THE THOMIST
A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

EDITORS:

THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PRoviNCE oF ST. JosEPH

Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C.
VoL.

XII

JULY, 1949

No.3

BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE

J

AMES JOYCE is one of the very few modem artists to quote
St. Thomas Aquinas as an authority on esthetic philosophy.
Many times, in the esthetic theory presented in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man, the name Aquinas recurs. The
purpose of this essay is to appraise Joyce's pronouncements on
the beautiful, using Thomism as a toqchstone.
The existence of the beautiful, in terms of the fundamental
epistemological problem of realism and idealism, has disturbed
esthetic philosophers from Plato to Croce. Does beauty exist
in the mind, or does it exist in nature? Is beauty a logical
being, a concept; or is it a real being, an extra-mental phenomena? Or perhaps it is both a product of nature and a
product of mental activity. The last of these suggests the
traditional solution the Scholastics have accorded this problem
of the locus of beauty. They assert beauty is both a physical
and a psychical fact.
The French neo-Thomist, Maurice de Wulf, viewing esthetic

FRANK L. KUNKEL

experience in the light of this objective-subjective interpretation, says the beautiful does not ". . . belong exclusively to
things, as the Greeks thought, nor to the subject alone who
reacts. and enjoys, as some contemporary philosophers maintain.
But it is as it were midway between object and subject, and
consists in a correspondence between the two." 1 Leonard Callahan summarizes the whole Thomistic position as follows:
" Beauty is not a simple but a complex notion; not an absolute, but a relative conception. In its entirety it exists neither
as a physical nor as a psychical fact; it is neither wholly in the
object, nor wholly in the subject, but the result of an intimate
connection of both object and subject. In fine, beauty is a
quality of a work of art or of an object of nature, which by reason of its adaptation to the perceptive faculties of the subject,
can arouse a feeling of admiration in him who contemplates
it." 2 This dual aspect of the beautiful is clearly indicated in
the writings of St. Thomas, as will subsequently be shown.
While the unity of the esthetic experience must be insisted
upon, it will be advisable to consider its two aspects separately.
A choice presents itself at this point between two approaches
which cannot be simultaneously presented though they are
closely interwoven. Should an analysis of the ontological qualities of beauty be given at the outset, or should the psychological aspects be considered first? Since being is prior to being
known, the extra-mental and ontological elements of the beautiful will be considered first, and then the perceptive and emotive
characteristics will be analyzed. "Beauty is in the object
according to the perfection of its being, the proportion of its
parts; and in a metaphysical sense, all things which are, are
beautiful." 3 Hence, the three conditions assigned to it by St.
Thomas: "For beauty three things are requisite. In the first
place, integrity or perfection, for whatsoever things are imperfect, by that very fact are ugly; and due proportion or con1 Maurice De Wulf, Mediaeval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1922), p. 186.
• Leonard Callahan, A Theory of Esthetic According to the Principles of St.
Thomas Aquinas, Baltimore, 1927, p. 29.
• Mortimer Adler, Art and Prudence, New York, 1987, p. 88.

BEAUTY IN AQUINAS

AND JOYCE

fl63

sonance; and again effulgence: so bright colored objects are
said to be beautiful." 4
The condition of integrity requires that an object of beauty
have a positive fullness, completeness, and a richness of perfection. Integrity or perfection is to be understood not in a
moral sense but in its primary ontological meaning, so that an
object of beauty is perfect when it lacks no essential parts or
elements. "The importance of this factor in arousing a sense
of beauty is evidenced by everyday experience. An aspect of
nature which suggests incompleteness and imperfection, such as
a barren field, leaves us cold and indifferent. The same piece
of land at a different season of the year, covered with rich crops,
enlivened by the myriad tints of its vegetation, may provide a
lively esthetic stimulus, in that it arouses the mind by its suggestion of richness, vitality, and energy." 5
Attempts have been made to disprove this condition of
integrity, which the Thomists posit for beauty, by citing the
universal approbation accorded the beauty of the Venus de
Milo and several other famous fragmentary specimens of art.
This objection vanishes when it is understood that integritas is
relative to the aims of a work. The observation of Jacques
Maritain, on this point, will serve to repudiate the objection.
The speculation of the Ancients concerning the nature of the
beautiful must be taken in the most formal sense and their thought
should not be materialized in any too narrow specification. The idea
· of integrity or perfection or complete execution can be realized not
in one way only but in a thousand or in ten thousand different
ways. The lack of a head or an arm is a consider!tble defect in a
woman but of much less account in a statue--whatever disappointment M. Ravaisson may have felt at being unable to complete the
Venos of Melos. The slightest sketch of Leonardo's or even Rodin's
is nearer to perfection than the most finished Bouguereau. And if
it pleases a futurist to paint a lady with only one eye, or a quarter
of an eye, nobody denies him such a right: all one is entitled to require--and here is the whole problem-is that the quarter eye is
all the lady needs in the given case.6
•
• Summa Theol., I, q. 89, a. 8.
• Callahan, op. cit., p. 59.
6 Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, translated
by J. Scanlan, Sd edition
(New York, 1946), p. 22.

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FRANK L. KUNKEL

Proportion or harmony is the second extra-mental feature
arousing a sense of beauty; pulchrum in debita proportione
consistiV Proportion represents the completion of order.
Variety, unity, and harmony are all affiliated notions implied in
this idea of order and proportion.
Wherever we seek for beauty, and especially in sensible objects
whence the concept is primarily derived, we always :find this unity
'in variety, this peculiar proportion or harmony which makes for
esthetic order. In architecture we have the several parts of a
building, windows, doors, columns, ornaments, etc., blended into a
harmonious whole according to correct proportions. In literature
the same purpose is served by the combination of different ideas,
events, and circumstances, successively evolved; in music a combination of various sounds, changes in tempo, in rhythm. And so
through the· entire realm of art and beautiful nature-always
variety, but always proportion, symmetry, and adaptation uniting
disparate things and effecting a common center, a unity of action
or of plan. 8
As integrity was superficialized, and it was assumed that
perfection could only be realized through material fullness, so
proportion is often associated with superficial meanings: symmetry, assonance, and the like. But this is far from the truth
for asymmetry or dissonance is often required for the work of
art to have due proportion. And as it was with integrity, it is
with proportion and harmony:
They [proportion and harmony] differ with the object and the
end aimed at. Proportions good in a man are not good in a child.
Figures constructed according to the Greek or the Egyptian canon
are perfectly proportioned in their kind: but Roualt's yokels are
also as perfectly proportioned in their kind. Integrity and proportion have no absolute significance and must be understood solely in
relation to the end of the work, which is to make a form shine on
the matter. 9
This very brilliance of form/ 0 the essence of beauty, the claritas
• Summa Theol., I, q. 5, a. 4, ad lum.
• Callahan, op. cit., p. 61.
• Maritain, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
10 " The word form is a technical term, signifying that which constitutes
a given

BEAUTY IN AQUINAS

AND JOYCE

fl65

pulchri of Aquinas, is the most important esthetic quality. It
correlates the two conflicting viewpoints concerning the locus
of beauty; it unites the ontological domain to the psychological
domain. Claritas is a stepping stone linking beauty in the
object to beauty in the subject. In view of this, it is capable
of being defined in two ways: in terms of what it is in itself, or
again in terms of the effects it produces.
In order to grasp this splendor of form comprehensively, it is
necessary to look at the definitions arrived at by two neoScholastic commentators. The first emphasizes claritas as
it inheres in a work of art or an object of nature. " By the
brilliancy of the beautiful, therefore, we mean the shining forth
of the form of a thing, either of a work of art or of nature, or
whatever it may be, in such a manner that it is presented to the
mind with all the fullness and richness of its perfection and
order." 11 The second commentator starting his definition where
the first left off emphasizes claritas as it is introduced into the
realm of consciousness. " The claritas pulchri is a manner of
being which attracts the attention of the intelligence, solicits
contemplative activity, brings before its gaze the order, variety,
and unity of works of nature and art." 12 By these definitions
it may be seen how integritas and consonantia are relative to
and dependent upon claritas. The splendor of form stimulates
sensible intuition by lighting up the integrity, perfection, proportion, and harmony of a material being.
Since there are certain crucial differences between the interpretation presented by James Joyce in his novel, A Portrait of
the ATtist as a Young Man, and a genuinely Thomistic interpretation, the foregoing standards maybe used to measure certain Joycean artistic pronouncements. 13 Emmanuel Chapman
thing in a determined species or essence; it is the type, the abstract ideal. The
scholastic conception of form should not be confused with the prevalent acceptation of the word in contemporary language."
(Callahan, op. cit., p. 64.)
11 Callahan, op. cit., p. 64.
12 Maurice
De Wulf, "Les Theories Esthetiques Propres a S. Thomas," Revue
Neo-Scolastique, II, 341 (Oct. 1895).
13 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist
a Young Man (New York, 1928).
All the quotations in the text will be found between pages !'l39-51 of the Modern
Library edition.

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FRANK L. KUNKEL

is perhaps the sole neo-Thomistic philosopher ever to evaluate
Joyce's esthetic in print. In one part of an essay on the subject of beauty and art/ 4 Chapman succinctly appraises Joyce's
interpretation of St. Thomas' three requisites of the beautiful.
Unfortunately his criticism of Joyce is brief, but it is so accurate
and so penetrating that it goes right to the heart of Joyce's
peculiarly deep and at the same time partially erroneous insight.
In interpreting St. Thomas' three requisites of the beautiful,
Stephen Dedalus, who images so perfectly Joyce, his artificer,
glimpses certain truths which he obscures and combines in the
wrong way. It is not suprising that the existential meanings of the
requirements of the beautiful are missed altogether. Nor is there
any fundamental objection to Stephen extending the meaning of
integritas, which he translates as wholeness, to unity: "You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend
its wholeness. That is integritas."
The truth is glimpsed that consonantia flows from the form,
but Joyce does not see that it is the ontological good of a thing ....
Claritas, as might be expected is given the best interpretation by
Joyce: "It would lead you to believe that he (St. Thomas) had in
mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being
a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is
but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas was the
artistic discovery and the representation of the divine purpose
in anything or a force of generalization which would make the
esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk, I understand it so. When you
have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analyzed
it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing, you make
the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissable.
You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The
radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic· quidditas, the whatness of a thing." 15
So much from Chapman has been quoted, because he so
clearly indicates Joyce's mistake both in interpreting and applying the three requisites of the beautiful posited by Aquinas. In
the text of his esthetic, Joyce makes the three things needed
" Emmanuel Chapman, " The Perennial Theme of Beauty and Art," in Essays
in Thomism, edited by R. E. Brennan (New York, 1942), pp. 888-847.
16 Ibid., pp. 840-841.

BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE

267

for beauty correspond to the phases of esthetic apprehension.
Aquinas, on the other hand, primarily considered the qualities
of universal beauty as conditions for esthetic apprehension.
Joyce misunderstood Aquinas; he mistook the preparation for
the process, for the process itself. For Aquinas, integrity, consonance, and clarity were primarily existential qualities, stimu'"
lating the sense of the beholder. For Joyce, integrity, consonance, and clarity exist primarily in the mind of the beholder
as stages in the generation of the "concept" of beauty.
Joyce was thus confused with respect to the precise locus of
the beautiful. He perceived that integrity and consonance flow
from the form, but he failed to perceive that they constitute the
ontological good of a thing. This is not to say that the Thomists
do not recognize the fact that the objective requisites of the
beautiful are ultimately introduced into the realm of consciousness. Indeed, the function of claritas, the foremost ontological
quality of beauty, is to effect the adaptation of the object to
the subject. And it is further true that a beautiful being,
whether it be an object of nature or a work of art, presents
within itself the concrescence of all three qualities only formally
distinguished by reason. Thus, they are similar in the object
and only become dissimilar and separated out when they are
perceived. Despite its ultimate realization in the process of
artistic apprehension, the threefold root of the beautiful is still
basically the possession of the object.
It remains to
Joyce's characterization of the esthetic
emotion. Instead of initially citing Aquinas on the constitution
of the esthetic emotion, it will expedite the whole process of
criticism if several of Joyce's declarations on the subject are
brought forward first this time.
Joyce forges out the following distinguishing characteristics
of the esthetic emotion:
-Aquinas-said Stephen-says that is beautiful the apprehension
of which pleases.-

Lynch nodded.
-I remember that-he said-Pulchra sunt quae visa placent.-He uses the word visa-said Stephen-to cover esthetic appre-

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FRANK L. KUNKEL

hension of all kinds. . . . This word, though it is vague, is clear
enough to keep away good and evil, which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the
true? It produces also a stasis of the mind. . . . - ... Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the
most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the
imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of
the sensible. . . . Joyce made other equally pertinent comments that might have
been quoted here, but the foregoing were chosen, because they
cut into the most serious failure in the field of modem esthetics.
The failure referred to is the inability to explain rightly how
beautiful, differently from the true and the good, resolves
contrary emotions and so brings the mind into dynamic repose.
The first step in the achievement of this purpose is the careful analysis of that classic definition of the beautiful formulated
by Aquinas and quoted above by Joyce. Chapman notes that
Aquinas, proceeding inductively, derived his first definition of
beauty from its effects.
Broadly speaking, those things are called beautiful the vision or
apprehension of which placate. Charged with implications, this
saying strikes the two-inter-blending notes which will help to
explain how man's cognitive and appetitive movements are brought
into repose by the beautiful, differently than by the true and the
good. The beautiful it says, refers essentially to vision or apprehension, and it also pertains to the nature of the beautiful that its
very vision or apprehension placate appetition. Vision not only
signifies the act of the sense of sight, but by reason of its worth
and certainty is applied to the cognition of all the other senses, and
also further to intellectual cognition.16
In this commentary, Chapman suggests that the cognition of
the beautiful brings its own special kind of satisfaction. The
preceding quotation from Joyce would suggest the same thing.
Thus, Joyce with a creative understanding of beauty reads into
Aquinas the same implication as does a philosopher with a
theoretical understanding of beauty.
18

Ibid., p. S4S.

BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE

269

While Joyce perceives the need of distinguishing the beautiful from the good and the true, the distinctions he does make
are not perfectly valid. With regard to the beautiful and the
good, Joyce makes a distinction on the basis of motion. The
good is kinetic in character exciting desire; the beautiful is static
in character inducing ideal pity or ideal terror. The Thomist
would object to the static emphasis, and certain Platonic
overtones in this and another supplementary statement of
Joyce's that " the mind is arrested and raised above desire
and loathing."
Two capital texts from the Summa Theologwa compare and
contrast the kind of satisfaction brought by the good with the
kind of satisfaction brought by the beautiful.
The beautiful and the good are the same as regards the subject:
they have the same foundation, namely form, and the good is
therefore commended as beautiful. But they differ in concept.
For the good, strictly speaking, regards the appetite, that being
good which all things desire; and therefore it partakes of the nature
of an end, for the appetite is as it were a sort of movement to the
thing. The beautiful, however, concerns the force of knowledge,
for things are said to be beautiful when they give pleasure at sight.
Therefore, beauty consists in proper proportion, because the sense
derives pleasure from things properly proportioned, as being similar
to itself, for sense also is a kind of reason like every cognitive virtue:
and as knowledge comes about through assimilation, and similitude
is concerned with form, the beautiful strictly pertains to the. concept of a formal cause.17
The beautiful is the same thing as the good, differing only conceptually. That being good which all things desire, it is of the
nature of good that the appetite is allayed by it: but it is of the
nature of the beautiful that the appetite is allayed by the sight or
knowledge of it ... and so it is clear that the beautiful adds over
and above the good a certain order to the force of knowledge. So
let that be termed good which simply gratifies the appetite: but let
·that be termed beautiful the mere apprehension of which gives
pleasure. 18

These two texts from the Summa are most important, teaching that beauty is with respect to some things like the good
u Summa Theol., I, q. 5, a. 4, ad lum.
18 Summa Theol., I-II, q. 27, a. 1, ad Sum.

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FRANK L. KUNKEL

and with :respect to others unlike the good. The beautiful is
like the good in two ways. With :respect to their effect on the
subject, they both quiet appetition and gratify desire in the
mind. Concerning their mode of being, outside the mind, the
beautiful is the same thing as the good. They share the same
metaphysical foundation; they both flow from the form of a
thing.
While the beautiful and the good both appease movement,
they achieve this effect by different means. The good placates
the appetite, satisfies the subject, only by being acquired or
possessed. The beautiful placates and satisfies the cognitive
and appetitive powers simply by being seen, apprehended, or
contemplated.
In relation to the good, one is a direct participator, a consumer. In relation to the beautiful, one is a
knower, a contemplator.
Concerning their existence in the
mind, the good is conceptually distinct from the beautifuL The
primary function of the good is to satisfy appetition; the primary function of the beautiful is to illuminate cognition. But
the beautiful gladdens the cognizer in order to quiet appetition.
So as Aquinas pointed out, the concept of the good pertains to
a purpose or end as regards the appetite, and the concept of
the beautiful pertains to a standard or a means as regards the
appetite.
It is clear then that while the good directly confronts the
appetite, the beautiful directly confronts the faculty of knowledge. But the relationship of beauty to knowledge is more
properly in the field of the beautiful and the true. So the
investigation moves from the good to the true.
Joyce distinguishes the beautiful from the true largely on the
basis of the appraising faculty. ". . . Truth is beheld by the
intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of
the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is
appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible .... "
The differences Joyce discerns here between esthetic apprehension and philosophical or scientific apprehension are further
afield from the Thomistic position than was his reference to
the good.

BEAUTY IN AQUINAS AND JOYCE

Joyce holds truth to be the object of the intellect and beauty
to be the object of the imagination. It is plain that he attributes to the imagination the terminus of the esthetic fact.
This doctrine is openly in conflict with that of the Thomists,
who are careful to stress the predominance of the intellectual
element in the perception of the beautiful. " This act of the
intelligence is the essential and formal element in esthetic perception." 19 This is not to deny that the imagination plays a
role in the perception of the beautiful, but it plays a minor
role. The perception of the beautiful is ultimately accomplished by the mind, using the senses and the imagination as
instruments. To use Maritain's words: artistic contemplation
is " before all intellectual." 20
Artistic contemplation, therefore, in common with philosophical and scientific contemplation is before all intellectual. Common to both modes of knowing is the apprehension of the universal or the intelligible. Both are adequations .of intellect and
thing but with this difference: scientific and philosophical
truth is abstracted; artistic beauty is intuited. In philosophic
knowing, forms of whole things are abstracted and considered
apart from the material things in which they are realized. In
esthetic knowing, the brilliance of form which ravishes the
beautiful object is apprehended in the sensible and presented
by the sensible, and not separately from it. 21 The radiance of
form glittering in a beautiful thing is presented to the mind by
means of the intuition begun in the senses.
Beauty also affords more satisfaction than does the true.
Truth, since it is simply intellectual, satisfies the power of reason but leaves the appetitive powers unappeased. Beauty,
since it is both intellectual and intuitive, satisfies man in his
cognitive and appetitive powers. Truth is a good of cognition;
beauty is a good of cognition and appetition. Beauty appends
the qualities of joy and love to what is seen and apprehended.
FRANK

L. KUNKEL

8309 Talbot St.,
Kew Gardena, N. Y.
Callahan, op. cit., p .. 40.
•• Maritain, op. cit., p. U5.

18

•• Maritain, op. cit., p. 1!5.

THE MEANING O:F THE

C

66

COMMON MAN"

1. THE " SovEREIGNTY OF THE CoMMON MAN "

OMMUNISTS, philo-communists, Socialists and radicals
or progressives of various shades criticize the " LiberalDemocratic " system of Western society on the ground
of its being insufficiently democratic. To put it bluntly as they
might, our democracy, too inhibited by its historic nexus
rooted in the traditions
with liberal constitutionalism-itself
of Christian civilization-has not advanced far enough in its
own direction. The inference from this is, of course, that
Marxist-Leninist communism must be either accepted outright,
closely imitated (subject to certain concessions and mitigations), or emulated in a fashion dispensing altogether with its
tyrannical and, therefore, " un-democratic " modes of procedure. The same " ideal " should be pursued, but if possible
in such a manner that it would not hurt a great many people;
the " dictatorship of the proletariat " should not " degenerate "
into a "dictatorship over the proletariat." Better still, the
dictatorship might be replaced by an immediate establishment of" substantial" or" social" democracy,-the liberal one
being merely formal, juridical or political,-which would act
from the outset in a mood of joyous spontaneity, and the stern
and narrow grandeur of the proletariat might as well be
broadened into the mo:re humane and tolerant concept of " the
common people." This is the concept we propose to examine
in the pages that follow.
The Common Man, indeed, may be regarded as the" common
denominator" between Communism and Liberal Democracy,
and so far, envisaged on the plane of realities, as one of the
chief ideological forces paralysing our resistance to Communist
Imperialismo Many of us are incapable of being integrally
anti-communist,-incapable,
not in the formal sense only of
granting everybody a " right to his own opinion "
the name
" tolerance " and abhorring the persecution of ever so pe:rni-

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

273

cious enemies of liberty in the name of Liberty, but in the
sense of a positive and specific sympathy with the Enemy, notwithstanding all reprobation or apprehension: for in spite of
everything that can be said against them, the Communists are
" after all " working on behalf and in the interest of the
" Common Man," nay, to no other purpose than that of
ensuring a social order in which the Common Man is supreme,
wherefore a certain essential solidarity cannot very well be
refused to them. Democracy, in our sense, as an actual regime,
a subsistent social reality, would naturally tend to withstand
the aggression and to counter the menace of Communism its
lethal Foe-which being an embodiment of subversive Totalitarianism at its height, cannot tolerate any power besides its
own, nor indeed any human reality or aspect of human nature
outside the grip of its power. Yet Democracy as a " dialectical "
p1·ocess, Democracy as informed and inspired by its inherent
law of" evolution," no less naturally tends towards welcoming
Communism as a "fulfilment " of its own transcendent aim
and a " consummation " of its own meaning, or at any rate
towards recognizing Communism as a rival brother labouring
under imperfections of his own but yet representing the selfsame triumphant march of Man in quest of his self-conceived
heaven on earth.
From the point of view of Democracy's defence against the
Totalitarian conqueror, then, the fetish of the" Common Man"
appears as a " paralysing idea " of the first magnitude, and its
philosophical destruction-apart from the purely intellectual
interest which few will deny to such an enquiry-a practical
task of great urgency. Moreover, even taking abstraction
from the formidable threat proffered by the actual and present
power of Soviet Communism, it is most important for those
attached to the high values bred out and reflected by liberaldemocratic civilization in its given reality to take note clearly
and fearlessly of the immanent dangers, the self-stultifying
tendencies, the spiritually suicidal bent of that civilization;
of the dismal ambiguity implied in the overworked slogan

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AUREL KOLNAI

"Democracy." What we have in mind is not, of course, a
proposal to substitute for (Western) "Democracy," along with
its ideological biases, a fancy system of Conservative Constitutionalism, nor a " return " to this or that specified stage of
the past, but a suggestion to displace the spiritual stress from
the " common man " aspect of Democracy to its aspect of constitutionalism and of moral continuity with the high tradition
of Antiquity, Christendom and the half-surviving Liberal cultures of yesterday. In other words, instead of emphasizing the
" ideal " of " Democracy," which is a bait held out by the
Enemy as well as a current emblem of our own world and of
that which makes it· go round, we should shift the emphasis
within " Democracy " from the fabric of ideas and tendencies
symbolized by the " Common Man " onto whatever the " Rule
of Law" stands for-a Balanced Society, that is, and the
finiteness of all human power even on the level of human relations; the plurality and the limitation of all social powers and
political prerogatives; the ordering of society in deference and
in reference to a Power radically beyond and above Man in
his social reality, in his political dignity and in aU manifestations of his " will."
We will inquire into the concept of the " Common Man "
with a special regard to the problem and paradoxy involved
in the postulate of his sovereignty. For it is only in this
context that the creed centered on the " Common Man "
emerges; nay, that this particular concept as distinct, notably,
from that of the " plain man," arises at alL The problem is a
difficult one, not only for the votaries of the creed but for
its critic, too. If our adversaries are, essentially, at odds with
the insoluble task of conjuring supreme strength out of supreme
weakness as such, of identifying Naught with All and investing
an artificially dehumanized man with the plenitude of Divine
Reason and Power, of establishing a world of Omnipotent
Slaves, we on the other hand-seeing the historic vigour of
that movement and the intellectual depths implicit in its system
of doctrines-cannot content ourselves with shallow polemical

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

275

interpretations denouncing the gross deceitfulness of the ruling
or nascent Tyrants and the crude sophistry of their scribes and
dupes. To use the weapons of exposure, satire and invective
against the workers of diabolical Evil is indeed a method
legitimate and necessary, but in itself plainly inadequate. Its
very effectiveness presupposes a vision that measures up to
the full stature of the Enemy, and a philosophical penetration
of his secret.
We must, to be sure, fully allow 'for the fact that under
the Communist dispensation men-not political suspects and
pariahs, but men, that is to say," citizens "-are enslaved more
totally than would ever have seemed imaginable in previous
history, and that the operation of modern "mass democracy"
itself seems to imply an ominous drift towards generalized
unfreedom under a specious disguise of "having a right to do
and to get what one likes." Yet we must cast out of our
minds, as a first step, all suspicion that what we are faced
with is "nothing but" the self-seeking, ambitious enterprise
of a more or less identifiable pack of crafty cheats to enslave
and exploit the " immense majority " of mankind, making use
to this end of the cunning pretext of " liberating " the
" Common Man " from his former masters and-what in fact
is implied in their concept of liberty-...:..ofmaking him more
sovereign over the earth than any of the ousted " Sovereigns "
have ever been. The agents of Subversive Totalitarianism
pursue a dream which, however hideous a nightmare it truly
is, they actually believe in. In a sense, they advocate and
practise what they do " in good faith." So must we, too, " in ·
good faith " and in a sort of philosophical " open-mindedness "
ask ourselves-or, rather," let the phenomenon speak "-about
what is meant by the Common Man; about how he can be
" common " as distinct from " man ,; not wholly and always
" common," and yet called to a glory of sovereignty inaccesible
to mere man. In other words, about a lapse into abject servitude experienced as an ascension to the fulness of freedom, and
the particular nature of a self-enslavement that bears, at the

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AUREL KOLNAI

same time, the traits of an assumption of godlike self-rule and
absolute rulership.
In the present study, however, we, in the main, confine
ourselves to the first heading of the problem as marked out
above-the concept of the Common Man-, examining his pretension to sovereignty and the reality underlying or corresponding to it as an essential implication of our primary theme
only.
2.

