of Athenian democracy but rather with its decline and fall...
...The source of our troubles is not sin but stupidity...
...After Mr...
...Woolf has proved that the Greeks were proficient in politics because they were deficient in piety, we are ready for his judgment on the Jews...
...5.00...
...Woolf is obviously troubled by "the betrayal of the standards of civilization by the civilized...
...that is why the Jews, who were not an unintelligent people, never developed even the most rudimentary conception of politics...
...The explanation, of course, is quite simple: The Jews really believed in God...
...Only some of us will wonder whether the horror may not be due in part to the fulfilment of the very logic of secularization which Mr...
...These values are freedom, tolerance, humanity, justice, love and intelligence...
...The phrasing is lucid and sometimes vivid...
...Pacific School of Religion In spite of the pretensions of the title, Principia Politica is an informal composition, written in the cultivated carelessness of manner which is the mark of the gentleman-scholar...
...He confesses: "I claim, in all modesty, to be intellectually well above the average, and my intellect was subjected to pretty severe training at Cambridge...
...They have been sadly corrupted by scheming priests and by conniving politicians...
...The deeper question, of course, is whether the civilized attitude is sufficient in itself to sustain the values of civilization...
...there is a leisurely progression in the thought...
...The "new social horror" of our world is that, in the course of a few years, such a movement "should have evolved a political system as frigidly inhuman, as insanely irrational as that of the Fascist or the Nazi...
...I took an honor's degree in the second part of the Classical Tripos in Greek philosophy and had to study, among other works, Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's De Anima...
...All of this argument--which takes up the first half of the book--prepares us to find the worst evils of our time allied with religion...
...Apparently, it never occurs to him that the thesis of the first half of his book contradicts the thesis of the second half...
...And the program of redemption simply calls for "the injection of a moderate amount of reason" into our communal psychology...
...The author is an eminently civilized person who finds time to comment on the sense of original sin in dogs and Christians, the Victorian family, the merits of hedonism, the Athenian drama and the Holy Eucharist while he expounds without hurry the authoritarian menace of the times...
...When men and women, instead of savoring their civilization, are called upon to suffer and to die for it--in the agony of Buchenwald, in the dreary hell of Korea, in the unrewarded heroism of East Germany--it is possible that they need something more than a discourse on that "rarest of all civilization's flowers its vital essence --tolerance...
...Woolf believes in the objectivity of values—the great values of civilization...
...It is enough, apparently, to enable him to detach Christ from the Biblical context (and, one presumes, from the belief in God) and to list him, along with Socrates, as one of the great civilizers of man...
...and though there is some logic in the structure, it is not accentuated to the point of pedantry...
...Woolf so greatly extols...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch ??????????????????????????????????????????????Professor of Christian Ethics, Harcourt, Brace...
...The New Testament troubles our author just as much...
...Yet, Mr...
...On the contrary, however, it appears that the great contemporary threat to civilization lies in those societies which (like the classical Greek...
...have most completely secularized and rationalized the gods, i.e., the Nazi and the Communist...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 16