"THE CoMMON MAN,"

A PRIVATIVE

CoNCEPT.

What is a common man? To all intents and purposes, the
common man is one who lacks any particular distinction, and
resembles more or less closely the great mass of his fellowmen. We say "any particular distinction," for obviously
every person as such is somehow radically distinct from others.
Democrats often affirm, anyhow, everybody's "right" to
"develop his personality." But what are the particular distinctions which prevent a man from being a common one?
Chiefly, they are the distinctions of rank and wealth; or to put
it differently, a higher social position. Whether extraordinary
talents and accomplishments on the ·one hand, eccentric traits
and criminal propensities on the other also interfere with true
commonness is not so clear. Education, eminently good inasmuch as it raises common men to a higher level, is eminently
bad in so far as it is meant to reflect, to express and to accentuate social distinction-membership
of a "leisure class," an
" exclusive circle," a " privileged group." But neither is social
superiority itself all of one kind. Power in the purely functional sense-being, for example, a dictator, a president, a
minister, a general, an admiral-may not be a possible attribute
of the common man, but it does not seem either to imply a
strict antithesis. The same thing is true of a" self-made man's "
wealth, or more generally, of a high income level owed to the
recognition on the part of society of one's personal merits.
Anything " out of the common," then, that appears to be
unequivocally ordained to the ends and concerns of Common
Humanity as such, may claim legitimacy, or at least absolution.

THE MEANING OE' THE " COMMON MAN »

277

Yet such a relationship is not presupposed ab ovo. On the
contrary, the prima facie assumption is that all social superiority as such relates antagonistically to the Common Man,
and needs special justification. Accordingly, the primary concept of the Common Man reposes on the exclusion of all such
distinctions. Secondarily, in view of their instrumental necessity, they may be readmitted on the condition of being kept
within the limits of the accidental, and strictly debarred from
any intrinsic pretension of superiority. By this we mean a
pretension of superiority not conceived in terms of immediate
usefulness for the needs of common humanity as such. For the
moment, it may suffice to observe that hereditary prerogatives
of every kind, though far from defining exhaustively what is
par excellence antithetic to the concept of the Common Man,
are particularly symbolic of that antithesis. To be common
men, we must be " born equal " not only in the sense of
abstract " rights " but in the sense of material " conditions "
or "chances" also.
Thus the primary concept of the Common Man is essentially
a privative one: the Common Man is Man stripped of all
specific excellence, distinction, superiority; of aU inherent pretension to be another's "better/' It will be objected that this
is little more than an arbitrary trick of verbalism destined to
couch, from the outset, in « philosophical , terms what is simply
an emotional prejudice against Equality, a rhetorical feat by
one holding a brief for Privilege. One might just as well
prove the value of Health by choosing to define it in negative
terms, as an" absence of illness": for, undoubtedly, conditions
like smallpox, malarial fever, consumption, gout, or jaundice
are more conspicuous and more " positively " perceptible than
is plain good health. Yet this is shallow reasoning. For
disease-like crime-, however conspicuous, is primarily an
imperfection; whereas "privileges" are primarily perfections,
in the opinion of their arch-enemies as well as in ours. The
upholders of the Common Man despise neither power,
dance, security, pleasure, knowledge, nor even dignity,
ture," or public-mindedness. What irks them is the limited
2

278

AUREL KOLNAI

presence, the non-universality, the unequal and "unjust" distribution, and along with that, the quantitative and even
qualitative " inadequacy " of these possessions and values.
Their very use of " privilege " as a term of opprobrium bears
eloquent witness to our contention. Unlike, for instance, the
seventeenth-centu:ry Puritans who denounced the real and
imaginary "vices" of the Cavaliers, the barkers against Privilege do not attack a thing they deem intrinsically evil but
blame a surplus of good as such, which they believe to be
harmful to the global interests of mankind and obstructive
to the broadening and heightening of these very goods. Consequently, they attack apositive, actual perfection, though with
the consciousness of doing so in the name of an abstract and
future greater perfection. Their motive, apparently, is by no
means . one of mere negativism; but that was not what we
suggested. What we mean is merely that the subject on whose
behalf they pretend to act is defined in· terms of Privation.
The " Common Man " is primarily Man in his " nakedness,"
Man deficient of distinctions and posessions, Man " depressed "
and " disinherited."
Again, it might be objected, this is merely to blur, by using
an unnecessary philosophical term, an obvious characteristic
of legal or vindicative justice. Suppose I wish to recover my
stolen property, and sue in court the person who has purloined
deprived" while he is "in
it. The fact that I am at
possession " does not alter the justice of my cause, nor render
me a mere " envious " fighter against " a perfection I lack."
Yet the analogy is doubly misleading. In the first place,
it implies an immoral origin of social inequality as such: which
in our opinion is manifest nonsense, but at any rate can only
be maintained at the cost of a specific extension of the concept of justice, and even then only by dint of laborious constructions. Secondly-and in the present context this is the
more important point-the worship of the Common Man implies, not merely as regards its objective presuppositions, mistaken or not, but even in the intentional sense, another element

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

besides the mere claim to "righting a wrong." Were it not
so, the ideologists of Equality would have contented themselves with speaking in the name of those " oppressed," " disinherited," " exploited "-instead of setting themselves up, not
only as advocates of " the People," but as mouthpieces of
the " Common Man." The " substantialization " as it were,
the creation of a specific "formality," the introduction of a
preferable " type " of man that are implied herein reveal a
state of consciousness unmistakably different to that of one
who is bent on redressing a wrong, real or imaginary. The
" Common Man " does not meah simply a victim of spoliation,
nor" Privilege" simply an act of illicit appropriation (or even
a set of such acts). The Common Man is by no means merely
a" plaintiff." He is at the same time a hero, if not a new god.
He not only abounds in " rights," he also has " powers " surpassing those of any kind of" aristocracy." It is our duty not
only to protect or succour the Common Man but also to
"believe in" him. In a more pregnant sense even than the
doctrine of the People's Will and the mystical vocation of the
Proletariat-the former being more vague and equivocal, the
latter more dialectical and chiliastic-the concept of the
Common Man expresses the idea of a specific and all-important
" betterness " based on an all-round absence of perfection,
comprising but transcending " poverty " in the stricter economic use of the term.
Being more " realistic," in a way, than either the abstract
juridical formalism connoted by " Democracy " or the onesided exclusive revolutionism of the Marxian vision of the
Zukunftsstaat, the "kingdom of the Common Man" conveys
a more vivid sense of the curious aspect of unreality inherent
in the modem movement of Subversion taken as a whole. It
evokes in a more direct and acute fashion the paradoxical
problem we have chosen to discuss in these pages. Political
democracy, however strictly equalitarian, has no direct bearing
upon the socio-economic, cultural and traditional gradation
within " the people," its " pre-political," " entitative " structure
as it were. The people may well " vote into power " now one,

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AUREL KOLNAI

now another of a few established "elite groups!' Nor does
proletarian ascendancy imply all the indetermination of the
Common Man's rule. The high industrial proletariat is distinct with a specific faculty of organized dynamism and militancy, which makes it something similar to an oligarchic
"elite"; the staff of agitators and conspirators emerging from
the " class struggle " provides a primary " cadre " of leadership
for the established proletarian State itself. The " Common
Man " conception, on the other hand-forwarding the postulate of an " identity between the rulers and the ruled " in more
concrete and immediate terms-, seems to offer no such outlet.
This impression will be strengthened if we consider the fact
that the Common Man conception makes no appeal to such
determinative principles, either, as are nationalist or :racialist
particularism, ancestor-worship and other" reactionary" bases
for a restrictive " We-consciousness." On the contrary, it is
universalistic, " Progressive," humanitarian, and utterly in
favour of "productiveness" and "proficiency," of dispersion
and dissemination, of expansion and circulation. A Subject
defined in privative terms, then, is invested with a title to the
"greatest possible" wealth, wisdom, validity, and perfection.
How comes such to be?-and what are the prospective consequences in the field of reality?
We are reminded of David de Dinant's identification between Prime Matter and God, of Nicholas Cusanus' doctrine
of God as infinite Minimum and infinite Maximum at the
same time (and of God. the pure Act being likewise absolute
Potency), of Pantheist Individualism as present in Spinoza and
in most kinds of monadological speculations, of Rousseau's
.. General Will " implying ultimately an identification between
the citizens' private spheres of interest with the common good of
the body politic, of the march of the Hegelian " Idea " from
Indetermination to Totality, and of all Evolutionism bent on
drawing Everything out of Nothing. If the Common Man is
Man decapitated, he is also the Superman. The objection to
any kind of head is precisely that the features of the face it
bears cannot help being too particular, and hence finite-not

THE MEANING

OF THE " COMMON MAN "

281

:representative of humanity pure and simple, sheer humanity,
the all-comprehensive universality of Man in the sense of
universalia in praedicando equated to universalia in causando.
In other words, the reason why all particular determination
must be broken up is that it implies Man's creaturely limitation. It is neither the powerful prince, the exceptional genius,
nor the millionaire-it is Naught alone that can ape the universality and omnipotence of God with an illusion of perfection,
with a deceptive semblance of symmetry as it were. Only
superficial critics can believe that the quasi religious impetus
of Total Equalitarianism draws on no deeper forces than envy
and jealousy, competitive self-assertiveness, the need to overcompensate for one's inferiorities, and the craving for material
comforts. It is Sieyes's concise formula, precluding to the
French revolution, that furnishes us with the key to the
Common Man's concept: "What is the Third Estate? Nothing;
-What ought it to be? Everything."
3.

THE DIALECTICS OF EQUALITY.

In a sense, then, the " Common Man " denotes a renewal
of :revolutionary equalitarianism in its original meaning and
mood, as distinct from mere " formal " or " bourgeois " Democracy-a mere" equality of rights "-on the one hand, from
the proletarian class-struggle scheme and the rigid collectivist
dogma of the Marxist conception on the other. Significantly
enough, from this latter camp the ideologists of the Common
Man are considerably less anxious to mark themselves off; they
usually do it in a much less emphatic and more apologetic
fashion. The accents are by no means evenly divided. Bourgeois democracy continues to :represent-in a mitigated form,
to be sure, as even the Communists are sometimes willing to
admit-the principle of Evil: inequality, hierarchy, privilege,
reserved advantages, exclusiveness of a sorL This is what
such vituperative labels as " monopolistic capitalism " or " economic royalism " are meant to express. Communism, on the
contrary, primarily stands for our own ideaL Only, it does so

Au"REL KOLNAI

in a somewhat harsh and narrow way which is apt to disagree
with our pampered selves, seeing our softer nature and laxer
habits. These harsher ways we may " not need," and we confidently hope to " dispense with " them while securing the very
same " ends." In·regard to its habitat and its field of operation,
of course, the lop-sided position of Common Man equalitarianism takes on an inverse sign. Its haze exudes. from "democratic " minds outside the pales of the Marxian empire, and
the reality it acts upon is Democracy, not Communism. Our
interview with the Common Man does not enchant us into the
midst of an exegetic quarrel of Marxist soothsayers but keeps
us roving over the broader and less stringently regulated paths
of Democracy.
To put matters succinctly, the equalitarian doctrine can be
described as consisting in the extension of a certain marginal
type of situation between two individuals or two groups, a
situation which in truth does involve strict equality as a
postulate of justice, into a general conception of social relationships. Suppose John steals Peter's property, robs or cheats
him, or in any other way secures some " illicit " advantage
over him. Justice demands "restoration," which essentially
implies "equalization," taking something away from him who
has more, and giving it to him who has less. The validity of
Peter's claim to restitution is irrespective of any intrinsic comparison between his and John's "personalities"; John has no
right to keep any of his ill-gotten gains on the strength of his
having superior racial characteristics, shapelier limbs, a greater
wealth of knowledge, tidier habits of life, or more refined
manners. The two men are presum('d fundamentally "equal"which in fact they are in regard to the natural rights of the
person as such. The psychological aura of this illustrative
situation even connotes the suggestion of a further-going
material equality: we tend to imagine "Peter" and "John"
as two small independent neighbours, preferably farmers or
shopkeepers, who " originally " own roughly the same amount
until John turns a rogue and amasses wealth at Peter's cost,

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

283

.who becomes a pauper. "Redressing the balance" means that
they both move back into an identical condition of respectable
poverty or modest well-being. Again, let Peter and John be two
hungry wanderers who find a moderately sized loaf of bread. It
is natural that they should divide it up evenly between them.
John is hardly entitled to eat, say, four fifths of the loaf
because he happens to have more ancestors, better breeding,
a cleaner moral record, or a keener sense of :rhythm. Again,
though it is fair that I should greet the Rector of our university
with a deeper bow than I do its Janitor, I am equally forbidden
to kill either. Similarly, whenever I have to arbitrate or
any other sense to choose or to decide between two persons
in a situation involving a definite set of rules, "merits," "conditions" and ":relevant viewpoints," I have to confine myself
to these and must not allow any further personal considerations, alien from the " merits of the case," to trespass on my
judgment. For example, I must bring myself to recognize
that Peter's interpretation of an obscure Greek text is correct
is, say, more deeply
while John's is false, even though
religious, a more skilful chess-player, a more prepossessing
person or a wittier conversationalist, or again, my own brother
or one to whom I am greatly indebted. In the given context,
these things do not "count." John and Peter are again "presumed equal" so as to isolate and determine the one inequality
between them which we have in view here and now, the one
that is the "theme of this discourse,"-as though they really
were as equal in quality as two brand-new dollars but, through
a fatal accident which has thrusted one of them into error,
suddenly came to be unequal so far as the one sharply circumscribed point of controversy is concerned. Now the equalitarian
mind would " analyse " the whole of life in terms of such
marginal situations, " existential ultimates/' definite " rights,"
isolable accidents and circumscribed contests, and
the
fabric of society into an incessant
ever-renewed succession
"
of races under " equitable
awarding decisions.

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AUREL KOLNAI

Yet in reality these types of situations are only one aspect
of life, and provide only one regulative principle-among
others-of social "classing," a conveniently "evident" and
" rational " one, to be sure. But " competition on equal terms "
would itself be impossible unless the " competitors " facing
one another in blank equality were embedded in a more stable
and concrete order of social coexistence which precludes
equality. They could not "run for the prize" alongside one
another without their respective" virtue" deriving from other,
and entirely different, phases of their lives. Above all, the
mechanism presupposes the " umpire " capable of an " impartial " adjudication, and thus a further and decisive element
of inequality. The " Common Man " conception, in consonance
with the " radical " or " popular " brand of Democracy and
with the Marxian identification between the proletariat and a
virtually universal mankind, views social order in the light of
" Peter despoiled by John " inasmuch also as it simply and
massively equates justice as such to the self-interest of the
" wronged " party as such. To be sure, the victim of a murderous assault who fights to save his life or the dispossessed one
who is bent on recovering his property also "represent,"
automatically and uno ictu as it were, the principle or' justice.
They du not, however, represent it formally as does the
legislator, the judge, or the policeman, whose private interests
are not themselves involved. In fact, the discharged impetus
motives may easily drive the "wronged"
of
person to recoup himself, if possible, "with a vengeance"an attitude distinct from the primarily aggressive or predatory
one but similarly opposed to considerations of justice.
As soon as, for the construction" victim versus wrongdoer,"
we substitute the polarity between him who is " worse off "
and him who is " better off " in the broadest sense of the term,
the rapport with justice or" objectivity" undergoes an inver-.
sion. Whatever the historical sources and backgrounds of his
intrinsic or his positional advantage, it is the more " perfect,"
the more highly placed, the better educated, the more pros-

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

perous, the more secure person who, by and large at least, is
likelier to develop the capacity of disinterested judgment.
The apotheosis of the Common Man itself, in its various
democratic and communistic forms, comes as little from the
minds of common men as the doctrine of Utilitarianism
nates from persons eager for pleasure or material profit. But
the trouble with the true equalitarian is precisely that he is
unable to see a fat person beside a lean one without being
tempted to assume that the former must have battened on the
flesh and blood of the latter. Whatever desires the Common
Man may evince or manifest, whether material or more
" refined," whether reasonable or absurd, whether genuine or
fictitious, they are never simply a desire or pursuit. They are
always a " struggle " for something that is " due " to but
hitherto " withheld " from him. These desires must needs be clad
in the gown of " righteous indignation." Accordingly, the onetrack mind of the prophets of the Common Man is little
inclined to discuss the problem of Equality. To restrain the
high-handed John and to make him disgorge, to "vindicate"
the virtuous Peter's right, to" emancipate" him and to stiffen
his neck-here is a simple and evident task, indeed a " clear
and distinct idea " involving no need for subtleties. Medicine
and hygiene are, at bottom, a simple affair: this man, for
instance, suffers from malaria, so in reference to him we equate
quinine to health. Analogously, the one theme of society is the
daunting of " the strong " and the strengthening of " the weak "
-that is to say, the actualization of their superior force, which
resides in their numbers. But in fact it is at this stage that the
really interesting problems arise. In what manner will the
actual bearers, the agents, wielders, administrators--of this
" new strength," the actualized " power of the weak," differ
from the eliminated oppressors and exploiters? What specific
necessities, what structural changes does the durable " elimination " of the latter entail? What exactly is the meaning of there
being none but "weak" members of society, and in what
terms is their mutual equality defined?

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AUREL KOLNAI

Obviously, both the principle of Government based on universal suffrage and the principle of economic Collectivism
suggest answers of a sort-however inadequate-to these
questions. So does, in a somewhat more concrete sense perhaps,
the concept of the Common Man itself. It is,-as, inspired by
this concept, we might say-, not enough either to provide the
Peters with the political means of exercising " eternal vigilance "
over the machinations of the Johns, or even to institute an
economic order that offers no scope for the activities of the
Johns, and prevents their trespasses from being profitable to
them (indeed, such a sweeping change in the economic order
we might also consider too painful, and avoidable). We must
above all endeavour to bring about a world consisting of
Peters alone, and no Johns at all; a society so integrally
fashioned for Peter's needs and so well suited to his taste,
so exclusively modelled on Peter's lines and adjusted to his
categories and ideals as to call no John into existence. The
presupposition is that, whereas " aristocrats " in the widest
sense of the term cannot live except by tyrannizing over
common men and " skimming the cream off " the produce
of their labour, a small farmer on the contrary needs no
" feudal overlord " to maintain himself, and can indeed do
jolly well without him, just as the vegetable realm can thrive
without man's intervention, while man cannot live without
vegetables. More generally, the common men "among themselves " can procure them everything they need, including the
values (problematic or inadequate) hitherto manufactured by
the "upper classes," without having to pay for the dubious
services· and endure the humilating prerogatives of a breed o£
rapacious and disdainful spongers. This gives us a hint of the
immanent totalitarian trend of social equalitarianism. But for
the moment our concern is with the meaning of equality itself.
What, beyond· a mere protection of Peter against being maltreated and imposed upon by John, is implied in its postulate?
Speaking in the abstract, two mutually incompatible interpretations are usually applied to that postulate. Viewed from

THE MEANING OJ!' THE " COMMON MAN "

a more practical angle,
aim that there shall
"
no "aristocracy," no group,
than the rest and, in
if not
ponderant share in the
variant of equalitarianism,
preserves a
continuity
with the initial demand
" confines its claim to the
abolition of an" artificial" inequality, of all falsification, deflection and warping of both " natural " equality and " natural "
inequality by violence, fraud, rigid perpetuation of attained
superiorities, establishment of monopolistic positions, and the
like. All members of society should not
levelled down, and
up, to a plane of actual, material, entitative equality-all
earning the same salary, consuming the same amount of food,
possessing the same wealth of information. They should be
merely placed on an " equal footing " implying the same rights,
the same access to the collective treasury of the community
in its every aspect, the same principle of treatment: so that,
every one being " recompensed according to his· merits," they
may all " unfold " their respective personalities including the
" natural :inequality " inherent :in that concept. The more
radical variant of equalitarianism aims, on the contrary, at
levelling as such:· everybody having the same right to " needfulfilment " in so far as the basic human needs are concerned,
" natural inequalities " should not be recognized by assigning
a congruous" reward" to every" merit" but compensated for,
corrected, and smoothed out so as to ensure actual equality
and nip in the bud all vertical stratification-in other words,
prevent from the outset all solidification of positional heights
and emergence of " privileged groups!'
The advocates of levelling sometimes pretend to be merely
fighters for the " merit-rewarding " species of equalitarianism,
"taken seriously" (for no demagogue would renounce the
classic trick of assuring his audience that the things he incites
them to " claim " are theirs " in justice ") . Any conspicuous inequality-they may say-cannot but be the result of organized

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AUREL KOLNAI

injustice. The mere diversities of "natural talents,. could never
bring it about. In practice, then, insisting on equality pure
and simple is tantamount to a " true " equality of consideration, of :rights, and of access. The historical and sociological,
as well as anthropological, fact is that all " artificial "-" positional," " social," " class "-inequalities are rooted in "natural"
and " personal " ones, and are in the long run always doomed
to crumble away if their nexus with such a background of
natural "excellence" is severed. It may be noted, in passing,
1. that inequalities disappear to give place to new types of
inequality, not to their absence, 2. that, to be sure, all natural
inequalities by no means possess the same moral meaning and
the same human value. There exists an elastic correspondence
but by no means a close parallelism between wisdom, goodness
and even bodily prowess on the one hand, success, power,
wealth and prestige-or even their preservation-on the other.
Moreover, the distribution of the various kinds of particular
capacities and values is generally complex and overlapping.
No "elite" group is the only one, or a homogeneously constituted one in any society, nor does any such group "excel"
the " rest " of society in all humanly relevant values and
achievements.
Anyhow, if the leveller can lean on less of a specious
"seH-evidence" than can the "merit "-minded or "competitive " equalitarians, it is he who has a deeper insight into
social reality. He is at any rate dimly aware of the fact on
whose denial the " moderate " equalitarian position rests-the
essential inseparability between " artificial " and " natural "
inequalities. Once we go beyond the wholesome and Christian
principle of a limited equality, formal andmaterial, as implied
by Man's basic dignity and rational nature as well as by the
radical transcendence of the person's ultimate value before
God above his social, physical, intellectual and cultural, and
even, in a tangible sense, moral, distinctions or shortcomings;
once we fall a prey to the illusive ideal of an absolute "formal"
equality, that is, of a neutral and homogeneous medium of

THE MEANING

OF THE " COMMON MAN "

9l89

equal " rights " and " chances "-we cannot help sliding down
the path that leads to the abyss of material equality, with its
concomitants of an impoverishing, oppressing, suffocating and
deadening uniformity. Nor can we escape that specific brand
of inequality, a " new inequality " replacing the " old " ones,
which goes with totalitarian " mass " government and with the
"conditioning of man by man" required by man's unlimited
and wholesale "self-determination."
For the truth is that " artificial " sets of conditions determine, in a varying but always a high measure, the natural
qualities, dispositions and aptitudes of a given person, and inversely, the operation of" natural" distinctions" naturally"by itself, and inevitably-tends to react upon, to shape and to
modify the framework of " chances," possibilities, means of
access, facilities and "advantages." There is no "natural"
distinction which is not also a fruit of various " privileges," and
none which is not generative of " privileges," though these
may be both enhanced and counterbalanced by other " privileges." The concept
an incessant" competition" based upon
an "equal start," joined between social blanks who at every
moment come from nowhere, measure their " natural " or
"purely personal" distinctions with one another,
one of
the set " climbing the top," to vanish into the void a moment
later and reemerge for another ''just" prize contest the
moment after-this concept cannot be thought out without
contradiction.
On the plane of reality, it must either be resane and sober postulate of ensuring certain basic
duced to
elements of equality and opposing certain barriers to an " excessive " accumulation of advantages, or expanded into the delea wholesale material, levelling equalitarianterious insanity
ism. This, too, entails some kind of contradiction-for
subversive and omnipotent levelling power itself needs a distinct supremacy over the power of " common men " as such-,
but seen as a concept it reveals at any rate incomparably
self-consistency, and much less artificial blindness to
reality. In awareness of the fact that the "artificial" impact

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AUREL KOLNAI

of a concrete social order on its constituent elements cannot be
eliminated, levelling equalitarianism demands a positive,
sale, central management of that" artificial" apparatus of conditions for the promotion of entitative equality and the
ing of such " natural " variations as may tend to engender
" privileges." In view of the discovery that equal and utterly
similar beings alone can ever have "equal chances," it leaves
behind the equality of chances to claim that of the beings
themselves.
4. EQUALITY AND SIMILARITY.
The parenthetical idea of complete similarity in the last
sentence needs some expansion. For it must be admitted that
equality does not, in sheer logic, imply similarity or uniformity.
Two citizens who have roughly the same income and the same
political rights, nay, the same "standing"
the community,
may at the same time exercise entirely disparate occupations:
for instance, a moderately prosperous grocer and a fairly succesful violinist. Moreover, even allowing for an approximative
equality in the level of " education," they may typify two
entirely different kinds of personality with most unlike outlooks, tastes, and modes of life. But the accident of a quantitative equality, as referred to income, power, social status, and
even " culture," is one thing and the deliberate endeavour to
secure a maximum of such equality throughout a given society
is another. The former is largely independent of similarity;
latter is not. In order even to render possible a large-scale
measurement or computation of equality, we must impose a set
of common " counters " or " denominators," units of calculation
as it were, which involves the postulate of largely identical
standards of value or habits of valuation,
beyond that a
value as
themselves
general preference for such types
easily to quantification,
regulation.
equalitarianism
breed a " reductionist "
far as possible whatever is "
soon
" qualitative," from the

THE MEANING OF THE "COMMON

MAN"

291

as we recognize essentially different social " types of virtue ""models" or "ideals" of public validity, such as the monk
or the hero, the entrepreneur or the scholar, the artist or the
artisan,-we have assented to Inequality. Howsoever we stress
the necessity and usefulness and, in the Christian view, the
fundamentally eq:ual dignity inherent to all of them, we cannot
help accepting the principle of a hierarchical order among them,
placing, for instance, the musician above the shopkeeper, though
any shopkeeper may in most important respects be " better "
than any musician, and in general, any " social inferior " in
most important respects be " better" than "his betters." Every
intrinsic difference between man and man contains the seeds of
a hierarchical tension and distance. In other words, it is pregnant with Inequality. And again, providing every one with an
"equal amount" is most naturally, evidently and verifiably
effected by providing every one with the same thing. Thus, in
social reality, wholesale equality winds up in mass similaritywhich, in view of its being a product of organizational technique
rather than the sign of a spontaneous tribal homogeneity, may
as well be labelled " uniformity." Of course, if one man is particularly keen on sausages and willing to renounce his " share "
of fruit, while another prefers to live mainly on dumplings,
the resultant danger to equality is trivial and may safely be
neglected. It is not so with diversities per se implying a note
of quasi-essential distinction. A "free" farmer or merchant
does not fit into a "society of workers"; still less does an
individual endowed with a "liberal education." Such .eccentricities, then, as " private profit " or " liberal education,"
must go.
At this point, however, a capital objection is sure to be
raised. Equalitarianism, it will be contended, is hostile neither
to the division of labour nor to personal genius, talents or
accomplishments, but merely to the social hierarchy of artificial
group privileges which perverts the division of labour and stifles
rather than brings to fruition,personal prowess or merit. Social
equality bids fair to set everybody to the task he is fit for,

AUREL KOLNAI

his respective fitness being henceforth unobscured by antecedents of birth and fortune. Likewise, it aspires to liberate
genius from the shackles of poverty and the handicap of a
humble origin. This is an undertaking entirely consonant with
the destruction of that fake culture which is merely an appurtenance of " conspicuous leisure." " Acquisitive " talents, it is
true, will no longer be appreciated, but " creative " talents will
be honoured all the more. Michelangelo to be relegated to the
turning-lathe? A \rile calumny! He shall in future create much
greater works of art for working henceforth for the whole
people and no longer for popes and princelets. In the world
of Equality, creative genius is no longer condemned to manufacture all sorts of sham and trash for the amusement of the
idle rich, nor to observe conventions destined to prevent the
exposure of a social system based on class exploitation. True
art, true science, true individuality will flourish-so much the
more as, released from the bondage of irrational privilege and
particular interest, they will be devoted to the service of
Humanity, or in other words, to the welfare of the toiling
Masses.
The Common Man, then, is a very mysterious, not to say a
mystical fellow, who according to need is admirably fitted even
to ascend the highest peaks, inaccessible to a privilege-ridden
mankind, of Uncommonness. In the context of art, genius,
culture and other such gadgets enjoying too much prestige to
allow any verbal slighting of them, we are offered the " moderate " equalitarianism of " fair competition." Yet the chief
fallacy of the argument consists in the puerile assumption that
the qualitative equality of men, not merely as an accidental
fact but as the leitmotiv of a comprehensive social system, is
compatible with a wide and rich qualitative variation of
"services": of" functions," capacities, achievements, sensibilities, "creations "-in a word, disposable values. The same
" Common Man " needs, in fact, many different kinds of things.
Therefore, while remaining the same Common Man, indeed
the more completely he remains so the better, he may at will

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

293

«differentiate" himself into this or that kind of "specialist,"
including any " needed " sort of " genius," through the instrumentality of training, " education," " selection of talents " by
psychologists' boards, and similar procedures of functional
organization. Until the last moment, as it were, I am exactly
the same thing as the next man in the
good as the
other fellow, nor any whit better-, but at the last moment,
I suddenly undergo a course of special training and switch off
into producing those fruits of " genius " which the community,
as is mostly admitted, notwithstanding that clumsy and treacherous Common Man naturlaut, " La Republique n' a pas besoin
de savants,"" also needs." Thus a blossoming out of personal,
mental, and artistic manifoldness appears to be expected on
the barren soil of institutions and ruling ideologies altogether
dedicated to the cult of equality and to the suppression of whatever category of social inequality might survive or threaten
to arise. Because society is enriched by a manifoldness of
qualities and achievements, the theorists of Progress imagine
that the graceful butterfly
personal dissimilarity can alight
directly on the drab fabric of social homogeneity with its
division of labour comparable to the presence of many
different-numbered departments in one huge bureau-without
needing the congenial framework of social hierarchy and the
" fields
tension " implicit therein. Yet, it will be suggested,
human manifoldness is not the same thing as social hierarchy.
Personal excellence does not in general correspond with titles,
wealth,
social classing. Man's response to challenge, adversity and humiliation may be a more fertile source of genius
and a more effective spur to high achievement than a position
of established mastery or leisured security. True; but what
lows is only this-that in a hierarchic society (in the widest
sense of the term) there will be much disproportion between
men's personal values and outward positions. Why should
there not be? " The labourer is worthy of his hire," by all
mea_ns, but that is not to say that wages or social " success "
ought to be an adequate measure of one's "inner worth."

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AUREI, KOLNAI

There will be many talents rising from the ranks and a constant
necessity of revising and refilling the " cadres of elites." It
does not follow, however, that in a social system based on the
destruction of all hierarchy there will be a free unfolding of
"natural inequality" or indeed any possibility for talents to rise
or for personal distinction to develop. Social nobility is not and
never was-except
the imagination of imbecile snobs-an
equivalent of human and personal, of moral or intellectual
nobility; nevertheless, its existence is indispensable for the
existence
nobility, indispensable as a stimulus and a gross,
provisional measure of
becomes a pattern of orientation for society's groping attempts towards experiencing, appreciating and fostering intrinsic distinction. Nobility of diversity
remains a symbol for the recognition of dignity and a rampart,
inevitably sheltering, it is true, many bad things along with
the good- as does civilization or life itself. It is the organic
structural link between social unity and individual manifoldness. The equalitarians who enjoy paying lip-service to "individuality," "personality," "culture," "art," "creative minds"
and what-not are,. indeed, much like the immoralists afflicted
with " sublime " moods who believe that " true Christianity "
consists simply in despising Pharisees and dining and wining
with publicans and adulteresses; who trifle with fancies concerning the salvation of the soul, the beauty of the. ritual and
the uplift of mystical experiences while confidently skipping
the unpleasant intermediary stratum of Decalogue morality.
5.

THE FALLACY OF THE "MIDDLE LEVEL."

A certain brand of equalitarians, resigned rather than enthusiastic, take delight or at least comfort in the " mathematical "
fancy that if on the one hand levelling breaks down the high
peaks of human worth-in respect of genius and character,
as well as' of luxury and refinement-, on the other hand it raises
the low levels of human existence to an acceptable average
standard and thus ensures justice without diminishing the sum
total of human excellence and happiness. We may :readily

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

fl95

dispense with the fine connoisseurship of delicious dukes if in
compensation we are relieved from the presence in our midst
of illiterates, uncared-for consumptives, and persons ignorant
of the use of soap. The crude fallacy on which this argument
rests is the assumption of a constant " sum total " of " goods,"
in the all-embracing sense of the term, which can be " distributed " in more unequal or more equal ways, or to use a
synonym, with less or greater justice. The trouble is, of course,
that the " realization," " production " or " growth " of all values
whatever implies the process of " imitating " and also of comparing, criticizing, sifting and correcting exemplars, or in other
words, a response to their " radiation." Although in a sense
we may indeed be more preoccupied with a " good average "
than with " high peaks," the latter are necessary for the " good
average" to form. Even the "distribution" of the material
wealth of the rich-according to the famous scheme of the
Rothschild of Paris who offered his whole fortune to the nation, to the tune of one franc for each citizen-is far likelier
to damage than to benefit the material welfare of " the people." With " goods " more qualitative and less measurable,
levelling cannot but be much more unequivocally destructive.
To put it briefly and with no pretension to treat the matter
exhaustively, by taking away their "nobility" from "the
nobles" we cannot" ennoble" the "people" but merely annihilate a large part of the "nobleness" present in the "people"
themselves. We may imagine that by so acting we respond
to the well-known phenomena of the village cobbler whose
shabby smock-frock hides the heart of a true gentleman and
the opulent Baron with a pageant of ancestors who is at bottom
nothing but a vulgar rake. What we really do is to dry up
the founts and to stifle the stimuli of " gentlemanliness," so
far as it depends on a social background and frame of reference,
in the hearts of village cobblers as elsewhere. Moreover, we
eliminate at least one powerful leverage of moral and spiritual
obligation hitherto weighing upon the strong and fortunate notwithstanding the cases of its apparent ineffectiveness. What

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AUREL KOLNAI

" levelling " brings about is not to raise the " people " to the
level of the wealthy and the highly " educated," nor even to
lower the " ruling classes " to the level of the people, but to
depress everything to a new " common " level which in the
most important respects will be decisively inferior to the old
level of the " people."
Not, however, explicitly or" formally" would this be so. On
the contrary, the" progressive" enthusiasts of Equality would
by no means content themselves with "levelling" proper-with
equalization directed to an average middle level. The mastery
of the Common Man is destined to surpass infinitely the possessions and attributes of the " privileged " masters of the dark
pre-proletarian, pre-historic past. And so much is actually true
that the Common Man is not a static and statistical reality of
to-day (or yesterday) but a goal of revolutionary " becoming."
The emancipation of the " common people " from the fetters
of social hierarchy is at the same time to •be the creation of
the Common Man of to-morrow. Thus do we gain a first
answer to the riddle of the sovereignty of the Common Man:
not only is that sovereignty possible but it is inherent in the
Common Man's very concept. He cannot even exist unless
he is sovereign; for the empirical common man vegetating or
struggling in the time prior to the integral triumph of the
Revolution is not yet " He " but the mere " material " preparatory, the mere "subject" ordained to His self-realization.
6.

AN ANALYSIS

oF "Omous"

INEQUALITY.

Let us, now, approach the problem of Equality from a new
angle, delicate though that aspect may seem to be. How does
equalitarianism relate to the elements of a " new inequality "
superseding, and compensating for, the old hierarchical one?
For inequality is without doubt technically necessary for
keeping the social machine in function, and doubly so for
enforcing and securing a postulate of equality.
Are we really witnessing, as the emotional appeal of equalitarianism to our sense of" justice" would suggest, a displace-

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

ment of " artificial" inequality by "natural" inequality purified
and emancipated? Such a statement is by no means borne out
by a study of the main facts or tendencies in question and of
their inward logic. What, after all, is most distasteful to the
equalitarian temper? True, it is not sheer physical or mental
dissimilarity as such, nor even the fact of natural gradations
concerning physical strength, intellectual capacities and moral
character. But surely it is not, either, sheer wealth or power
as such. Democracy in its liberal phase largely tolerates, and
in a way, even favours and exaggerates, a" plutocratic" order
of society. The Communist system itself, though incompatible
with the existency of a wealthy class, seems well to accommodate itself, on grounds of expediency, with a very considerable
inequality of income levels. Again, the power of State officialdom-that is, " artificial " power par excellence-has been
steadily rising along with the march of Equality, to attain a
degree next to omnipotence in the socialist paradises of Totalitarianism. The central target of the equalitarian attack is what
has rightly been described, not as wealth nor even as private
property, much less, power, but as privilege and what might
even more adequately be designated as nobility-precisely that
of which the Common Man is meant to embody a grandiose
and superior antithesis.
The essential idea of nobility is not unconnected but still
less identical with the historic fact of nobility in a " titled "
or technical sense. The hereditary principle itself is only a
secondary, though important, symbolic aspect of it. The idea
means primarily, as in so many cases, what is signified by the
word: "knowability ." Ideally speaking, the "noble " is a
'' known," a " noted " and " notable," an " intelligible " and
" identifiable " primary " factor " of society. Its opposite is
the " anonymous " individual, the mere statistical unit. In
other words, he is an intrinsically autonomous unit on the
social scene, the words " autonomy " and " privilege " conveying, again, a very much kindred meaning. There is supposed
to be an indissoluble-or rather, a most intimate-bond be-

AUREL KOLNAI

tween the qualitative " suchness " of the " noble " and the place
he occupies in society; a conception familiar to Aristotle and
St. Thomas (who were also well aware of the existence of
"natural slaves" among the class of" masters," and vice versa)
though not to all of their latter-day disciples. " Hereditary "
transmission of "nobility" -which, for all its biological foundation, is largely only a word for the unique formative action
of early education and coining influence of the family atmosphere-is a most natural corollary but not the inmost core
of the conception. His lineage constitutes " the noble " as
little as does his title, or great wealth, or again, on the other
hand, acumen or wisdom and courage or probity or integrity
as such. A social reference, a social " resonance " as it were,
is originally inherent in the concept of nobility. Now" nobility"
is neither " natural " as the colour of the eyes or certain
mental dispositions nor " artificial " as an office or rank
conferred by government or the brute fact of " possession "
taken in itself. Nor is it, as is, generally speaking, "selfearned " rank or wealth, an " artificial " advantage or distinction owed to certain natural attributes specifically equipping
their bearer to acquire that advantage or distinction. What,
then, does nobility stand for? It represents value intrinsic,
distinctively " qualitative," pervading the essence of its bearer
as it were, and as such directly underlying a claim to social
prerogative or leadership. To recognize the ascendancy of
the " noble " means, not to " pay " for this or that definite
"service" or certify behaviour in conformity with this or that
" rule " by an official stamp, but to submit to one's "better "
precisely in so far as it is the matter of a quasi-natural " betterness " in view of social superiority and subordination.
To prevent gross misconceptions, it may be well to emphasize that the excellence embodied by "nobility," as we here
use the term in the perspective of social philosophy, by no
means connotes supreme value or an optimum condition from
a supernatural point of view. The "true noble" might, but
need not, be a saint, and even less a priest. Even from a

THE MEANING

OF THE " COMMON MAN "

299

comprehensive natural point of view, morality as such is not
identical with and is more important for man than nobility
as such. Moreover, intellectual height and proficiency is not
identical with nobility, and it, too, may be preferred. On the
other hand, the concept of nobilty should not be narrowed
down to that of mediaeval feudality or modern-age rural
squirearchy. The urban patriciate, not seldom en.dowed with
a "landed" background to be sure, is also true nobility, and
there are other concrete manifestations of the phenomenon
as well. The modern capitalist " higher middle class "-the
Bildung und Besitz represented by "right-wing" liberalism in
the German Reich of Bismarck and William II-does duty, in
a more or less diluted way, for a kind of "nobility."
A note of " nobility " is inherent in certain military, academic
and even trade-union milieux; the Church by its very essence
carries a connotation of social nobility, although it as essentially cannot be the nobility par excellence.
We might define "nobility" as a quasi-natural, quasi-essential superiority that is necessarily not only
society but also
of society and so far inseparable from an aspect of artificialty,
not, however, by or from society. In other words, "nobility"
means the reception-if the term be permissible, the " intussusception "-by society of a structural principle of order that
is not of its own making or positing but originates in suprasocial, quasi "entitative" human value. It is as though the
"'noble" were of a higher natural species-which, strictly and
metaphysically speaking, is what he most certainly and unequivocally is not, being (essentially) just as liable to sin, sickness and ignorance as any proletarian. Thus nobility expresses
the submission of Society, on the natural plane-in its vital
organization and government, that is to say, by contrast to its
recognition of the Moral Law with its Divine sanction, as
well as of Church authority formally presupposing the supernatural-a recognition of what is higher and better than its
own " thesis," " volition " or " appointment " may be. It is
not the noble himself that is thus " better and higher " than

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AUREL KOLNAI

the plain man, nor does the stress lie upon the latter's "submission " to the former as such. What matters is the humility
displayed by society as a whole in accepting and elaborating
a manifold pattern of" distinctions between higher and lower,"
as part of its own vital constitution. Society thus bows to
the directive claim of superior value, not determined by man
even in the sense of " applying " a recognizezd supra-human
principle of conduct to single cases, but supposed to appear
in the differentiation of the social tissue itself as a " seminatural" growth.
Even according to the liberal ideology with its comic Cartesian perversitY' of idiom, the Prince is merely a constable
charged with " executing " the laws enacted by the "legislative" organ; but things are entirely different in reality. Not
only does a directing and ordaining function sui generis, irreducible to either legislation and execution, reside in State
authority, whether it is monarchical or republican, parliamentary or not, but State authority itself is never, except in the
limiting case of absolute totalitarian democracy, the only decisive and directive social authority even in the purely natural
context, abstracting, that is, from the social locus of the Church.
accordance with the formula of the French
revolutionists, " Il n'y a que l'Etat et l'individu "-is intent
on superseding all " intermediary bodies," i. e. the " corporations," and all autonomous authorities in society, i. e. elites,
nobilities, aristocracies, masters and owners, all privilege, all
private factors of public relevancy and influence, by a pure and
immediate juxtaposition of the " natural " raw material of individuals (outfitted by nature with blue or brown eyes, greater
and less capacity for work, greater talents in one or in another
direction, etc.) with the artificial collective Reason in which the
sovereignty of all is incarnate, and which again imposes on
Society a purely artificial scale of inequalities in the sense of
higher and lower civil and military posts. The central object
of its hatred is neither inequality as a mere " given " of nature
nor artificial inequality as such but the idea of a concrete

THE MEANING

OF THE •• COMMON MAN "

801

natural order of Society's life; of an artificial texture of social
relationships and appreciations reposing on a receptive incorporation of " natural " data of value rather than on the opinion
and will of an omnipotent collective Subject which merely
"administers" the human material as furnished by natureo
It is most characteristic, we may note in passing, that
equalitarianism, with the public constitution of the body
politic, the sphere of government and class relations, as its
primary habitat, should also have invaded such fields, more
remote from the political, the relationships of the sexes and
the domain of parental authorityo Its main theme with regard
to the emancipation of women is really the superimposition of
artificial similarity upon natural dissimilarity in the place of
"artificial" mores shaped in reverent awareness of the natural
order and the elemental differences between the sexes which
it implies. The destruction of parental authority, linked with
the odd idea of the emancipation of youth (which, unlike the
status of woman or the " depressed classes," is a necessarily
transitory stage in human life) is obviously inherent
the drive
for totalitarian State regimentationo Although this idea is situated on a very different plane than the extirpation of nobility,
it strikes even more fundamentally at the root of the concept
of a social order pervaded with natural bases of authority.
Of course these cursory side-glances at highly important subjects outside the range of our inquiry are only meant to complete the proof that the equalitarian attack is by no mean really
aimed at an .. artificial falsification " of the natural constitution of mano
To sum up-the "noble," together with his feebler substitutes like the bourgeois, the owner, the gentleman, even the
petty bourgeois and the kulak or independent farmer, as well
as his collateral and rival the priest and monk, and such other
figures as the unsocial thinker or artist, aesthete or " crank,''
must disappear for reasons which at their deepest transcend
the scope of relationships within society and the plane of such
psychological motives as justice interpreted in terms of mathe-

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AUBEL KOLNAI

matical summetry or envy masquerading as justice. The
natural revolt of the slave or servant against the master, a
phenomenon which is often quite justified in its immediate
limits, is not the spiritual core of the equalitarian movement
in its secular grandeur, albeit grafted in various ways upon
that movement in its changing phases. Nor is the Common
Man simply a narrow-minded yokel or an inferiority-haunted
wretch who grudges the " aristocrat " his distinctions, capacities
or possessions. The" noble" with his tentative and analogical
pretension to typify a " higher mankind " or to adumbrate
an unfolding of man's qualitative and intrinsic possibilities of
"height" is merely a pawn in the game. He stands for the
idea of Man's participation in values higher than those universally and actually obtainable for Man, and with it, for Man's
bondage to an objective order of natural being which essentially
and metaphysically surpasses his power and outranges his
sovereignty. Equality is merely a function and facet of
"Emancipation."
The war against nobility, that ostensibly
righteous social rebellion, sometimes made out to be aimed
at a restatement of the essential equality of men as a species,
long obscured and blurred by "unnatural" pretensions to
group superiority, is in truth an essential and metaphysical
rebellion levelled at something that towers infinitely above
kings, dukes, barons, squires, factory owners, generals and
admirals, fops or usurers.
7.

THE EQUIVOCATION

ABouT

THE " PLAIN

MAN " AND THE

" CoMMON ·MAN."

In a sense, the " Common Man " may be defined as a
modernized, diluted and Westernized, a " stream-lined " edition
of the Marxian proletarian; subservient, of course, to the
ultimate universal triumph of the authentic Eastemized version of that Hero of modem history as incarnate in a unique
and exclusive system of Power. The "people," as contrasted
with the " aristocrats," the proletarian, the " common man "they are all supposed to represent Man in his legitimate and

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

808

universal but curtailed essence, versus a " tiny band " of
wicked and freakish " tyrants," " exploiters," " spoliators,"
" profiteers," " two hundred families " and so forth. The ideological conception as such must not be judged simply on its
merits alone. It makes use of an appeal to our " loyalty
towards our own kind." If we see a man wrestling desperately
with a ferocious bear or gorilla, or some more fantastic monster,
we do not stop to ponder whether it is the man or his opponent
which has sounder views or more justifiable aims, nor whether
the struggle might reasonably have been avoided. Rather we
hasten to aid our kindred creature as best we can. In a somewhat analogous mood of " axiomatic evidence " must we take
the side of " our like " in the " class struggle," a " social fact "
equally independent of our own preference or contribution,
whether it be interpreted according to the stricter Marxist
or the looser "people's democratic" scheme of concepts. Not
otherwise did the Nazis suggest to every " Aryan " German
that in rejecting Nazism he would support, as against the
seventy million Germans of whom he was one, the few hundred
thousand Jews of whom he was not. Thus do happily coincide,
in the Leftist cause, our direct and automatic subjective selfassertion with objective good-for our interest is identical
with that of Man-and with the prospect of certain victoryfor in the long run, numbers must tell.
While our righteous indignation is stirred up against the
" selfishness " of " landlords and capitalists "-irrespective of
their individual behaviour, and nothwithstanding the fact that
a wolf cannot live on thistles-in ourselves " selfishness " is
made out to be not only permissible but actually a dutyo It
is the motive power behind the process of world redemptiono
The "divine discontent" that makes me crave for three rooms
instead of two or two radios instead of one is a " revolutionary
force " which deserves to be acknowledged not only but veneratedo Inversely, whatever personal sacrifices I submit to in
order to promote the Cause or whatever material and moral
hardships I endure under Socialism I must cheerfully consider

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AUREL KOLNAI

as a service I do to " myself " or at any rate to " my children."
Here "self-interest" and "idealism" are not just brought
into an external and concrete mutual accord but, as it were,
qualitatively fused into one. The underlying assumption is
that there is a sort of substantial identity between my person
as a Common Man and Humanity as a whole. The doctrine
of the Common Man, with its connotation of a certain descriptive similarity of kind common to most men (but not to all:
the reproved " minority " of the " privileged," except for
possible cases of "conversion," being set apart) is meant to
provide this bold construction with an apparent fundamentum
in re. A mere majority as such, as an arbitrarily stressed figure
of statistics, is not necessarily a reality commanding a group
loyalty. If the majority of men are dark-haired, they need
not constitute a unit of solidary interest as against the fairhaired. If most people are frail and I am so myself, I may
yet hesitate to feel myself one with all the frail and to swear
enmity tq those possessed with moral firmness. But. we
Common Men are all, essentially, decent men " like you and
me," who recognize one another and belong to one another.
We are not the products of an existence based on violence,
theft, fraud, and parasitism. The white-collared workers who
speak and write for us sometimes
us as " the toiling
millions " or even " the laboring masses," thus revealing that
we are workers because we h.ate to be idle, whereas the frivolous lazybones and the good-for-nothing profligate, happily only
a tiny minority, being loath to work, acquire wealth by inheritance or " racket," and live in abundance which they fatally
turn to an ill use at our expense.
The reality of the Common Man seems to draw nurture
from concepts, long in use without any specific subversive
intent attaching to it, like that of the " average man," the
" plain man," the " ordinary man," or " the man in the
street "-beings which most of us, should we even have the
misfortune of belonging to the " ruling classes," are inclined
to be mildly fond of, though not perhaps to glorify or to

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

805

elevate to the plane of heroics. Just as opposing the demands
made in the name of " the People " connotes or at least evokes
the idea of being " against the people," indeed " against
people," an enemy of the human race as it were, whoever is
unwilling to espouse the cause of the Common Man lays himself open to the suspicion of " lacking the common touch,"
of despising" the ordinaryrun of men," of being out of accord
with his fellow kind, and of callously, cruelly and crankily
regarding the great bulk of men as mere instruments destined
to serve the interests and whims of an allegedly " higher "
species of beings, exiguous in numbers. A predisposition deeply
rooted in the souls of sane men, legitimate and honourable in
itself, and in fact conservative. much rather than subversive,
affection for the " plain man," is thus being made into a
vehicle of utopian revolutionism and perverted into an ideological bias utterly alien to its proper nature. Whatever the
"plain man," the "ordinary" or" average" man etc., regardless of the shades of difference in the meaning of these and
similar terms, is, he is not identical with the " Common Man "
whose champions work on the " advancement " of liberal
democracy along the path that leads to totalitarian tyranny.
In attempting to elaborate the distinction, it would be unfair
to say, however, that while the" plain man" is a reality which
constantly surrounds us, the "common man" is a mere construct of the subversive mind. For on the one hand, the
"plain man" also denotes something of an ens rationis, rather
than being a pure and simple collective noun made to designate
the Jones, the Brown and the Robinson we know, and on the
other hand, the " common man " is not a pure figment of imagination either. We must strenuously guard against the temptation to abase ourselves to the mental level of the subversive
ideologists in applying the demagogic trickery of " class " interpretation they use against their adversaries. Subversion is a
great, if evil, thing. It is by no means simply the" group bias"
or " self-assertion " of a " tiny " sect of ambitious crackpots
and gangsters eager for power. To be sure, these ideologists,

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AUREL KOLNAI

agitators, sophists and tyrants or would-be tyrants do not
represent Man. Yet far from representing " only themselves,"
they do represent a perennial evil potentiality in Man, and
more particularly, a prominent aspect of contemporary semiChristian and post-Christian mankind. Accordingly, their
" common man " possesses a sort of sociological reality just as
does the " plain man " so often referred to in every kind of
discourse. Notwithstanding the verbal similarity of the terms
'and a point of actual kinship between the two " types," however, the "plain man" and the "common man" are not the
same reality.
The point of actual kinship is obviously that of an absence
of particular distinctions. Actually, on closer examination,
we might find that we are able to describe unequivocally as
" plain- men " much fewer people of our acquaintance than we
should have supposed. In any one we know well we are
likely to descry certain "unique" and :·distinctive" traits.
On the other hand, in all commonplace situations almost all
of us behave in just the same commonplace way in which any
drab and humdrum specimen of the race would behave. It is
very much more difficult to make out what is really peculiar
to a " plain man " than what is peculiar, say, to a typical
district physician, a typical highlander, or a typical philosopher.
But we may try to encompass him in a set of negations. First,
he occupies no very conspicuou"S'and distinctive position in
society. He is "·one of many," no." aristocrat" in any sense,
not rich but reasonably poor, obliged to earn his bread by
work, though not a downright pauper and not confronted with
strong temptations to espouse anarchistic attitudes, banditry
or other forms of criminality. Secondly, he is not set off
against the mass of his fellows by outstanding intellectual and
moral qualities either in a favourable or in an unfavourable
sense. He is not obviously a saint, though he may certainly
be God-fearing, not a genius, not a scientist nor an artist par
excellence, though he need not lack intelligence or imagination.
He is not a specialist wholly absorbed in his subject, nor a

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

807

fanatic or an eccentric, although he may adhere to a conviction
with firm loyalty or pursue an aim stubbornly. He is not
mentally ill or definitely weak-minded. Thirdly, we have to
add two more negative characteristics related t9 each other,
which are perhaps less evident at first sight but most significant
in regard to the distinction we seek for between the " plain
man " and the " common man."
Whatever the " plain man " is, he is not a mathematical
average of all human individuals living on earth, not the
abstract " man who is naught but man " that would result
from rescinding all local, racial, cultural, professional or other
particularizing and limiting data. He is not man taken in his
absolute "nakedness," not a flavourless cosmopolitan "unit"
of humanity interchangeable with any other such " unit."
" Plain men " of different countries, different walks of life,
different traditions may resemble one another in that they
are " plain men," and perhaps, on occasion, even recognize
one another as such with a measure of mutual sympathy.
They are, however, most dissimilar and alien to one another in
many important respects. Again, the " plain man " is notcertainly not permanently and predominantly-" group-conscious" qua "plain man." His "group-consciousness" bears
on more restricted and distinctive bonds. His loyalties-however typical of him as a plain man-have nothing to do with
a solidarity among " plain men " as such. His traditions, which
again it is natural for him to have, are not "plain man"
traditions. In other words, the plain man evidently fails to
cultivate and to assert himself, except in a secondary and
accidental, a " corrective " fashion, in his quality or status as
a " plain man." He does not pretend to be Man in actu, to
incarnate the fulness of humanity, to dispense with whatever
is outside the ·pale of " plain manhood." In other words, the
" plain man " is not his own paramount theme. Although he
may incline towards various ideologies, democratic or otherwise, he is not an ideologist of his own grandeur. In short,
the " plain man " is not primarily a believer in the " plain

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AUREL KOLNAI

man." He may j;asily grow resentful at such «upper class"
prerogatives or advantages as happen, in given cases, to impair
his interests or wound his susceptibilities. He may not
quently view this or that established authority with scepticism.
He is prone to enjoy gibes at one-sided scholars or experts.
Yet· a traditionalist and even reverential attitud(f is no less
firmly rooted in him. More often than not, he inclines towards
snobbery. The last thing that would naturally occur to him
is to abolish " his betters," in the broadest sense of the term,
and to actually step into their place.
The reason why the " plain man " is legitimately regarded
as one " representative " type of humanity lies in his semipotential balance, sanity and universality. We say "
potential "-for obviously, on the one hand, the plain man
is not a professor of " balanced doctrines " in an actually
formulated, consistent, intellectually responsible sense and still
less a possessor of universal wisdom or skill but neither is
he a mere potential " reservoir " of human qualities whose
superiority over this or
" elite "
negative fact of its not being yet " committed," " loaded " or
" signed " in one determined direction or with one limited concept of perfection. Just as, witness the Gospel, it is easier
for the poor than for the rich to attain heaven, the "plain
man " not seldom gives proof of a kind of actual superiority
over the specialist, the refined and fully shaped intellect, the
man enslaved to one definite pursuit or preoccupation. For
it is true not of chattel alone that whatever distinctive good
we possess threatens to possess us too much. Therefore,
though it is nothing but vulgar obscurantist mysticism to
believe that the " plain man " can " govern himself " better
than a Prince and a State aristocracy can govern society, it is
indubitably true that a system of government in which the
" plain man " as such " has a say " is intrinsically better than
government by an esoteric caste of public officials no matter
how well bred, " cultured " and " public-spirited." This is
what perennially validates Democracy in the sane sense of

THE MEANING

Ol!' THE « COMMON MAN "

309

the term, as contrasted to its erection into a false religion of
secular messianism. Democracy, in that same sense, means
the participation, at various levels, of the broad strata of the
people in the shaping of public policy. For one thing, the
" eminent " representative of Man, in his " actualized " prefection, whatever the specific nature and basis of his claim
to spiritual, social or technical authority, "ultimately" originates in the " plain man," and " in the final analysis " acts on
behalf and for the sake of the " plain man " rather than of any
human " elite " as such. Humanly speaking, he is but a servant
of the Common Good, which is shared by the multitude as a
whole. But there is more. He also needs the actual co-operation
of the " plain man " so as to be reminded of his limits and of his
duty of subordination to the whole of which he is· a part. He
needs this co-operation to be restrained from indulging too
freely his one-sided vargaries and predilections; to be supplied
with information and with impulses such as he cannot derive
except from the comments and suggestions of '" plain men "
with their relatively untutored and therefore obviously less precise and less well stocked, but again some sense " unwarped "
and potentially richer minds. In a Christian society with
manifoldly developed and balanced hierarchies, the « plain
man " himself, although not formally established as such in
the status of an eminent "order" (many "plain" men by
nature form, of course, part of this or that definite social
" order " or " corporation ") would constitute an « elite " sui
generis, of the highest importance if not explicitly of the highest
dignity.
8. How THE" CoMMON

MAN" DIFFERS FROM THE

" PLAIN MAN."

The " common man " for whom the " century " and the
kingdom of the earth are claimed is in many ways a different
kettle of fish. To be sure, the debased machine-serving and
machine-made middle-class or proletarian " plain man " of the
industrial society marks an automatic transition towards him.
4

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AUREL KOLNAI

But the authentic " common man," far from being a simple
product of the conditions of life under industrialism-in which
case he would actually form the overwhelming majority of
men-is above all a function and an implication of the subversive equalitarian ideology itself. As the " class-conscious "
proletariat has been made rather than discovered by Marxism,
so also the true "common man" is generated and trained rather
merely " championed " by his heralds and interpreters.
He may be defined as a " plain man " gone mad, who, by
exaggerating and puffing up his plainness, aspires to embody
the fulness of human perfection and to achieve self-sufficiency
in the sense not of renunciation but of all-round abundance.
Unlike the "plain man " whose centre of gravity lies in his
practical concerns but who is attached by firm, if somewhat
elastic, ties to things " higher than himself," the " common
man " cares about nothing but his " welfare " in the strictest
sense of the term and that of the universe in the most comprehensive. Indeed, for him the two coincide. He would
" fight " for a rise in his salary or the acquisition of some more
efficient gadget with the solemnity proper to the performance
of a religious duty, but is also capable of much enthusiasm,
in the spirit of tua res agitur, about "better and cheaper"
grammar schools in some antipodean country. He not only
is but consciously and doctrinairely expects to be influenced,
as a voter in the election of pub1ic officers, by the crudest
ad hominem argument and the basest "psychological" tricks.
Yet at the same time he believes as a matter of course that
he is better equipped than is " secret diplomacy " to decide
about problems of foreign policy. He would subordinate his
concrete " self," with incomparably greater " generosity " than
the "plain man" is likely to display, to any imperative of
" progressive idealism." He differs from the " plain man;"
however, in that he is entirely unable to appreciate, or even
realize the meaning of, any " ideal " point of view not assimilable to the categories of " his welfare." Utterly irreverent
towards anything that carries the pretension of being " above

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

311

him," he is boundlessly pliant to, and indeed craves to obey,
any power that orders him about in his own name or in the
name of any " progressive " purpose that reflects or flatters
his aspiration to be everything. A verse to all constraint, tension
and subordination, he is yet most willing to endure the heaviest
chains that can plausibly be made appear of his own making.
Experiencing all transcendent authority as tyranny, he at the
same time itches to be " determined," and made to " will "
the :right thing, by what acts on behalf of" his needs." Revolted
at the idea of censorship, he on the other hand accepts " figures
of sale " as the standard by which to assess the value of a
book While clamouring for " more education " which he
expects to inculcate the same attitude even more thoroughly
into him and his like, he might easily be allured into welcoming State monopoly of the printing-press as a more " advanced " or more " efficiently organized " application of the
selfsame principle. As contrasted with the " plain man," then,
with his unsystematic but ingrained and in some measure
palsying but in many ways healthy distrust of " the high and
mighty," of the "fine gentlemen" of refined culture and intellectual subtleties, the "common man" is at the same time
intolerant and covetous rather than distrustful of these
elements of social reality. He desires not so much to avoid
or to limit, to counterbalance or to correct them as to abolish
them integrally in their proper essence, but also to re-create
them or have them re-created in his own image, thus enhancing
and amplifying rather than circumscribing their function.
The " plain man " presupposes Distinction, in the broadest
sense of the term. He embodies a complementary relation to it.
His secondary and indirect " superiority " over various specific
embodiments of
fact whose deep irony none
but a Christian can savour to the full-expresses the relativity
and transitoriness, the limitation and imperfection of all human
scales of rank. Ultimately, as an oblique projection of metaphysical truth upon the social plane, it expresses the creaturely
tenuity of Man as such, yet also in some manner his spiritual

AUREL KOLNAI

and above the social hierarchies in which he is
ordained to live and which are themselves not devoid of a
spiritual meaning-with what transcends Man infinitely but
is the Goal of his striving in a sense incomparably more proper
and intimate than is true of other corporeal creatures. The
Apostles, indeed, were " plain men " of limited education, and
rather poor. He Whom they followed, also born of a workclass family- though of " royal blood," treated, indeed, the
erudites of His people with some harshness, and asserted that
it was hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
In the new perspective He introduced, the high, and mighty,
the governors and tetrachs, the scholars and scribes, the noblemen and gentlemen of this world unquestionably suffered a
certain diminution of stature. So did, incidentally, the" respectable " moral hypocrites, and even the legally " just " were in
some sense secondary to converted sinners. " Christian democrats" of all colours, as well as "progressives" and revolutionists evincing or, for rhetorical reasons, feigning a sympathy
with " early Christianity," never tire of pointing out this aspect.
Following in the wake. of Danton who, on the eve of his
execution at Robespierre's behest (prefiguring, rather closely,
the fate Democrats .are foreordained to suffer at the hands
of the Communists) referred to Our Lord as a " good sansculotte," they suggest that Christianity was " essentially " a
movement of " common men " ai:Ified at the emancipation of
the Common Mail. That, at a later stage, it unfortunately
compromised with the ruling classes and degenerated into a
system of powerful popes, wealthy bishops and dogmatizing
theologians does not alter the fact. To the Liberal Idealist
mind, a hybrid between Pantheist optimism and the Manichaean hatred of creation, there appears to obtain both a law
to Humanity and a law of
of limitless Progress in
ineluctable decay in regard to all human " movements " and
institutions, owing to their loss of " ideal " content and
"purity" in the course of their adaptation to Reality. The
truth is that Christianity was about as much a " Common

THE MEANING OF T:aE " COMMON MAN "

318

Man " movement of " social emancipation " as, for example,
a book of high poetry which happens to help a liver patient
bear his oppressive illness more cheerfully and indeed contributes to relieving his physical condition is therefore " essentially" a digestive remedy. More, if any relation can be
established between the Apostles and the Common Man,
it is that of an extreme antithesis. For, let alone the fact
that the theme of " the Common Man versus Privilege " was, in
any formulation or terminology, utterly alien from them, what
they relied upon was not their " own forces," not the potential
totality of human power and science the " common man "
allegedly harbours in him, but the guidance and mediation of
the most Uncommon of men by hypothesis. In other words,
Light and Help descending " from above " par excellence,
rather than the " aspiration " of " plain men like you and me "
to expropriate the heights and annex the attributes of Divinity.
Their attitude typified the principle of " participating in What
is above us "-rather than of displacing what is above us and
thus ascending even higher. Nor can the faintest trace be
discovered in the Gospel, including the Sermon on the Mount,
which so many champions
Progress and Equality are inclined
to " endorse," of the hint that by " liquidating " or " taxing
out" the rich the poor can and shall become rich themselves,
and even achieve a degree of " plenty " for all which surpasseth the opulence of the richest among the hitherto
privileged.
However, Christ the Man is a "Common Man" or, better,
the Common Man in the sense of being the Head and Repre;.
sentative of all Mankind, uniquely related to Mankind "as a
whole " and in its every member. In the sense of the term
" common " in which we speak of the " common good " of the
"multitude"; in the sense of a universal Cause and End-not
of an "average" type or a predicate that recurs in all individuals; in a similar sense to that in which (proportions being
maintained) a Prince, or again, in a very different fashion, a
great genius is a more " common " man than the ordinary

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AUREL KOLNAI

" private individual," Christ is common to mankind. The
subversive concept of the " common man " is based precisely
on this equivocation between " commonness " as inherent in
Distinction, the " universal Cause," the " bonum difjusivum
sui " and " comll!onness " as a negation of distinction and inequality (the" common crow"; a" common trait") . In it, also,
is rooted the further equivocation between the ordinary" plain
man " as such and the " comman man " as a hero of our age:
the mere " bundle of urges " which at the same time is called
to monopolize human existence and to assume absolute rulership; the plain man so planed down, so planified, so mechanized
and indoctrinated as to emerge in the quality of a solipsistic
Lord of the earth. In the bygone years of the Nazi peril, we
never heard the hymnifiers of the Common Man refer to the
Brown storm-troopers as a " mass of common men," though
these rough diamonds were in fact almost without exception
plain and poor men of lower-class origin, whose " commonness "
left nothing to desire. Nor could the splendid peasants of the
Vendee in the seventeen-nineties-starving,
ragged, illiterate
it is true, but fighting on the wrong side, for the Faith and for
their King, against the "enlightened" killers and tyrannous
prigs of Paris-lay any claim to the epithet of honour, " common men." It is not numbers, poverty, intellectual plainness
alone-not the mere fact of being " exploited " and " cheated
of' education," "disinherited" and "underprivileged "-that
makes the true Common Man. In order to become such a one,
the simple " man of the masses " must be artificially hypersimplified, cleansed from common sense, distinctive loyalties
and traditions, chance limitations and possessions; he must be
" born anew " of the " Cause," the " ideology," the " faith "
in his own " mission," " rights " and " future " itself. In a
word, he must be moulded and informed by the intelligentsiamade concept of the Common Man. Accordingly, the charge
that we who view the " common man " with dismay and refuse
to place any " faith " in him are eo ipso " haters of the People "
and " incapable of sympathy for the plain man " is a wholly
pointless accusation.

315

THE MEANING OF THE " COM:MON MAN "

9.

THE PosTULATE

oF " IDENTITY":

ANARCHISM

THE

SoUL oF ToTALITARIANISM.

The Common Man might be described, then-emphasizing
the paradox implied in this concept-as a " plain man " pared,
trimmed, and clipped into a generic representative of mankind.
He is a robot sublimized into an angel, an offspring of poverty
taking hold of limitless abundance. He is an
is
"private "-and an absolute Citizen in whom all wisdom of the
race is incarnate, rolled into one; a sovereign machine or a
governable Superman. Although these formulations admittedly
connote a touch of polemical irony, they are by no means
meant to convey the idea that it is the dismal aspect which
purely and simply expresses the reality of the matter, whereas
the glorious aspect is nothing but clap-trap, a deceitful pretext
of totalitarian tyranny exercised or aspired to by a sect of
selfish, cunning and power-mad conspirators. Such a short
cut to the solution of the paradox cannot but fatally miss the
point and replace intelligent criticism by what is scarcely
more than cheap vituperation. The Common Man is neither
a mere dupe of unscrupulous demagogues nor the mere product
of a debasement of humanity to the level of a mechanism. The
sophists and tyrants who act in his name and use him as their
instrument are not a specified, identifiable " group " or " race "
bent upon enslaving the great bulk of mankind. Notwithstanding the prominent part played by secularized Jewish
intellectuals in most phases of the subversive process, the contention of the Nazis and some other " Rightists " that the
world revolution can be defined in terms of "the Jewish
interest" is a piece of arbitrary fantasy. Again, it is not a herd
of tractors or a pack of turbo-generators that have invaded
the earth so as to turn man into a "servant of the machine."
Nor is it accurate to say, lastly, that what we face is simply
the recrudescence of the age-old Pagan tendency towards
State mnnipotence, with the social " whole " as a religious
absolute, and the individual as its mere worthless tool. It is not

816

AUREL KOLNAI

that the wheel has swung full circle back to paganism, past the
Christian and Liberal interlude of freedom and respect for the
person. For all we know, such might be the historical outcome
of the" world revolution" we are traversing, foreshadowed to a
degree by the Fascist brands of Totalitarianism, though even to
these, the formula is not appiicable without reserve. Yet, so far
as it goes, the kingdom of the Common Man means a very
different thing from that.
" Communism " or the " Red peril " as such, to be sure, is
preponderantly, to-day, a function and a stock-in-trade of the
Soviet system of power. Once given the Communist party
organization and the apparatus of power at its disposal, here
is indeed a social reality in its own :right,. a definable and
tangible human agency which is most certainly and irrevocably
set on enslaving the remainder of the world and imposing
Communism upon it by brute force. The great struggles of
history are anything but pure battles of ideas, and much less,
a reflexion of evolving economic necessities. Wherefore, the
task of resisting Communist expansion is not primarily an
affair of alleviating economic distress nor even of propagating
a sound social doctrine. Rather the great struggles of history are, above all, contests between. inimical units or coalitions of power, in whose constitution however an ideological
element always enters to a greater or lesser degree. Our danger
is not, then, that-in a period of economic crisis and social
perturbation, for instance,-we may simply and directly succumb to the spell of the ideology broadcast from Moscow
and its satrapies, but that our determination to resist the pressure of Soviet power may be fatally sapped by its emotional
attraction. Although limited and in itself indecisive, that
attraction is exercised upon us by the Communistic ideology
because of its points of " democratic " affinity with our own.
Yet the concrete historical entity labelled to-day as " Communism,'' and rightly regarded as the one all-important danger
of the moment, is by no means our only problem. The great
Subversion did not start with Lenin's seizure of power in

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

317

Russia, which would not have been possible or even conceivable without its well-known set of ideological sources and
historical antecedents. The present-day Communist dictatorship, though a trifle more massive and " realistic," is far from
being simply an " Asiatic despotism " of the traditional Pagan
type. Would it were only that! In the happy event of a downfall of the Soviet power we shall continue to be faced, not
only with the secular religion of the " Common Man " but
also with its inherent tendency towards anti-constitutional,
monistic, totalitarian types of power-idle as it would be to
conjecture whether, in such a case, the great Tyranny of the
future shall spring from the soil of American mass equalitarianism, at present stronger as a diffuse atmosphere than as a
concentrated political force, of British " Fabianist " Socialism
and "scientific" Statism, at present enacting its first experiment in grand style, or perhaps of the German Prussian
tradition reviving after the Russian scourge has been disposed
of. In spite, then, of the practical precedence due to all entities
of power, of a markedly ideological and conspiratorial character
at least, once constituted, we must not see the " Common
Man " reduced to the stature of a mere emblem for the aspiration to power of any definite group of ambitious men. Rather
we must meet him on the philosophical plane on which he is
primarily situated. Nor can we see him in the right perspective there if we choose the facile polemical way of visualizing
him in his character as a dupe, a tool, an impotent puppet
only-as a mere cog in the mechanical apparatus of " ind.istrial
production " as such, or of an omnipotent " State " which
" uses " the " individual " as its soulless, impersonal instrument.
The concept of the Common Man certainly is " collectivistic,"
and supremely so, yet it is so in a specific sense of the term.
At the same time, or rather, by the same token, it is also
par excellence " individualistic."
The well-meaning Liberals and Conservatives who criticize
Communism as a" barbarous collectivism: the polar opposite
of individual freedom, which is the principle of civilization,"

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AUREL KOLNAI

as an "exaggerated collectivist reaction to the excessive individualism of the Liberal epoch," as a "top-heavy system of
State omnipotence," as a system that " unqualifiedly subordinates the parts to the whole" and "regards the interests
of the organized whole as an absolute, setting the rights ofthe
individual at naught " etc., either know nothing about the
Marxian doctrine which has inspired the action of Communism,
or have to fall back on the primitive and pernicious expedient
of charging the Communists with having "betrayed in practice " their own " lofty " aims and ideals. The label of excessive
" Statism " or " Wholism," with the stress put on the subordination of the individual, applies in a fairly high measure to
the Fascist and Nazi brands of Totalitarianism but very much
less to the Communist one, although the latter is far more radically totalitarian. Still less, of course, does it apply to the
" democratic " variety of mass equalitarianism. Although we
certainly cannot gain an adequate knowledge of what the Common Man means from the letter of the phrases put forth in his
glorification, he certainly does not mean a man completely
owned, and unscrupulously used for its own purposes, or
designed to be so owned and so used, by " State-power " as
such.
The Common Man, moreover, is Man Divine as " mere man,"
as man taken in his" privation," not to say," privateness,"Man above whom is set no Order, no Power, no Being essentially different from him, impervious to his reason, independent
of his will; no social authority, therefore, either, which symbolizes, expresses, and fructifies, illuminating its various aspects
and corollaries, this fact and this sense of metaphysical subordination. An all-powerful State is thus postulated, to be
sure, for all pretension to unlimited power on the part of the
empirical single " ego " is stultified from the outset by the
plurality of " egos." Yet again, that all-powerful State must
reflect and bear in itself-and behave exclusively in terms ofthe actual consciousness of all the single, empirical, .. naked "
egos that compose iL Otherwise it would embody the all-

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

819

powerfulness of this or that specified man or group of men
rather than of Man pure and simple, thus introducing again
the suspicion of something-some order, value, principle or
essence-transcendent
to man. Moreover, the all-powerful
State would otherwise tolerate outside it an element of significant human reality, suppressed only in an outward sense and for
the time being, and thus fall short of all-powerfulness. That is
why the" absolute" State of the Future is no longer a" State"
in the strict use of the term, something tending to " encroach
upon " the liberty of the individuals and in need to be " vigilantly checked" by them, but the ensemble of human consciousness moving and decreeing in complete unison throughout
all individual minds. For this reason also the
Anarchist vision of Marx, his prediction that after a period
of stern proletarian dictatorship, ensuring the "socialization
of the means of production," the State shall become objectless
and "wither away," is by no means an empty phrase, tagged
on for merely romantic or tactical reasons to the main body
of solid "authoritarian" collectivism. On the contrary, it is
the master key to the understanding of Communism as the
consummate embodiment of the spirit of Subversion. And this
is why many " individualists " and " personalists," " Liberals "
and even " Christian democrats " find it easy to submit to the
Communist yoke or at least imperative to make allowances
and to forge excuses for the Tyranny that magically attracts
even though it frightens them. In other words, the Common
Man is not just a slave deluded into spineless obedience and
·ovine docility by captious promises of absolute liberty, sovereignty and "plenty." He is a man prepared and trained for
slavery to that Power which is constituted upon the principle
of his claim to sovereignty and in terms of his consciousness
of unchecked selfhood. If the Common Man is a human freak
made to order, so as to fit the strait-jacket of an all-pervasive
tyranny, the latter again is not any tyranny of no matter what
gang of insolent. masters, but in its turn a garb so designated
as to fit the misshapen anatomy of the Common Man. The

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AUREL KOLNAI

two things postulate and define each the other. The central will
of the " State " must tangibly represent the General Will in
which all individual wills fuse into actual identity. It is not
an arithmetical mean of divergent individual wills, nor the
will of a" majority," although it may be "discovered" by the
taking of votes. ·Rather, every individual will must be so
fashioned as to represent, in itself, the General Will by virtue
of its essential identity with the rest. Similarly, the common
good is neither raised above the private goods nor simply the
sum thereof but actually the same as every one's private good.
To put it with the utmost brevity, Man as individual is the
community. His relation to the Tes publica is that of immediate
" identity," not, of course, in the strictly natural but in the
intentional and " ideal " sense of the term. So.ciety is conceived
as " one man," of which however the " individuals " are no
mere subordinate particles or tools but so many refl.exions and
alter egos, merged as it were in a tensionless common subjectivity. Nothing but this is the meaning of the Marxian aim
concerning the destruction of the " objectivizations," V erdinglichungen: religious, philosophical, juridical, institutional
" idols " which claim service and self-surrender on the part of
men, and unite them in a " transsubjective " way. In the
world of true " freedom," beginning with the establishment
of Socialism, men will act in immediate perception of their
identical concrete aims-the only ones-, casting aside the
" objective " apparatus of impersonal " constants," laws and
" taboos " not defined in terms of the actual living will of " you
and me," a mere function of society's division into classes and
its productive imperfection. By the same token, our consciousness pooled into one will be able to bend the contingency of
facts and circumstances under the yoke of a comprehensive
scientific knowledge of necessity, no longer limited to "universals" and "essences" (a projection of social partitions and
stratifications regarded as "eternal") but attaining reality at
its core. Thus it would fulfill what was formerly a mere impotent dream of idealistic philosophers, and thanks to the crea-

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

321

tion ofthe Greater Self of Socialized Man make human freedom
valid in relation with the surrounding universe.
10.

THE PosTULATE

OF "IDENTITY":

AND THE CoLLECTIVIST

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC

AsPECT oF THE " CoMMON MAN "

In a more diffuse and less highly strung form, displaying
the " individualistic " aspect more conspicuously and the
"collectivistic" one somewhat more indirectly, the "democratic " concept of the Common Man equally implies the
basic motif of Identity. The difference lies not so much between stressing " the collective " on the one hand and " the
individual " on the other as between a greater emphasis on
utopian perfection in the one case, on present fruition in the
other. Our own" common man" is possessed in a less measure
by the idolatory of the central Power supposed to incarnate
his " self," and more particular about the postulate that the
social reality of which he forms part should be administered
and fashioned in concrete accord with the motions, desires and
opinions of his own empirical self. His experience of an absolute
and exclusive sovereignty is weaker, his experience of being
the direct and personal bearer of sovereignty is stronger. He
is less convinced of there existing nothing outside the human
divinity which he feels to be one with his own relevant will
and consciousness, but more assured of the immediate correspondence between all relevant social reality and his own will
or consciousness such as it is. If everything is not yet strictly
ordained to make him identical with the totality of human
selfhood, in concrete detail he is already reaping more ample
fruits of that same promise of perfection. Under the Communist system, the Common Man is enthroned uno ictu, and
whatever falls outside him is from the outset integrally proscribed. Under the Democratic system, with its constitutional
and liberal traditions-in part wholly alien, in part but remotely
akin to the cult of the Common Man-, he is still struggling
for an ever greater self-realization and fuller supremacy, but

AUREL KOLNAI

his triumphs and progresses in this sense may carry a stronger
flavour of experimental reality. "The People" is more uniquely
existent, more absolutely sovereign in a Communist regime
than in
(even with, but better without, a constitutional
any possible democracy. Where and when, however, democratic
" rights " and political plurality are retained, " people!' may
more easily realize, imagine, be aware of and rejoice in the
fact that " they " as such are identical with " The People."
The " Common man " under Democracy must be continually
persuaded, not only that he is ruled with a view to promoting
his own good and with regard being taken to his own desires
and preferences, which indeed pertains io the principle of good
government, if for the " common man " we substitute here the
" plain men " who make up most of the population, but that
the acts of his rulers are exactly, promptly and exclusively
determined by the types of aims and viewpoints immediately
evident and attractive to him and his like-conceived in terms,
that is, of the " common man " consciousness as such. He
must be made aware that he is himself the one who " rules,"
although he does so through the instrumentality of technically
trained public " servants," appointed by his General Will as
ascertained by the ritual of voting. Hence the unquestioned
dominance of the theme of " prosperity," for which Marxism
is by no means primarily and centrally responsible. The " plain
man," however, is not really such an abstract unit of greed
and voracity as refined aesthetes, reductionist scientists, and
candid vote-hunters imagine him to be. Nor have economic
for two people can only share
values the greatest unitive
a loaf by cutting it in two, not by eating both the same morsel
of bread, while they can hold the same tenet or contemplate
the same beauty without having to halve it. But the evidence
of the fact that two loaves are more than one, that two hours'
work is more tiring than one, or that a more efficient gadget
increases one's range of power, is the kind of evidence that
most directly and identically appeals to any one taken in
his capacity as just " any one," and the " common man " is

THE MEANING

OF THE " COMMON MAN "

328

Man defined in terms of, and artificially reduced to, "anyoneness." Hence, again, the stupendous popularity of culture,
education and science in the current sense of these terms, of
schools, books, and the printing-press, and even art (thus the
Nazis' abolition of unemployment helped them little in view of
their crime of being " book-burners," that is, " enemies of the
spirit"): the "common man" is not supposed to be particularly" intellectual,"" deep," "high-brow" or" arty"; but he is
credited with and is incited to develop an " enthusiasm " about
intellectual and cultural values because " knowledge is power "
and in some sense is " learnable " and can be " appropriated "
by any one as well as by any number of people. This provides
the Common Man, conceptually at least, with a decisive means
to outstrip the " privileged." The admirably tense and succinct
formula enounced, not long ago, by a reputed director of
orchestra, " I want to secure the best music for most people
at the lowest price," stamps its author at least as great an
artist of ideological expression as he may be in his own field.
Yet had he omitted "
best music," he would
proved
a mere bungler
social philosophy. Generally speaking, all
governmental activity must be aimed at the' securing of an
immediately tangible " progress " in all material and cultural
domains, as measured by standards necessarily evident to " all,"
in the sense of " any one " without the implication of either
mature personal judgment or a particular creed or tradition
which most members of a given community happen to share.
It is precisely this foundation of an empty humanistic "universality " in the sense of " any-oneness " upon which this
" creed," the cult of the Common Man and the mentality bred
by that cult, is erected. It must be " progress," of course,
seeing that the Common Man is not y.et rich and not yet
educated, and above all, not yet in possession of a full monopoly
of existence, which is tantamount to the fulness of perfection.
Also, since all good things, by supposition, are manifestly
" good " in the sight of every; one concerned, they can all be
had together, one evoking and conducing to the other, knowl-

in

AUREL KOLNAI

edge making for prosperity, prosperity bringing in its trail high
culture and guaranteeing morality-except in the prosperous
few, who must first be dispossessed.
On the other hand, all points of view not carrying an immediate emotional appeal to " any one " in his indistinct privateness must be discarded, and the necessity of facing unpleasant
tasks and accepting grim realities veiled by illusive perspectives
of progress or laid over with sweetened and sublimized interpretations. In this respect, the Common Man enjoying the
benefits of democratic government is far more exacting and
more true to type than the one subject, in return for his global
omnipotence, to the iron discipline of Communism. Thus the
two great wars which the Western democracies had to wage in
order to restore the equilibrium of power endangered by
German prepotence-to preserve their independence and their
institutions-could not be presented to their " home opinion "
in these sober terms. The war must be " fought for " inane
and deceptive dreams .of "collective security," universal peace
and prosperity, freedom for all mankind to adopt the Western
scheme of government (which, since junkers are everywhere a
minority, they could not but wish to
"a world fit for
heroes to live in," a world revolution for the apothesis of the
Common Man, perhaps a world without taxes and cancer
and I know not what else. The " Soviet people," more intelligently," fought for" the defence of their invaded soil. Under
Communism, the Common Man thinks with the Dictator's
head only, but again, let us warn: this is not brought about
by the mere violence and cunning of an armed band but depends on essential and specific prerequisites. Under Democracy, where the Common Man is perpetually nascent and
advancing rather than " all in all," the leadership must adapt
its own thinking on every concrete point, with a more varied
and improvised system of expedients and fictions, to the
thought, real and supposed, of the Common Man.
The high conception of Pantheist Idealism, human society
as One Subject, ruler of Itself and the universe, and actually

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

825

apparent and incarnate in every individual subjectivity: the
kingdom, paradise and lunatic asylum of the Common Man,
is not, in a superficially complete sense, realizable or proposed
at all. There must always remain the bodily dividedness of
men, with the trivial psychic multiplicity and isolation it entails, as well as the technical need for specialists, experts and
"artists." However, even in a more essential sense the conception is not realized as yet either under the Communist
regime-where society is not yet " communist " but merely
"socialist," confronted with dangers arising from the survival,
so far, of non-Communist foreign regimes, and still needs the
cement of outward discipline, censorship, harsh sanctions
or under Democracy-where the Common ]\fan's claim to
Totality is recognized only as the trend of Progress, the transcendent aim of government as it were, but not as the constitutive principle of the State. It is in this light that the
"individualistic"
tendencies, so manifoldly linked-in the
milieu of Democracy and of militant, though much less of
established Communism-to the worship of the Common Man
should be considered. These affirmations of "self-expression,"
"Sich-Ausleben," "emancipation" and the" freedom to explore
untrodden paths "-as present, for instance, in the_ cult of
"progressive education," of a studied " spontaneity " in
manners and language, of " decadent " or " abstract " art and
ungrammatical or plainly meaningless writing, of sexual promiscuity and perversions, including the vindication of " rights "
for the so-called Third Sex, an " oppressed minority," down
to the rehabilitation of suicide as "Freitod "-would, at first
sight, seem to ill accord with the " common man " conception,
which after all is directed to the utopia of a gigantic realm of
self-contained Philistinism, excluding all individual caprice,
unpredictability and non-conformity. yet, apart from their
obvious subversive function in a society still debarring the
Common Man from his exclusive right to existence, still tainted
with. the evil of " Privilege," these anarchistic tendencies are
calculated to symbolize both the absolute sovereignty of man
5

326

AUBEL KOLNAI

over the universe-the negation of his creatureliness of the
limits and laws imposed on him by the concrete order of a
Nature he has not made-and the joyous descent of man to
the
of " blind urges " and physical " forces " or " pressures," of one material element of "nature" in the sense of
" Science " by whose quantitative and mechanical " control "
he dreams of achieving integal Rationality, Freedom and
Happiness. Loose-jointed and unintelligible "literature," to
take one example, has its place, notwithstanding the justified
repugnance it inspires in the plain man as such, in the complicated ritual performed by the priesthood of the Common
Man, for two reasons: First, it stresses the coincidentia oppositorum, the identity of the Highest and the Lowest in man .•
the mystagogic seolemnity to be conjured out of the witless
play of " spontaneous associations " and of man's status as a
puppet of his " subconscious
the " depths of
intuition," infinitely transcending mere logic and sense, to be
reached through the medium of irrational glossolalia, itself
" rationally " interpretable, " scientifically " explicable at the
complementary level of reductionist naturalism. Secondly,
unintelligible literature gives warrant for its own existence
inasmuGh as the well-trained" common man," when confronted
with such specimens of higher nonsense which he venerates yet
(through no fault of his) fails to understand as he venerates yet
keeps aloof from Einstein, will intensify his righteous indignation against the privilege-ridden society that has deprived him
of the measure of education requisite for an enjoyment in
natura of wisdom and beauty at their highest. In some such
way do many other extravagant and scurrilous antics of subversion for its own sake fall into place as feats performed
" in the service of The People."
An objection to our stressing the element of Identity in the
concept gf the " common man " is likely to be made by those
who notice above all the materialistic and" possessive" character of the ideology centered in that concept. The obsession
of an infinite and insatiable " need-fulfilment," the determina-

THE MEANING 0]' THE " COMMON MAN "

327

tion of man's value in terms of what he "has" rather than
of what he "is," the interpretation of all meaningful human
endeavour-all activity aimed at" reforms," that is-as some
sort of " struggle " devoted to some " conquest," be it " the
conquest of bread," " the conquest of culture," or " the conquest of " any disease or imperfection, would seem to suggest
a cult of boundless egoism and greed, ready to be made valid
at the expense of " others," rather than a disposition on the
part of the ego to feel " one " with the " collective ego " of
humanity. But this objection would repose on an error allied
to the error of those who mix up " dialectical materialism "
with vulgar materialism, or view the Marxian concept of the
" class struggle " in the light of the idea of a meaningless and
purely relativistic " struggle of groups " as elaborated by bourgeois semi-Marxists or "tough " naturalists like Michels,
Pareto, Sorel or Lasswell. It is precisely the glorification and
apotheosis of "the individual's needs " that bears witness to
their being referred to One identical Subject-not, to be sure,
one human subject elevated above the others, and claiming
to represent as it were the common good, but one collective
Subject identical with the subjectivity of all. The solid,
cunning, callous, ruthless egoism of any individual, or for
that matter of any " group," as such can be stated, accepted
as a fact or even appreciated, reckoned with or winked at; it
cannot be divinized or made into an absolute. The " common
man" whose needs and appetites constitute an object of
worship is not simply " any man " whatsoever-he is not a
" privileged " one, of course, but neither is he a " working-man "
who would personally become one of the " privileged ": for
this reason, envy is not the inmost soul of the " movement "but the man who recognizes " any human need," experienced
through and typified by his own, as an object of worship, and
allows his "needs" to be defined and fashioned accordingly.
Most certainly, the subversive humanism which underlies the
concept of the " common man " does view the good as a function of the appetite, instead of viewing the appetite as that

328

AUREL KOLNAI

which is directed towards the good, Hence arise the possessive
and aggressive implications, the reduction of aU goods to what
is material or measurable, patterned on a material scheme of
goods, the hegemony of the quantitative, the tendency to
dissolve everything in qualitatively indifferent units, all directions of appetite being by supposition equivalent. But it is no
mere accident that it should have been Spinoza, the " sublime "
and " pious " rationalist, monist and pantheist, not some unruly
voluptuary, not an empirical or materialist epicurean, who
first codified with classical rigour the great modern principle
of the good defined in terms of the appetite. The identity of
all essential, admissible and operative human appetite is the
necessary complement, the implicit counterpart to that principle. The General Will is only sovereign because it represents
mine, but correspondingly my will is an absolute, an ultimately
valid measure-instead of being a mere factor of " friction," a
wayward resistance to be " eliminated "-inasmuch as it mirrors and embodies, translates into actual experience, and
ensures the immediate "giveness" of, the General WilL
In strict alignment with Hobbes' absolute and amoral
" individual " in the " state of nature" who by one turn of
the handle " surrenders his sovereignty " to the equally absolute and amoral State yet remains essentially what he was
before, with Rousseau's avatar, by dint of an even more
pervasive stroke of magic, of the purely anarchical and idyllic
" good savage " in the shape of the total " citizen " from whose
every pore the General Will is oozing, with Kant's " autonomous" moral will identically equated to a "universal law,"
with Fichte's universal "Great Ego" and Hegel's "Absolute
Spirit " becoming wholly " Itself " after its lengthy course of
dialectical peregrinations, with Marx's proletarian class interest
and consciousness made to represent the "objective" interest
and " true " consciousness of mankind, with the redemption
of the "Unconscious," the basic though inarticulate "reality"
by the "conscious-making" torch of" Analysis" in the Freudian mythology: so many variations, among others, of the

THE MEANING

OF THE ., COMMON MAN "

329

central motif of Prime Matter identified with God-in strict
alignment, we say, with these and like intellectual antecedents,
the Common Man, far from standing either for the primacy
of the Common Good or for its formal negation and the
intangible validity of any private good " as it is," incarnates
the Common Good qua Private and the private identical, as
such, with the common good. Thus, on the one hand, he is
" sovereign " not as " man " pure and simple, in his " unregenerated " suchness, but only as Common Man. On the
other hand, he is not an abstract unit of servility towards any
tyrant that may claim his obedience but only a fit subject
for tyrants furnished with the proper credentials about their
being nothing but the formative and volitive agent of his own
"enlarged" subjectivity. In part, these credentials are historical, since the subversive origins of the tyrant, his record
of continuity with the revolutionary movement, must bear
witness to the purity of his intentions. In part, they are ideological, meaning a cadre of references and aims in which the
Common Man feels entirely " at home," with which he is
conversant as if on a level of his own and which altogether
" conspire " with his pet ideas and predilections. Again, they
are negative in character inasmuch as they must reflect the
absence of any other essential pretension to value: thus, let
alone any claim based on " distinction " or on a " legal " right
to assume power, qualities like sagacity or probity must not
either count by themselves, though they may be stressed as
implications of the tyrant's claim to formulate and to enforce
the will of the Common Man. But among these credentials
will aptly figure, moreover, the excessive and increasing tyranny
of the ruling personnel in question.

n. CoNCLUSION:

THE SUBVERSION

OF HuMAN NATURE

AND THE SELF- ENSLAVEMENT

OF MAN

0

" My " will-speaking as a " common man "-cannot be
" absolute," cannot "rule supreme " or be invested with
unlimited sovereignty unless there is only one efficacious will,

330

AUREL KOLNAI

and indeed only one essential state of consciousness in Society.
To be sure, it must be one which I recognize, which I am bred
and trained to recognize, which I am cudgelled and coaxed
into recognizing, as mine. Immediately I have "rights" or
indeed any " reserved sphere " of my own, others inevitably
come by such attributes and " privileges " also, so that my
power is no longer unique and unbroken but must bend itself,
adjust itself and take regard to an autonomous principle outside it. I should then be obliged to find my bearings in a world
of " alterity ." This entails, speaking psychologically from the
"sovereign common man's" point of view, a palsying sense
lack of freedom. In Totalitarian parlance, the People's
liberty and therewith my liberty would no longer be untrammelled. More, because state-power would then be not the only
effective social power-identical with mine, and with Man'sbut merely one social power, however strong and prepotent,
among others, it would lose the credential of being an embodiment of the one and indivisible revolutionary " mass will,"
and come to appear as. an oppressive and partial state-power
in the old and hated sense of the term. Whatever " factual "
inequalities of social condition it would have to tolerate or see
fit to foster would thus assume the character of " privileges,"
with state-power "on the side of" these "privileges" as in the
ancient regime. Severe terror, then, exercised virtually upon
everybody-including the" ruling set" which is, therefore, not
a " ruling class " proper-, and raging with undestrained ferocity against the various " elements " that fail to fit in with the
system of Identity and thus set themselves outside the subjectunity of·" human society," is not so much an instrumental as
an intrinsic, not to say a logical requirement of Totalitarianism.
In other words, Terror is not the means but the meaning of
the " direct " and " actual " rule of " The People." Again, it
is not so much the bulwark as the definition of that rule: a
guarantee, not of its mere safety but of its structural form.
But if Totalitarian tyranny must be excessive, it must also be
ever-increasing. For after the "liquidation" first of the

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

881

formerly " privileged," the prosperous and cultured classes,
then of the more obvious groups both of small owners and of
"deviating" ideologists of the Left, new targets of actualized
terror must be found, lest the regime should lose the credentials
of revolutionary impetus and of a vigilant readiness to annihilate any divergent will. In addition to that, the substantial
" re-creation " of man-the metaphysical remoulding of his
nature, and by no means merely the politico-economic " reeducation " of his character-must
visibly and infinitely
advance precisely with a view to the " final phase " of accomplished Identity, the "withering away" of the State, the
elimination of the division of labour, the performance of work
out of man's "pure spontaneity." Hence, state-power must
again and again extend and intensify its tyranny. Otherwise,
it would lapse from the position of Permanent Subversion into
that of a "New Conservatism," the defence of an existing
"state of things," even though based on the antecedent of a
petty and transitory, if violent and prolonged, social upheavalnot to use the insulting phrase, " social reform." The Marxian
rebellion. against the order of nature is itself a slave of that
"dialectical" law which it uses to putatively "interpret" the
reality of "Capitalist society." Just as capitalism is supposed
to bring about a " growing misery " of the more and more
vastly proletarianized " masses " out of which the redeeming
catastrophe of the Social Revolution is to spring, Totalitarian
tyranny must not only ruthlessly be maintained but also grow
more and more excessive because it is" ultimately" to" vanish,"
together with all statehood and social constraint, and cannot
do so before the aim it is expected to secure has been " completely " achieved.
The Marxian war against the" contradictions,''" self-alienations " and " objectivizations " implicit in the fabric of civilized
society thus culminates in the blind-alley of the one supreme
" contradiction " between the Terror State which must push
its tyranny further and deeper and the Luciferian vision of pure
Anarchy which underlies its drive and provides its principle

AUREL KOLNAI

is

of being. It the contradiction between the giant
ment of man setting up and, respectively, submitting to
munist tyranny in a mood which combines-not seldom in an
actual unity, as in certain pathological cases of personal" bondage "-an infernal awareness of abject slavery and desperate
impotence with a rapturous if morbid experience of " total "
freedom. This one last and integral " objectivization," which
consists in positing that every state of consciousness, as it were,
shall be " state-consciousness " and a consciousness provided by
the State cannot be overcome except by bursting the joints of
the system, that is, by counter-revolution. It must, on the
other hand, swell infinitely to more monstrous proportions while
the system endures. The "Common Man's sovereignty," then,
means neither an historical self-realization of Man at the cost
of certain grim but transitory hardships or certain painful sacrifices in terms of amenities and culture, nor an ordinary enslavement of common men by a predatory tribe or criminals' association drugging their victims with a specious promise of freedom.
It means a" self-enslavement" sui generis, "self-enslavement"
· in the truest possible sense of the term: the consummate type,
universal in scope, of that "self-enslavement" of man which,
in some form or other, a form not always but often projected on
the level of social relations, we know to proceed from his every
act of rebellion against God. What is comparatively new here,
although manifoldly foreshadowed and prepared throughout
history, is the universality of the scale: the totality of the
pretension to step into the place of God. New, also, is the
attempt to establish in permanence the subversion of the order
of Nature, to inflate the revolutionary moment into a parody
of Eternity, to decree and to impose a new law of Being instead
of merely trying to ignore and to elude or even to defy or in
places to " improve on " the real ones. But, as surely as these
are the real ones and as Man, however devil-ridden, can no
more create a world than can a moth or a grain of dust, the
crazy undertaking is doomed from the outset. There is no such
thing as a Totalitarian order, only a self-perpetuation of sub-

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

333

version.. Self-enslaved man. will not disembogue in an angelic
aeon of undreamed-of liberty but only entangle himself in an
ever-darkening maze of tyranny until that in mankind which
is not he will meet and stop, shatter and rescue him. This
heaven, which is hell, cannot be fulfilled but only destroyed.
And destroyed it will be, for the permanence of Subversion
is only a mock eternity. But after how great an extension in
space and time the monstrous growth will be exploded no one
can yet foretell. Nor is there any telling whether a notable
part of Christian and Liberal civilization, which is also a perishable thing, though the Church of God is not, will survive the
downfall of its lethal foe which at the same time is its nurseling
and the concentrated and rigidified replica of its own nether
self. That the evil power is bound to fail-because
on
behalf of the order of Nature, is sure to react against it: et
pugnabit orbis terrarum contra insensatos-is no reason whatsoever for us not to combat it, combat it with all appropriate
means and on all planes, spiritual and corporeal, not only
in our midst but in our own souls, too; combat not only the
miasmata it sends out but wit heven greater assiduity all
that is receptive and congenial to them in our own mental
complexion, and which is by no means all of its making or a
result of its impact.
According to its prevalent interpretation, stressing Equality,
"the People's Will," and the concrete though still uriaccomplished human type of the " Common Man," Democracy
represents a more pleasant provisional alternative to Totalitarianism-with a fabric of inane fictions and deceits, a great
deal of dangerous inertia, a tendency towards vital and cultural
sterility as a most acceptable ransom paid to keep out Tyranny.
But over and above this precarious compromise towers, in the
phantom-like yet by no means altogether unreal shape of the
Common Man, the promise of an ultimate reunion with the
Totalitarian system: a virtual pledge of its advent. Democracy,
thus conceived and "run," must ever move "forward"; that
is to say, away from what it still actually is, and towards what

834

AUBEL KOLNAI

it " should be " in the sense of its cult as a" religion," human
Totality actualized, Tyranny based on the self-enslavement of
man. Every " social reform," whatever its intrinsic merits or
drawbacks in the given case, being regarded but as a steppingstone for the next one, a phase in the " forward " march of
Utopia-a "Progress" of" self-evident" necessity, and obliging
in conscience-we have tra veiled a long way already from
Liberal abstractions and juridical formalism to Socialist " substance " and mass regimentation, from " rights " to " claims "
and from " liberty" to " security," from one's right to do what
one likes to one's right to get what one likes, from' the pursuit
of happiness " to a claim to happiness rationed out by the
State, a guarantor of " social justice," from an official indifference to quality to its latent persecution, from the principle of a
moral " equivalence " of any human " needs " whatsoever to
the program of ensured " need-gratification." This program
involves a naturalist philosophy as well as a " collective " determination of needs, in other words a comprehensive " planning "
of men's conduct, a wholesale" conditioning" of their character
or " psychology," their thoughts and desires and moodseconomic and administrative, educational and propagandistic,
biotechnical and psychotechnical. The " conditioning " agency
-that is, state-power monistic and centralistic in spirit, though
not actually totalitarian in structure-proceeds, not in view of
objective values and standard rules recognized as a measure
rather than a function of " actual " human volitions, but simply
on behalf of what it is supposed to" condition": men's psychic
" urges " as such. This is precisely what confers on its operation
a tint of virtual totalitarian tyranny. It expresses or announces
the uprooting of man's moral substance, the sacrificing of man's
intrinsic freedom to the fetish of his unlimited power, the
sweeping aside of all " privileged " moral and spiritual value
along with social " privileges," the dissolution of society's
common goods in the private ones of its members and the
absorption of the private in
pseudo-common good, the
primacy of the Moment over the secular wisdom of mankind,

a

THE MEANING OF THE " COMMON MAN "

885

the divinization of a congealed mass subjectivity in the place
of object-references as supreme unifying constants, the logic of
" I must get what I covet and covet what I am told to "-in
brief: the sovereignty of the " Common Man " over Man, or
more briefly still, the self-enslavement of man.
It might still be argued that the compromise can be so
cleverly managed as to endure indefinitely, and that in the
circumstances Democracy as it is and works, including its
service on the altar of the " Common Man," constitutes a
tolerable state of things. In fact, it can hardly " slip imperceptibly " into tyranny proper: the true actualization of
Totality would always imply a more or less abrupt and express
abolition of the framework of constitutional society, a revolution, that is, against Democracy. This, it is true, might come
about easily, here or there, given a sufficient period of maturation and an adequate amount of preparation by an autochthonous " common man " movement of " advanced democrats."
However, once a system of actual Totalitarian power has
formed on a considerable scale,-and, in fact, it exists as a
World Power,- its relationship with that rival, enemy and
tempter becomes the one paramount theme of Democracy. All
its intrinsic vices and immanent dangers pale into insignificance
beside the one supreme peril lest it should prove unable to resist the onslaught of the Power which is relentlessly plotting
its annihilation but which the most. zealous of its own high
priests-the idolatrists of the " Common Man" -cannot but
love and venerate, though their state of fascination is not
always unmixed. with fear and reserves, as a truer or more
emphatic fulfilment of its own meaning.
AUREL KoLNAI
Laval University,
Quebec, Canada.

DR. NORTHROP, TECHNOLOGY AND RELIGION

H

I

IROSHIMA terrified the world with its evidence that
man had a machine potent enough to annihilate himself, his works, terrestrial life and possibly the earth
itself. Wherever the significance of the atom bomb (and bacteriological warfare should not be forgotten) was appreciated,
many men's thoughts turned, as the forlorn soldier's in the fox
holes of Battan, to the divinity, and the sole hope of saving,
not so much one's immortal soul, as the mortal things of time.
This is Dr. Northrop's approach to religion and morality.
As any reflecting person must be, Dr. Northrop is impressed
by roan's prodigious harnessing of nature to produce instruments of destruction. Of course, these products need not be
engines of war; with control they can be guided into ways of
peace. But how control them? What forces can shackle
atomic bombs? The answer is, that controls must be sought
outside of the physical. Only religion and morality, Dr.
Northrop submits/ can furnish the absolutely essential control. He insists that the world, since technology is a world
problem, must have a religion and a morality capable of exercising enough control to save roan from his handiwork. Since
man needs religion and morality to survive, religion and morality are necessary.
1 The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (New York:
Macmillan, 1947),
p. 864. · Hereafter this work is referred to as Logic. It is a collection of treatises,
originating between 1985 and 1947, when they were published as arranged and
amended by the author. Since this work benefits from the author's previyus
publications, it is largely the basis of this critique. Dr. Northrop's "The Complementary Emphases of Eastern Intuitive and Western Scientific Philosophy,'' though
published in Philosophy-East and West, in 1944, really goes back to the EastWest Philosophers' Conference held in Hawaii, 1989. The Meeting of East and
West, Dr. Northrop's probably best known work, appeared in 1946 and has had
four printings. This is referred to as East and West (New York; Macmillan, 1947).

886

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

This argument has similarities with Lindbergh's plea in his
recent book, Of Flight and Life/ which, obviously, does not
make it more valid. It only shows that Dr. Northrop's approach is not an isolated instance of putting the cart before
the horse. Right order gives God first place, and then men.
Whether Dr. Northrop would agree to this is doubtful. For,
as will appear, it is difficult to say just what is Dr. Northrop's
belief in God. But from the point of view of reason, it is evident that, granting God's existence, man's obligation of religion follows not from man's need of God to keep himself safe
in this world but from the relationship which issues from God's
transcendence and man's dependence. 3 This criticism is valid,
of course, chiefly for those who accept the existence of a sovereign God distinct from the world and its manifold beings.
Religion is not just a life-preserver for drowning men. Yet it
may be doubted that such considerations carry much weight
against Dr. Northrop on his own premises or postulates, since it
is not clear that he grants in any real sense the existence of a
transcendent supreme being.
To begin with, he stresses the need of religion if man is to
survive. Precisely what he means by religion is never stated.
Apparently it stands in general for man's thinking about God
and his relations with Him. But of what sort must man's
religion be in order to control, as Dr. Northrop says it must,
man's technological achievements? Two qualities, at least, are
essential: religion must be intimately associated with science
and it must be capable of unifying man the world over. Dr.
Northrop is not in the least uncertain about whether or not
such a religion actually exists. He is sure it does not. 4 On the
New York: Scribner, 1948.
Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, 81, 1: ... religio proprie importat ordinem ad Deum. Ipse enim est cui principaliter alligari debemus tanquam
indeficienti principio: ad quem etiam nostra electio assidue dirigi debet sicut in
ultimnm finem. Also, I-II, 60, 3, where Aquinas shows that religion along with
the other moral virtues pertains to justice, and II-II, 81, 3; Ad religionem autem
pertinet exhibere revereutiam uni Deo secundum unam rationem, in quantum
scilicet est primum principium creationis et guberantionis rerum.
• Logic, pp. 364-365, 373, 378.
2

3

838

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

score of religion's scientific connections it may be conceded
that Oriental religions do not, and never did, have the required
alliance with science and scientific method. 5 This will appear
clearly when its intuitive character is dealt with. As for
ern Christianity, in Dr. Northrop's opinion, neither Roman
Catholicism nor Protestantism meets the test.
Roman Catholic ethics and theology, the author concedes,
were essentially connected with Greek and mediaeval science.
When this gave way before Galilei, Newton, Einstein and
Planck, Roman Catholicism was set adrift and has never recaptured its hold on science. As a consequence, the ethical and
:religious humanism as well as the Roman Catholic conception
of the good society, became such that they cannot any longer
fully comprehend, relate themselves to, or control the contemporary scientific technology. 6 While Roman Catholicism fails
in Dr. Northrop's eyes because of its effete science, Protestantism likewise fails to qualify because it has connected itself
with no science at alL Traditional and modern Protestantism,
the author emphasizes, conceive moral philosophy and religion
as autonomous subjects, standing on their own feet and justified independently of natural science, with which they simply
have nothing to do. This explains, in his mind, why, in Protestantism, theism gave way to deism, which, in turn, under the
attrition of Hume's criticism of Bishop Berkeley and John
Locke, ended in the denial of Go<Land the soul's immortality. 7
Kant, revolting against Hume had, of course, a philosophy
of natural science. But Dr. Northrop dismisses it as being no
help at all; it simply enfeebled morality and religion. Kant
himself, Dr. Northrop suggests, saw the chasm between his
• Cf. Dr. Northrop's essay, Chapter VIII, in Philosophy-East and West, edited
by C. A. Moore (Princeton: University Press, 1946). Also East and West, pp.
410-411, 484. Also The Great Religions of the Modem World, edited by E. 'J,
Jurji (Princeton: University Press, 1947), " Confucianism," " Taoism," " Hinduism," "Buddhism," "Shintoism." Also W. E. Hocking, in Philosophy-East and
West, p. 2.
• Logic, p. 865-366. Also The Meeting of East and West, pp. 264-275.
7 Logic, pp.

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY AND RELIGION

389

science on the one hand and religion and morality on the other,
and proceeded to separate morality and religion from science
and make them autonomous. The immediate result was freedom for man to believe anything about morality and religion
suggested by the demands of the moral will. But the lamentable
end-effect was to make ethics and religion vacuous verbalisms.
" Ethics and religion were robbed of one of their previously
most important functions in life, the function, namely, of pulling together every phase of man's knowledge and experience
into a single moving triumphant whole." Yet, Dr. Northrop
says, the notion persists in Protestantism of keeping ethics and
religion separate from science. This explains why Protestantism cannot meet technology's challenge, which is, after all,
a crisis born of man's frightful success with science.8
Dr. Northrop's evaluation of Protestantism's insistence upon
the disjointed autonomy of religion and ethics in the main is
well taken. From Luther to Niebuhr and Barth the emphasis
has been so heavy upon the partial truth of God's kingdom
within man, that the more complete truth of God's existence
and kingdom outside man has been almost obliterated. Furthermore, Protestantism was not only a revolt against the papacy
and traditional Christian orthodoxy. It was a rebellion against
reason, culminating in Kant's attack on man's intelligence in
favor of his voluntary and emotional nature. It was all very
well, indeed rather too simple, to infer God's existence and the
immortality of the soul and freedom and virtue from the categorical imperative, and to insist that this imperative is as clear
within a man as Konigsberg's starry sky is above him. But
the outcome was lamentable; it made life's most vital truths
dependent upon the alleged imperative, with the consequence
that if a man looked within and failed to find the imperative
he could reasonably reject the ethical and religious convictions
based upon it. For since these truths had been divorced from
reason, there was no arguing about them. Reason and scientific inference could not be used in a court where they had been
officially disqualified.
8

Logic, p. 871, and 87!! and cf. pp. 864-867.

340

,JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

While this may be granted in Dr. Northrop's criticism of
Protestantism, it leaves untouched the author's assumption
that religion must be intimately tied up with science. Protestantism has not been tied up with science; that is true. Likewise it has made religious and ethical truth autonomous, with
grave injury to religion and morality. And finally it may be
conceded with Dr. Northrop, that Protestantism cannot unite
the world to control man's technological successes. But none
of this, singly or collectively, justifies his contention that
religion is a coefficient of natural science.
When his conclusions about Roman Catholicism are examined, it is to his credit that he appreciates so well the work
of Thomas Aquinas, who did produce a marvelous synthesis of
science, philosophy, ethics, and theology. Probably no thinker
before or since has succeeded as he did in blending human with
divine wisdom. It is likewise true that thirteenth century science in the West was largely inherited from the Greeks. But it
is startling to find Dr. Northrop asserting an essential dependence of Aquinas' philosophy, religion, and ethics upon his Greek
science, and even more bewildering still to have him rejecting
Roman Catholicism because of its alleged dependence upon the
mediaeval Saint Thomas and his obsolete science.9
Dr. Northrop may have his own meaning for Roman Catholicism, whieh is the term he commonly uses-although, if he
has, he fails to make it clear. But if Roman Catholicism has
its usual meaning, it is difficult to justify this particular criticism of it by Dr. Northrop. Catholicism existed before Thomas
Aquinas and the thirteenth century. Eight hundred years
separated him from Augustine of Hippo; yet Saint Thomas not
only had the highest esteem for Saint Augustine but made
liberal use of his teaching. This is not to deny there were differences between them. The point is that with all their dissimilarities they professed essentially the same religion. In
addition, it must be remembered that for some nine centuries
Augustinism prevailed, indeed to such an extent that when
• Logic, pp. 28, 865; also East and West, pp. 268-290.

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

341

Aristotle became popular in the thirteenth century, some of his
champions were hailed as heretics. 10 In the light of such facts,
how can one equate Roman Catholicism with AristotelicoThomistic
value such philosophy may,
or may not, be thought to have!
This, however, is not the main issue of the present critique
of Dr. Northrop. Likewise may be dismissed rather quickly
his statement that there is not a major concept in Aristotle's
metaphysics which does not appear in his physics, and that
since modern physics has displaced ancient Greek physics, so
is required the rejection of the Aristotelian philosophy and its
attendant mediaeval Thomistic theology. 11 Dr. Northrop makes
no effort to justify these statements. They are offered, presumably, as self-evident, undebatable. But if language means
anything, his interpretation of Aristotle, Aquinas and the dependence of Roman Catholicism upon them conflicts with facts
and misses the spirit of Aquinas as well as the import of his
synthesis of Christian truth, mediaeval science and Aristotelian
metaphysics. Moreover, one can very properly question Dr.
Northrop's unsupported view about Aristotle, which so confounds his philosophy and his science, that the rejection of his
physics necessitates rejecting his metaphysics.

II
At any rate, for reasons which the author holds to be unquestionably valid, he rejects twentieth century Western Christianity as being eligible for the universal religion which he
thinks absolutely essential for civilization. The possibility even
1 °Facts with which Dr. Northrop is acquainted,
cf. East and West, pp.
On this complicated subject cf. M. De Wulf, History of Mediaeval Philosophy
(New York, 1938), 3rd English ed., ii.
E. Gilson, Spirit of Mediaeval
Philosophy (New York, 1936), pp. 15 ff.; J. B. McAllister, The "De Occultis
Operibus Naturae" of St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, 1989), pp. 81-53; Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l'Averroisme latin au Xlllme siecle (Fribourg, 1899),
I. lxx; Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (new edition, Oxford, 1936), i. 356 ff.; R. Simeterre, "Sur les condamnations d'Aristote et de St.
Thomas xiiie S." in Revue pratique d' Apologetique, v. (1908), pp.
11 Logic, pp.

6

842

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

of converting the Orient to Christianity is peremptorily dismissed.12 Indeed, granting the possibility, Dr. Northrop could
not logically accept it as a solution. For if contemporary
Christianity is rejected as the solution of technological problems, it would only make matters worse to convert the whole
world to it. So much, then, on the negative side of Dr. Northrop's thinking. about religion and the world's crisis. It is not
the chief element of this study, which is directed rather to Dr.
Northrop's proposed solution of the problem and to investigating how religion fares in the process. A summary of his position will be followed by its criticism.
Dr. Northrop advises that the only way religion can meet
the challenge of the times is for the religions of the West, East,
and Far East to combine into a world religion. The theology
and morality will be determined on the basis of their harmony
with modem science and approved scientific method. With
its validity thus assured, this religion will be man's best and
only chance of mastering forces which show signs of becoming
Frankensteins. The author does not minimize the radical differences between the East and West. 18 None of the four major
. religions of Far Eastern origin (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism) is theistic. None has a religious prophet
essential to salvation. Their religious writing tends to be poetic,
intuitive, and aesthetic. On the contrary, the major religions
of Western and Middle Eastern origin (Judaism, Christianity,
and Mohammedanism) are theistic and have a divinely inspired
prophet essential to salvation.
These differences between the philosophy and religion of the
Far East and those of the Middle East and the West are explained by Dr. Northrop in terms of his theory of knowledge.
" All that anyone," he says, " can possibly kno.w in any field
of experience or knowledge whatever must be of one of two
kinds or a combination of both: One can know what one immediately apprehends without any theoretical acts of faith or logiLogic, p. 878.
Logic, pp. 878-877. ·For much fuller treatment, see his East and West, pp.
8U-874.
10
18

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

343

cal inference taking one beyond the immediately apprehended.
Or one can know that which, by an act of the mind, one infers
from the immediately apprehended." 14 Calling the immediately apprehended factor in knowledge and reality the aesthetic
component, and the unseen inferred factor, the theoretic component gives Dr. Northrop his distinction between Oriental and
Occidental religion. Oriental religion identifies the divine with
the timeless factor in the aesthetic component; Western religion identifies the divine with the timeless or invariant factor
in the theoretic component. 15 The Oriental restricts scientific
knowledge, philosophical reality, moral goodness, and religious
divinity to the directly apprehended portion of human knowledge alone. He concedes the practical value of scientific method
and logical inference, butrejects them as worthless in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth. For him the only ways
are intuition and contemplation, which are functions of direct,
immediate apprehension.
Of themselves and apart from inference, what knowledge
does intuition or immediate apprehension give? According to
Dr. Northrop it reveals a continuum differentiated by the
colors, sounds, odors, pains, and pleasures which the senses
convey.16 This continuum he calls the" differentiated aesthetic
continuum," and goes on to explain that it has two directly
apprehended factors. One of them is the aggregate of differentiations, in other words the specific immediately sensed colors,
sounds, odors, pains and pleasures limited in time and space.
The other factor is the immediately apprehended continuum
apart from these differentiations, which he terms "the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum." 17
One is not astonished when Dr. Northrop finds that the
appelations Nirvana, Tao, Jen, and Brahman evidently and
necessarily refer to " the indeterminate aesthetic continuum."
For the proper object of contemplation is the \].nchanging, the .
uLogic, p. 875.
Logic, pp. 874-877.
16 Logic, pp. 875-876. Cf. East and West, pp. 815-820.
17 Logic, pp. 875-876. Cf. East a.nd West, pp. 815-822, 408 fl'.
15

844

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

immortal. But the unchanging and the immortal are indeterminate, since determinate things as a matter of daily experience come to be, change, and pass away. Consequently the
Oriental rejects immortality in the sense of the immortality of a
determinate personality and, for the same reason, the existence
of a supreme being of determinate characteristics. Likewise
Eastern religions do not need a prophet while the Western ones
do. All that religious sages in the Orient have to do is to direct
one's attention to the factor given with immediacy with which
the divine is identified. But when the divine is conceived of
as being beyond experience and intuition, then, if God is to be
known with the directness of the aesthetic intuition, it must
be through a divinely inspired being who represents God coming
into the world of immediacy.
In great contrast, the West tended to identify the scientifically true, the philosophically real, the morally good, and
the religiously divine with the inferred unseen factor in the
nature of things. 18 Its approach is by way not of intuition but
of inference. It believes in an unseen God the Father, beyond
the grasp of sense experience or intuition. In the West personal
immortality is a basic belief. But, Dr. Northrop adds, this
immortality is not claimed for the self known directly in the
aesthetic intuition. Indeed " if a religion is going to affirm the
doctrine of the immortality of the determinate personality the
real in knowledge must be identified not with the self given
with immediacy in the aesthetic intuition but with a self
inferred from the immediately apprehended self." 19
This analysis of the striking differences, however, between
East and West, does not prevent Dr. Northrop from insisting
that religion for the contemporary world must relate the intuitive emotional type of religion of the aesthetic component of
reality with the inferred, more doctrinal, theistic type of religion of the theoretic component of reality. 20 He opines that
Logic, pp. 367-377. Cf. East and West, pp.
Logic, pp. 376-377. Cf. East and West, pp. 270-277.
20 Logic, pp. 377-878.
Cf. East and West, pp. 454-471.

18

19

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

345

such a combination of the moral and religious thought of East
and West has a chance of winning the whole world, since the
various religious groups will keep their integrity and self-respect
and contribute something to the totality rather than be forced
into some foreign religion. Before this union can be actually
achieved, Dr. Northrop warns, there will have to be a religion
of the truly Western type, since, according to him, none as yet
exists. He wants a Western religion which will be authentically
an inferred religion, one in which valid, unseen orthodox factors will be distinguished from falsehood and heresy, and in
which the fantasies of the moron or obsessions of the crank will
be sifted from true doctrines about the unseen divinity. 21
The way to do this is by means of the logical and scientific
methods developed by the West for making trustworthy inferences to the unseen. Such doctrines as God the Father or the
immortality of the soul can be winnowed from illusory inferred
objects "only by the empirical and logical scientific methods
which science and philosophy and mediaeval theology developed. . . . It is not the business of the theologian to determine whether such an unseen inferred theoretically known component of reality exists or not, or what its character is. This
is the business of the scientist." 22
The integrity of Western religion must be restored, first, by
pursuing the emphasis upon intuition of the Oriental type and,
secondly, by developing on the part of contemporary man a
confidence in the existence of inferred unseen factors in knowledge. For this purpose natural science, especially mathematical
physics, is the most effective instrument in Western knowledge.
For the world " of man and nature which it reveals to us has
characteristics differing radically from what we immediately
apprehend. Yet these objects and space-time structures of
mathematical physics constitute the most trustworthy knowledge which the Western man possesses at the present time." 23
Granted, then, that an adequate religion of the Western type
21 Logic, pp. 878-879.
•• Logic, p. 881. Cf. pp. 881-882.
•• Logic, p. 880. Cf. East and West, pp. 294-296.

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JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

arises, a solution to the problem of a religion universally acceptable is in sight. The scientifically grounded, theoretically
known, theism of the West must be combined with the Oriental aesthetic component known by direct intuition. The principle of union is the epistemic correlation of the aesthetic components of reality- with the theoretic. In this way " our world
will possess a moral and religious knowledge which, because of
its essential connection with the theory and philosophy of science, should have the means necessary to control the otherwise
ethically neutral technological instruments of science. And,
because of its roots in the traditional culture of the East as
well as the West, this humanism should possess the truly international character necessary to call forth the support of men
the world over." 24

III
No one is likely to dispute Dr. Northrup's insistance upon
tlte crisis of civilization. Though some may dissent from his
thesis that religion and morality are man's solitary hope, surely
on this score he is perfectly correct. Likewise, his emphasis
upon the need for bringing men into a united religious front is
not going to be disputed by any one who realizes the weakness
which comes from the world's disunited and warring religious
sects. The recent Assembly in Amsterdam of the World Council of Churches evidenced the consciousness in some non-Catholics of the need for a stronger alliance. While the Catholic
Church could not take part in the meeting, she has not failed
down the centuries, and never more than at the present time,
to echo, and work towards the fulfilment of, Christ's prayer,
that " ... they all may be one, as we also are." The need of
bringing East and West closer together has been succinctly
stated by J. H. Van Der Hoop in his "Freedom in the Philosophy of East and West." 25 But probably no writer in Eng•• Logic, p. 884. Notice the shift from religion to "humanism." It is extremely
significant.
•• Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, June, 1948, pp. 571-57!l (Vol.
viii, no. 4) •

DR. NORTHROP,

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AND RELIGION

347

lish has given more thought to, and argued with greater insight,
earnestness, and conclusiveness for, a cultural and religious
meeting of East and West than Dr. Northrop himself. The
necessity, then, of the world's religious unity may be grantedas indeed it must; but this leaves the problem of achieving it
still an open question.
Dr. Northrop's solution, presented with sincere scholarship
and no little charm, offers serious difficulties, whether it be
considered in his suggestion for a union of Oriental and Occidental religions or in his criticism of Christianity with the
recommendation for what he calls a truly Western type of religion. The net result seems nothing short of a rejection of
truth and a relegation of the verities of religion, and morality,
to the residue of postulates or "truths" justified by his norms
of scientific method. At best religion turns out to be simply
scientific humanism. In this instance, the " cure " appears
worse than the disease!
Dr. Northrop's position would be more definite and certainly
more comprehensible and manageable if it were simply reducible to the logical positivism which it somewhat suggests. But
Dr. Northrop cannot be so neatly labelled. Far from agreeing
that only those statements have meaning which are based on
observable facts and which connect the facts logically, he
advances a system of postulates and theorems, as he calls them,
which do not and cannot fall under directly verifiable sense
experience. Indeed his views on " naked facts " and the fetish
of their worship amounts almost to an excoriation. 26 Undoubtedly Dr. Northrop holds to the validity of religious truths and
would maintain that statell?-ents about morality and God do
2 " Cf. Logic, pp. 39-57; 317-318.
For example, " ... if what one wants is pure
fact, then it is neither to the beliefs of common sense nor to physics that one
should go, but to impressionistic art, which presents only the sense impressions and
omits the external material object." (p. 44.) And again (p. 317) "The only way
to get pure facts, independent of all concepts and theory, is merely to look at them
and forthwith to remain perpetually dumb, never uttering a word or describing
what ·one sees, after the manner of a calf looking at the moon. F·or the moment one
reports what one observes ... at that moment one has not pure facts but facts
brought under concepts, and hence theory."

848

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

have meaning. Nevertheless the author's proposal for combining the religions of the East and West apparently implies
the compatibility of opposites.
In his contrast of Eastern and Western religions, which necessarily had to overlook significant details, the author does not
minimize differences. Thus he allows that the West clings to a
belief in a personal determinate God, in the immortality of the
determinate individual human being, in a wophet considered
divine and essential to salvation. The East, on these items,
shows not merely differences but holds firmly to the very opposites. The Oriental rejects a personal, determinate God in favor
of the Indeterminate. Western determinate immortality is converted by the Oriental into the loss of the personal determinate
being and the individual's disappearance. At the same time
he does not look upon prophets as necessary for salvation. In
logical terms, the Oriental and Occidental positions are simply
contrary. And whatever criticism Dr. Northrop makes of
Western religious truths, he never suggests rejecting these particular ones. All that he says seems to argue for some combination of East and West.
This union, granted its desirability, would have to be one of
the following: (a) East and West come together but each
keeps its respective and opposed religious doctrine. (b) In
fusing, one defers entirely to the other; religious truth then
would be completely either of the East or of the West. (c) A
compromise of doctrine is worked out, which would be a patchwork of Eastern and Western beliefs. (d) Finally, the systems
of East and West are wholly discarded and a new religion is
produced. Of these possibilities only (a) and (c) need be retained. For Dr. Northrop explicitly rejects (b), of converting
one group to the other; and there is no evidence that he would
jettison the religions of East and West in favor of an entirely
new religion foreign to both (d) .
It is then a matter of facing the proposal to bring East and
West together in either the way of (a), each keeping its respective beliefs, or of (c), blending their characteristic doctrines.
Either of these alternatives involves combining religious con-

DR. NORTHROP,

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349

victions which are contraries. But contraries cannot be true
together-though they may be simultaneously false. Now Dr.
Northrop nowhere hints that the Eastern beliefs are false. And
while he does think that a religion of the truly Western type
nowhere as yet exists, he does not reject as false the particular
Western tenets which are here being opposed to the Oriental's
as contraries.
In arguing, then, for the :religious consolidation of East and
West, on his own premises, Dr. Northrop seems to be asking
for the :rationally impossible. It is either this or Dr. Northrop
accepts the compatibility of contraries-which would imply rejecting the logical doctrine of opposition and, equivalently, of
truth itself. For if contraries can be true together, then truth
ceases to mean anything and the rational approach to any problem becomes chimerical. This conclusion seems inescapable
even in the presence of the author's strenuous efforts to salvage
human knowledge through what he calls " epistemic correlations "-to be considered shortly.
Dr. Northrop's argument reveals another weakness
that it
makes religion a Deus ex machina. To survive man needs religion; so he must produce a religion to insure his survivaL
This appears without a doubt to be D:r. Northrop's position.
Whether there exists a personal God or not; whether He has
given man a revelation or not; whether He has sent official
representatives to speak in His name or not; whether there is
an institution of His founding or not-are questions which,
apparently, are to be answered with reference not to the actuality of the event but to the contribution they might make
toward saving man from himself. This is not to imply that
Dr. Northrop is proposing a religion tailored to every man's
caprice. Quite the contrary. He wants religion to be true and
valid and orthodox, freed of heresy and falsehood, isolated from
the fantasies of the moron and the obsessions of the crank. 27
This is the standard he sets up for religion in general but most
especially for the authentic Western religion which he insists
27

Logic, pp. 378-379.

350

,JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

must exist before any union with Eastern religions is posl!ible.
This raises the most salient point of Dr. Northrop's position:
his doctrine of truth and criteria for its verification.

IV
Dr. Northrop's distinction between knowledge by intuition
and by postulation has been touched upon in his proposal for
uniting Oriental and Occidental religions. The East, he says,
cultivated intuition while the West has favored the ways of
inference. In this sweeping generalization Dr. Northrop is
merely applying a very basic theory of his about concepts by
intuition and concepts by postulation.
Concepts by intuition, called also concepts by inspection or
induction, are concepts whose complete meaning is given by
something immediately apprehended and observable. 28 In these
concepts the empirical immediately observable fact first provides the meaning. Upon it is constructed a scientific concept
by merely giving some determinate sign to the empirically given
meaning. But what is this something which is immediately
apprehended and observable? " ... all that one knows as pure
fact," Dr. Northrop explains," is what one's senses convey, and
the senses convey neither material common-sense and scientific
objects nor persisting selves, but intermittent aesthetic qualities different from person to person and hence not giving either
substance, causality in the sense of mathematical physics, or a
public world." 29 This might suggest that Dr. Northrop is
rather sceptical about the existence of these common-sense,
public objects, as he calls them. But he actually is not. It
seems, he allows, that " sense objects do point beyond themselves to postulated factors such as tables, chairs, persons,
electrons, electro-magnetic propagations, and a space-time
manifold which is public .... " 30 But one's conviction about
any of these objects does not spring from experience directly;
•• Cf. Logic, pp.
•• Logic, p. 44.
80 Logic, pp.

104, 186, 170-171, 191,

Cf. East and West, pp. 447-450.

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AN» RELIGION

351

they are theoretically inferred. 31 In other words, anything
beyond the barest data of the various senses is the product of
illation rather than of external or internal sensation, taken
singly or jointly.
Concepts by postulation, on the contrary, are not empirical.
"A concept by postulation is one ... designating some factor
in man or nature which, in whole or in part, is not directly
observed, the meaning of which may be proposed for it postulationally in some specific deductively formulated theory." 82 The
significance of these concepts, completely or partially, is set or
determined by the postulates of the specific deductively formulated theory or system in which they occur. By deductive
theory Dr. Northrop intends a set of propositions, which fall
into two groups-postulates and theorems. Granted the postulates, the theorems can be proved. Postulates themselves are
those propositions of a theory which are taken as unproved
and used to prove the theorems. They are not verifiable directly through experience and have no meaning apart from a
specific deductively formulated theory. They are general propositions referring to all instances, independently of time. Most
of the concepts of Western philosophical systems, Dr. Northrop
avers, are concepts by postulation. This is what makes them
so important.
However vague some may find Dr. Northrop's explanation of
how concepts by postulation arise, it is perfectly clear, that
they " are not caused by denotatively apprehended, previous
historical or social events or economic conditions. Instead of
being the effects of the latter factors, the primitive concepts by
postulation in a deductively formulated theory are, precisely
because they are primitive and elementary, the causal factors
which determine the empirically given phenomena for which
they were introduced to account." 38 On the positive side, to
justify the origin of concepts by postulation, Dr. Northrop is
81 Logic, p. 41.
•• East and West, p. 447.

especially pp.
•• Logic, pp. 69-70.

Cf. Logic, pp.

67, 83-84, 139, 170-171, and

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

at pains to explain that they gain their meaning from the postulates of the scientific theory in which they occur. "Apart from
these postulates and the deduced theorems they are meaningless marks. Thus, the meaning of these concepts, i,nstead of
being presented to the empirical scientist by what is immediately inspected or observed, is proposed by the theoretical
scientist drawing upon the full play of his material imagination
and upon the investigations by pure mathematicians into the
formal possibilities. Afterwards ... the empirical scientist
determines whether the entities and relations designated by
the system of meanings thus prescribed by the theoretical scientist's postulates are verified as existing .... " 84
Concepts by intuition, i. e., the empirical factor in knowledge,
are related to concepts by postulation, i.e., the theoretic factor,
by what Dr. Northrop calls epistemic correlations.85 They
associate a thing known empirically in its aesthetic component
with what is in some sense that same thing known postulationally in its theoretic component. In short, they join the
empirical component of any complete object of knowledge to its
theoretic component. In this way the relation between the
immediately sensed factors in knowledge and the postulationally prescribed, deductively formulated, theoretical factors
is 'unambiguously and unspeculatively prescribed by the nature of scientific method itself ... .' 36
Dr. Northrop submits, and this is a dominant theme in The
Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities as well as in The
Meeting of East and West, that the solution of contemporary
ideological issues (which certainly include religion) must be
found in the two-fold relation of epistemic correlations, whereby
the aesthetic, intuitive, purely empirically given component in
man and nature is related to the theoretically designated and
indirectly verified component. 87 Epistemic correlations are so
extremely pivotal to this study, because it is by them that the
•• Logic, p. 104.
•• Logic, p.
Cf. also pp. 119, 144, 171, 198-194. East and West, pp.
16 East and West, p. 448.
"Idem.

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

353

existence of the unobservable scientific objects is verified. The
procedure is this: the unobserved scientific objects are first
postulated. Then one sets up "epistemic correlates ahead of
time between them and the factors which one can directly
inspect. If the directly inspected data are in accord with what
the postulated or deduced theorems plus the epistemic correlations specify with respect to the continuum of immediately
apprehended fact, then the unobservable scientific objects are
said to exist." 38
Dr. Northrop is arguing for an authentic religion of the
Western type, which means a religion which holds to the unseen, unexperienced existence of God and the truth of personal
immortality on the basis of inference. In other words these
religious truths are concepts by postulation. For this reason,
in that they are the result not of experience but of indirect
knowledge through inference, they must be checked. Otherwise there would be a hopeless mixture of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, against which Dr. Northrop launches his test of valid
truth. More concretely this signifies that the concepts by
postulation of the much desired and vitally needed religion of
the Western type must be tested out by reference to empirical
fact. " Trustworthy unseen factors can be distinguished from
erroneously inferred ones only by means of the logical and
scientific methods developed by the West for making trustworthy inferences to the unseen." 39 This is why Dr. Northrop
consistently, if a bit astonishingly, adds, referring to religious
truths, "These and all other inferred unseen objects, such as
God the Father or the immortal soul of theistic religions, can
be known and distinguished from illusory inferred objects only
by the empirical and logical scientific methods which science
and philosophy and medieval theology developed. Moreover,
it is not the business of the theologian to determine whether
such an unseen inferred theoretically known component of
reality exists or not, or what its character is. This is the business the scientist." 40 Damaging as this may appear to any38

Logic, p. Ul.

•• Logic, pp. 878-879.

•• Logic, p. 881.

354

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

body holding to religious truths as immutable and eternal and
simply transcendent to the scientist's field and as the subjective counterpart of objectively existing, extra-mental reality,
the situation is actually much worse than it appears.
First, where do these religious truths, these postulated unobserved scientific objects, these concepts by postulation come
from? Apparently they get their meaning and worth from the
specific deductively formulated theory of which they are a
part. 41 But where does the theory come from? From what
Dr. Northrop has written, it seems one must say that these
theories are largely, if not entirely, the products of man's free
and fertile imagination and intellect. " There is no limit whatever," he explains, "to the sources of meaning upon which one
may draw for the construction of deductively formulated theory
in science. The mind of the deductive scientist is absolutely
free and open in this respect, getting meanings from any source
whatever. The only prescription is that these meanings must
be rigorously and precisely designated by being unambigously
prescribed in the postulates of the deductive theory, and that
the theory must be verified by way of epistemic correlations
with directly inspectable data before what its postulates designate may be said to exist." 42 It is difficult to see how such a
theory can possibly avoid solipsism.
It may be objected, that in this passage Dr. Northrop is writing of concepts by postulation in natural science and not of religious beliefs. This is hardly a defense, since Dr. Northrop
contends that religious beliefs in a religion of the Western type
are purely concepts by postulation and must be treated as similar concepts in any other field of scientific knowledge. They
are to be referred to the scientists and submitted to the appropriate empirical methods for ratification. This brings the criticism of Dr. Northrop's plan for an authentic Western religion
to its second big stumbling block.
.
that Western man possesses a body of concepts by
postulation, or religious truths, which he obtained in some way
" Logic, pp.

139.

•• Logic, p. 123.

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

355

or other but certainly not from experience and which are not
verifiable as such by observation nor are in any way immediately apprehended, the true will be winnowed from the false
by Dr. Northrop's scientific method. 43 Whatever else his theory
of method may or may not imply, it involves ultimately an
appeal to empirical knowledge, recourse to what can be known
directly, to immediately apprehended fact. 44 But what does
Dr. Northrop think can be known in this way? In other words,
what is the " stuff " of these concepts by intuition?
One directly apprehends, Dr. Northrop replies, colors and
sounds and the other specific data of the particular senses " ...
one does not immediately apprehend even common-sense, public objects, to say nothing about the scientific objects of physics
such as electrons and electro-magnetic propagations.
What
one immediately apprehends are colors and sounds." Man
does not have a direct, immediate apprehension even of such
common-sense objects as tables, chairs, persons-though Dr.
Northrop concedes that "It seems to be the case that sense
objects do point beyond themselves to postulated factors such
as tables, chairs, persons, electrons, electro-magnetic propagations .... " 45 Still what they point to are postulated factors,
the objects not of concepts by intuition but of concepts by
postulation or inference. Consequently when religious beliefs
are submitted to the scientists for verification, as Dr. Northrop
insists they must be, the limit of their empirical verification in
the last analysis is the hopelessly lean pickings of directly
apprehensible sense data, which is nothing more than ineffable
deliverences of the several senses. How can God the Father or
the immortality of the soul or any other religious truth or, for
that matter, truth of any sort whatsoever, if idealism is to be
avoided, emerge from such emaciated data! The conclusion
•• For Dr. Northrop's view on method cf. Logic, pp. viii-x, 1-76, 133-167,
!l57,
177.
•• Cf. Logic, pp. 36, 41, 63-70,
45 Logic, pp.
Notice how Dr. Northrop here cites George Berkeley with
approval. It is certainly a sign of the drift of the author's own epistemological
position.

356

JOSEPH

Bo MCALLISTER

seems inevitable, that Dr. Northrop's prescription for a true
religion of the Western type shrinks truth to nothing beyond
the pattern of man's hopeful thinking.
When Dr. Northrop's plan, then, for a religion of the truly
Western and scientific type is examined on the basis of his
theory of knowledge, of which it essentially partakes, it seems
to lead down blind alleys. The religion will be constituted of
concepts by postulation of no better origin than man's wishful
thinking to complete a deductively formulated theory or, more
practically, be inspired by his critical need for something to save
him from himself and his works. Neither explanation rescues
religious truth from idealism or some sort of opportunistic utilitarianism. On the other hand, if the postulates are tested
against experience, one is confronted with an empirical reality
pared down to nothing but the denuded, ineffable data of the
individual senses. AU else is inference, and pertains to concepts
by postulation.
This brings the inquiry back to where it started and suggests
what looks like an astonishing vicious circle. In the process
religious truth has been not merely attenuated. In any sense
of implying a reality existing apart from, and independently of,
man, which man comes to know and which creates certain
obligations, religious truth has vanished. Consequently, while
acknowledging Dr. Northrop's sincerity and erudition, the alternative seems inevitable-either Dr. Northrop's doctrine, by
reason of its disregard of contraries and its theory of knowledge,
is destructive of religion in any real sense, or one must reject
the notion that truth involves mental conformity to an extramental reality which it discovers, and accept an epistemology
which not only undermines religion but leads to scepticism.
Dr. Northrop's religion is nothing more than an impressive
humanism, disguised by a brilliant analysis and an intricate
logical apparatus, but for all that a man-made product. It is
a relationship not between creator and creature, between the
infinite and the finite, between a necessary, self-existent supreme
being, the ultimate goal of man's knowing and loving, and the

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

857

contingent, dependent creature who is bound to know and love
and serve God simply because he owes Him everything. Dr.
Northrop's religion, from man, by man, and for man, binds
man to the effusions of his own desperate thinking. What is
offered as religious truths are only man's own brain children,
whose legitimacy he judges by his own standards.
Dr. Northrop proposes his humanism with a necessity as
critical and absolute as claimed by any prophet. Man must
produce a valid universal religion or perish. That is Dr.
Northrop's solemn judgment. The only thing wrong with it is
that the threatened perdition has nothing of eternity about
it; salvation has traded a timeless heaven for a brief span of
happiness between birth and death. Worst of all, this poor
human who dangles on the brink of being destroyed by forces
of his own making has lost his resemblance to God and forgotten that he is God's creature.

v
But aside from the regrettable epistemological consequences
of Dr. Northrop's plea for religion and apart from the validity
of the criticism which has been offered, there is another aspect
of his doctrine, challenging and indisputably clear. In it religion becomes nothing more than a Deus ex machina. Men
desperately need religion, so they make one.
It has been pointed out that Dr. Northrop's views of God,
natural' knowledge and religious truth, even when most favorably interpreted, threaten religion. But his insistence upon
man's need for religion is unequivocal and dramatic; either man
produces a universally acceptable religion or he perishes. Dr.
Northrop does not begin with God-nor even with man in the
sense that man discovers God and thereby contracts religious
obligations. Dr. Northrop begins with man and with man's
discovery of his weakness in the midst of his strength. Unless
man can dominate the deadly engines of his own invention,
they will grind him to death. His only hope is a universal
religiono

358

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

If the ideological criticism of Dr. Northrop has been just and
valid, religious truth as well as all other truth evaporates, at
least in any sense of truth involving correspondence with an
reality and of being controlled by, as well as controlling, the laws of logical opposition and inference. A natural
theology is impossible on the basis of Dr. Northrop's theory of
ideas and epistemic relations. That should be dear from what
has been said. Yet even on the supposition that a valid religion could be contrived to satisfy the requirements of Dr.
Northrop's scientific method, there is this objection, that it is
a religion of man, by man, and for man, with nothing of God
in it except what man puts into it. It is simply the product
of his desperate need.
Before this most evident implication of Dr. Northrop's position is treated, his attitude towards the Bible ought to be considered, because it too is involved in Dr. Northrop's concept of
religion. He recommends the Bible 46 or at least those parts of
it which stand the test, as he says, of modern biblical criticism.
He wants men to turn to it, but insists that the Bible must first
be pruned of what he calls additions. Appareiltly Dr. Northrop
does not appreciate the problems which his proposal creates.
Presumably the Bible is supposed to be universally accepted,
at least with regard to "the statements of Christ" which survive the prescription of Dr. Northrop's" whittling down." But
on what basis are these " statements " to be accepted? Because
they come from the Son of God become man? Because Christ
is just an exceptionally good man, speaking with the authority
of God and bringing truth endowed with divine errorlessness?
Because the message represents merely supremely noble human
wisdom? Or because these " statements '' in some way or other
provide a pragmatically acceptable solution to man's pressing
need?
If Dr. +'l"orthrop is consistent with his general proposal about
knowledge and religion he will have to insist that the Bible,
along with all other religious truths, be submitted to the veri46

Logic, pp.

DR. NORTHROP,

'l'ECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

359

fication of the scientific method he has elaborated. This raises
a serious difficulty. It makes Dr. Northrop either dismiss the
"Bible" as the word of God and as having any more worth
than its operational value for saving man from himself or he
must grant its divine origin as tested by its utility for solving
man's desperate plight. The problem can be resolved into the
logical statement: If the Bible is divine or simply human but
true, it will furnish man a solution to his problems. Suppose
Dr. Northrop's scientific methods "prove" its utility for life,
does it follow either that the Bible is true human or divine
wisdom? It does not. Such reasoning only exemplifies the
fallacy of affirming the consequent and illustrates a mode of
inference which Dr. Northrop himself terms as" logically inconclusive." 47 If it be granted that the Bible is God's word or in
some other way true, then it follows that it will assist man in
living. The consequence of the Bible's utility for life must be
granted if the hypothesis be granted that it comes from God.
It is valid to argue from the truth of the antecedent in a hypothetical syllogism to the truth of the consequent.
The reverse procedure is, as Dr. Northrop himself says, logipages ahead
cally inconclusive. True, he wrote this some
of his treatment of " The Methods and Grounds of Religious
Knowledge." But this earlier statement, which conforms to
the ordinary laws of formal logic, must not be forgotten when
the author takes up the vital question of religious truth and the
way to discover and verify it. You can-reason that what comes
from God or what is humanly true is for man's welfare. But
you cannot argue that because something proves useful for life,
a remedy to man's difficulties, an antidote for his self-inflicted
poison, a panacea of his woes, or because in some way it rescues
him from the trap of his own setting, that the proposal is true.
There is not the slightest suggestion that Dr. Northrop considers the Bible, even in its reduction to his self-defined dimensions of Christ's statements, as coming from God and therefore
bringing man truth which is obligatory not because it works
47

Logic, p. 146.

860

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

butbecause it is divine. Neither does he show nor attempt to
show that the statements of Christ are true on the human level
and therefore give man some promise of helping him meet the
challenge of his situation. Indeed Dr. Northrop could not very
well take such a position, without raising the question of how
those statements of Christ are known to be true. Its answer
brings the discussion right back to the only reply which appears
consistent with Dr. Northrop's theory of knowledge: inferred
unseen objects and the truths of theistic religions "can be
known and distinguished from illusory inferred objects only by
the empirical and logical scientific methods which science and
philosophy and mediaeval theology developed. Moreover it is
not the business of the theologian to determine whether such an
unseen inferred theoretically known component of reality exists
or not, or what its character is. This is the business of the
scientist." 48
Whether Dr. Northrop's plea for religion, then, be considered
either as based on the Bible, as he wants it defined, or upon
" truths " otherwise arrived at, the conclusion is inescapable
that he thinks scientists, not theologians, must verify religious
truth through their empirical scientific methods. How can
they deal w:ith the problem without falling into the logical
inconsistency of affirming the consequent-rejected, as has been
mentioned, by Dr. Northrop himself? Apart from the logical
weakness which the procedure involves, is the existence of the
Holy Ghost or the divinity of Christ or the doctrine of the
Blessed Trinity or of grace, or any one of them or all of them
(and they are traditional Christian truths-Or concepts by
intuition, as Dr. Northrop would call them) to be accepted as
true or rejected as illusory simply on the basis of what they
can do to save man from the technological monsters he has
invented? Furthermore, what validity will these doctrines have
for men who think them unnecessary or who have found some
other solution to their problems (and Dr. Nqrthrop is arguing
for a universal religion to unite the world) . They would seem
•• Logic, p. 881.

DR. NORTHROP,

TECHNOLOGY

AND RELIGION

361

to have no value, and so not be true, for those who either have
no need for them or who have found they failed to solve their
difficulties. If this is so, Dr. Northrop has still to meet the
challenge of his own problem of devising a world religion to
embrace all man.
We might suppose, what is actually impossible to grant consistently with Dr. Northrop's theory of knowledge, that man
could determine the religious dogmas which " work " and the
ones which do not, in other words, which doctrines prove themselves " true " by their effectiveness, as weighed by the scientists, for bringing man temporal salvation. We might suppose
that Dr. Northrop's methods of religious knowledge are above
criticism and will indeed produce that absolutely necessary
means for saving man and his world. The conclusion would
still be objectionable: man is concerned not with a Supreme
Being, to whom he owes everything but with concepts of his
own fashioning, which he originated, amplified, and, because
they prove valuable in his eyes, he comes to respect and love
them. As much as the machines which man fears, religious
truths are his invention. Their reality is nothing more than
the pattern of his own thinking, with nothing to correspond to
them outside of man and beyond the good which they apparently help man to produce and enjoy.
If this is all religion and religious truths amount to, beneficial as they might prove for living, then it should be emphasized that man is dealing not with a transcendent Being but
only with himself, with his troubles and his thoughts, with his
own works and his own remedies for life's pain and its threats.
Man has not gone beyond his own frightening world-a world
which Dr. Northrop's theory of knowledge construes as nothing beyond a vast fabrication of human thought, if it can be
certainly known even as that! But religion has always meant
something more than man's love of self or of his earthly happiness or his affection for, and loyalty to, the products of his own
fervent thinking. Religion has generally in some way signified
a relationship binding man to the Deity. To make religion

362

JOSEPH B. MCALLISTER

anything else is to make it something which it has not been
and which it cannot be and still deserve the name and respect
due religion. What Dr. Northrop is arguing for should be called
by some other name. Humanism might do. That at least describes the periphery and the heart and all in between of Dr.
Northrop's "religion."
There is a God or there is not a God. Man's thinking will
not alter the objective reality, granted (as Dr. Northrop probably could not consistently grant) that there is some extramental, some extra-subjective reality. But if God does exist
and if He created the world and all things in it, then man is
His creature and by that relationship contracts profound oblgations. Man may be ignorant of them or he may refuse to live
up to them. They may actually make his life happier or seem
at times to be unmitigated hindrances. But there they are,
distinct, separable, absolute, and by origin independent of man.
Man's part is to come to know them and fulfil them. This is
the traditional view of religion. It is something essentially
unconditioned by man's earthly needs or by his self-inflicted
threat of annihilation.
The question, then, of critical importance is whether or not
God exists, the Creator and Ruler of the universe, and whether
or not He has spoken to man. The answer cannot possibly
come from any wishful thinking or from man's appreciation of
his situation, appalling as that may be. Man can produce
machines; he cannot produce God, any more than a thirst unto
death can create a single drop of water. The doomed wanderer
may " see " an oasis and drag himself towards it. But its cooling waters exist only in his imagination as he will surely find
out when he tries to drink and tastes only sand.
JosEPH B. McALLISTER

Catholic University of America,
Washington, D. C.

BOOK REVIEWS
Principes de Morale: Tome /-Expose Systematique; Tome II-Oomplements de Doctrine et d'Histoire. By DoM OnoN LoTTIN. Louvain:
Editions de l'Abbaye du Mont Cesar, 1947. Pp. 341 & 277, with
Indexes.
For many years the scholarly articles of Dom Odon Lottin on the historical background of St. Thomas' moral theology have been appearing in
a number of scientific reviews. The fruits of this research have been and
are being published in a three volume work, entitled: Psychologie et Morale
aux XIIe et XIIJe siecles. The present work is, in a sense, more personal;
it contains Dom Lottin's exposition of morality as he thinks it should be
presented. Following the precedent established by some of his colleagues
at Louvain, he has divided his work into two volumes, the first of which
is a systematic presentation of general moral theology, while the second
contains what might be called a series of extended footnotes to the text of
the first. As the author remarks in his foreword, the understanding of
moral principles is facilitated by placing them in their doctrinal and
historical contexts. The first volume is concerned exclusively with the
doctrinal context; the second volume, though not exclusively, presents the
historical context. There are numerous helpful cross-references scattered
through both volumes. There are also very excellent short bibliographies
on many controverted questions of the recent past. There is an obvious,
though understandable, lack of reference to many contributions made to
these questions by scholars in the United States and Canada during the
war years.

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

Dom Lottin has written a rather lengthy introduction to his first volume
on the nature of moral science, both philosophical and theological. To
this we shall return. The- main body of this volume is divided according
to what the author is pleased to call the theory and the practice of the
moral life. The theory of moral life is exposed in four chapters dealing
with: The Human Act from a psychological point of view; The Imputability
of the Human Act; The Norms of Morality; The Morality of the Human
Act. The practice of the moral life is treated also in four chapters: The
Life of the Conscience, or the formation of the judgment of conscience;
The Life of Virtue, or the formation of the judgment of prudence; The Life
of Sin; The Life of Merit, or the Supernatural Life.
The order of the second volume follows loosely that of the first, though
the studies are independent of each other. Some are merely historical,

868

864

BOOK REVIEWS

tracing the doctrinal development of certain moral ideas in the writings of
twelfth and thirteenth century authors. Such are the notes on liberty (II) ,
indeliberate motions of the sense appetites (ill) , synderesis (IV) , eternal
law (IX), the Thomistic definition of law (X), conscience (XI), intri!'lsic
morality (XV) , the indifference of human acts (XVI) the obligation imposed by conscience (XVII) , tutiorism in the thirteenth century (XX) ,
" Ignorantia jum " (XXI) , the beginnings of the treatise on prudence
(XXII) , the connection of the virtues (XXill) . Some of these notes are
devoted to a study of the development of a certain doctrine in the thought
of St. Thomas: the relations of the common good and the private good
(VII) ; the norm of morality (XIV) . Other notes are accompanied by
doctrinal considerations. Almost wholly doctrinal are the notes: the elements .of a human act (I) ; the relation between natural right and natural
law (V), the first and second precepts of the natural law (VI, I), and so
forth. Finally certain studies are concerned with controverted questions of
the present: moral obligation (VIII) , norms of morality (Xill) , the influence of charity on the other virtues (XXIV) , the infused moral virtues
(XXV) , moral imperfection (XXVIII) , and others.
At the close of his foreword to the first volume, Dom Lottin expresses his
adherence to the moral teachings of St. Thomas and also his independence
as to the details of that system. It will be of interest to a Thomist to
note where this independence has been manifested and discuss the worth
of the reasons given.

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

Dom Lottin starts his introduction with a discussion of the nature of
moral science. Almost at once he chides St. Thomas for not clarifying the
terms he uses in regard to the distinction between speculative and practical
science and for not having applied the principles to moral science (p. 16) .
As a matter of fact St. Thomas quite clearly justifies the terminology he
uses. A science is wholly and simply speculative when its matter is
speculative, its way of viewing the matter is speculative, and the end of
the knower is speculative. In fact, when the matter is speculative, i. e., is
something that the knower cannot produce or do, the other two aspects
must also be speculative. As an example of this type of knowledge, St.
Thomas cites theology and natural philosophy, theology in its consideration
of God, natural philosophy in its consideration of the things God made.
At the other extreme, there is a science that is wholly and simply practical;
its matter is practical, something that the knower can produce or do; its
mode of knowing the object is practical, it knows how to produce or do;
and the knower intends here and now to produce or do something. This
is the practical knowledge of prudence or of the artist in the act of producing. There are two other kinds of knowledge that St. Thomas dis-

BOOK REVIEWS

865

tinguishes; they are partly speculative and partly practical. The first,
approaching very close to purely speculative knowledge, has as its object
something that the knower can produce or do, an operable, says St. Thomas,
but he does not consider it as operable, nor does he intend to produce or
do it. This is the case, for example, of an architect who makes a purely
theoretical study of houses or forms of architecture; in this he is proceeding,
not as an architect, but as a philosopher. The other type approaches the
purely practical; it considers an object that is operable and it considers the
ways of producing or doing it; the only thing lacking is the intention of here
and now operating.
Forced by the facts, then, St. Thomas admits that a science that is not
wholly practical, i. e., here and now ordained to operation, is somewhat
speculative, and may be so called; just as a purely speculative consideration
of something that can in fact be produced by an agent, · is somewhat
practical. He was also aware that in teaching medicine the professors of
his day were accustomed to make a distinction between the theoretical part
and the practical part of this science. This distinction was founded on the
remoteness or proximity of the principles to the actual practice of medicine.
While St. Thomas finds justification for this usage (and thereby incurs the
displeasure of Dom Lottin) , he does not change the division of speculative
and practical science. In fact, he concludes his answer to the objection
taken from medicine by these words: " It does not follow that if some
part of an active science be called theoretical, that that part should be
listed under speculative science." (De Trin., a. 5, a. 1, ad 4um) . Therefore, no matter how remote from practice the matter under discussion in
a science may seem to be, it belongs to practical science, if it is considered
in relation to operation.
Dom Lottin also expresses regret that St. Thomas did not apply these
distinctions to moral science. Yet in his first pages, he cites both
Aristotle and St. Thomas as most explicitly insisting that moral science is
practical. The virtues, for example, are studied, not merely to know what
they are theoretically, but to practice them and become·good. (II Eth.,
lect. 1)
To solve the problem of the nature of moral science, Dom Lottin cites
John of St. Thomas, Maritain's development of the former's theory and the
controversy that was aroused by its appearance. He then presents his own
solution, which, in
is an ·attempt at compromise. "Why," says the
author, "cannot I set up a course of moral with the end in view of
helping my students understand the principles, or if you wish, the theory
of the moral order?" The answer is: "You can, of course, but you would
not be teaching moral science and in fact you would be wasting good time."
For, as St. Thomas says: "If the investigations of this science were only
for the sake of the truth, it would be of little use. It is not of great import

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nor of great value to the human intellect to know the variable truth of
(Ibid.)
the contingent operables that are the objects of virtue."

*

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*

*

*

*

*

*

The author next turns his attention to the relation between moral
philosophy and moral theology. He gives an excellent rapid summary of
a recent controversy op the subject and concludes in the following words:
"The consequence is clear. Since in the practical order, the ultimate ends
fulfill the role that first principles play in the speculative order, the first
principle of moral science, which is a practical science, can be only the
ultimate
Now this end is, in fact, supernatural and knowledge of it
belongs to theological science. Hence, the moral science that is deduced
from this first principle is a moral theology. All the conclusions acquired by
moral philosophy, while conserving their own truth, are, therefore, taken
over by moral theology, which becomes the only science that leads human
nature to its end. There remains, then, no place outside of moral theology
for a moral philosophy that would be purely philosophical" (p. 31).

*

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*

*

*

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*

Passing on to a consideration of the way in which moral. theology should
be organized, Dom Lottin points out that it differs from dogmatic theology
since it is concerned with the supernatural end that God has proposed and
promised to men and with the means He has given men to attain it. We
might note that one of his brief characterizations of the distinction between
dogmatic and moral theology is not very happy. Dogmatic theology, he
states, presents us with God's part in our sanctification, moral theology
organizes man's part. Such a division hardly coincides with St. Thomas,
who includes the tract on law, grace, the infused virtues and the gifts in
the second part of the Summa.
More particularly, should moral theology be organized according to the
commandments, as has been the custom since St. Alphonsus, or according
to the virtues, as St. Thomas organized it? The author gives good reasons
for choosing the virtues. However, he does not like the way St. Thomas
set up his tract on the individual virtues. The reader will recall that St.
Thomas treats all the virtues under the three theological and the four
cardinal virtues. Dom Lottin indirectly asserts that this arrangement of
St. Thomas is not specifically Christian (p. 35). Why? He thinks that
the four cardinal virtues have been taken over from Aristotle, although St.
Augustine finds them in Sacred Scripture (Wisdom, viii, 7). Forcing all
the virtues under the cardinal virtues, St. Thomas must place religion and
obedience under justice, humility under temperance.
What would be, according to the author, a specifically Christian ordering
of the virtues? In the first rank would be the three theological virtues;

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under these, the more important moral virtues of the Christian life, religion,
humility and obedience; finally, the moral virtues that regulate our conduct
tow&-ds ourselves and others. But is not this precisely the ordering of
St. Thomas? Not of treatment, but of rank. In this matter we can
sympathize with Dom Lottin. A student of St. Thomas is rather surprized
and even a bit annoyed, when, having finished the questions on the virtue
of justice, he turns to study the tract on the virtue of religion and learns
that it is the highest of the moral virtues. " Why didn't we study it first
if it is so important? " But as he continues his study and reaches the
other tracts, he is brought to realize that St. Thomas himself was perfectly
aware that the physical order (or the logical order) of treating the virtues
does not correspond with their dignity. Why, then, did he organize the
treatise on the virtues as he did? Because of the authority of Aristotle? Or
of St. Augustine and Sacred Scripture? Not entirely. ·Had he followed Dom
Lottin's plan and put, for example, religion right after charity (Dom Lottin
is particularly blind to the commanding position of the virtue of charity
in the Summa) he would have had to discuss much of the matter of justice
anyway, for the precise notion of religion is best had by an analysis of it
as a potential part of justice. The wisdom of St. Thomas' procedure is
also brought out by the defects found in many treatises on humility because of the hazy notion of the virtue taken out of its context. We do not
deny that for purposes other than moral science a treatment of the virtues
such as Dom Lottin suggests would be helpful.

*

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*

The Introduction concludes with a section on the method of moral
philosophy and theology. While the previous section on organization was
really concerned with special moral, this is a discussion of the organization
of general moral, philosophical and theological. Now when we speak of
" method," we can mean either the way to acq'uiremoral science, the method
of " invention," or the way to impart it, the method of " exposition." The
author is chiefly concerned with the former, adding a few words about the
method of exposition when presenting the outline of his book.
Speaking of the method of investigation, we must distinguish between
moral philosophy and moral theology and also between induction and
deduction. The method of moral theology is deductive; its principles are
revealed by God and are the causes of its conclusions.
But what of the method of moral philosophy? Should it proceed
deductively, from causes to effects. According to the author: "The
deductive or synthetic method would start from God and explain through
God the fundamental problems of moral philosophy " (p. 48) . But,
says the author, the philosophical notion of God, the concept of the eternal
law, the vagueness of natural sanction would throw little light on our

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moral problem:9. Moral philosophy would be a simple corollary of theodicy
and would risk losing its autonomy as a science.
It would seem, then, that the inductive method is indicated. Certainly
not the method of physical induction proper to the natural sciences that
has been unsuccessfully applied to moral problems by Durkheim, LevyBruhl and others. Rather the method of psychological induction from the
sentiments and judgments in the moral order that spontaneously arise from
the human person. Dom Lottin cites approvingly the work of Du Roussaux, who starts from the consciousness of moral obligation, of Soloviev,
who took as his point of departure the three sentiments of shame, pity or
sympathy for others, and religious reverence, and of De Bryne, who
analyses the feeling of remorse. From these objective facts the authors
mentioned proceed to establish the fundamental principles of the moral
order.
Now, as presented by the author, all this seems quite inescapable. However, we are forced to ask ourselves, for instance, why is not the objective
fact that man seeks happiness a better basis for an inductive study of
moral philosophy than the ones chosen by the authors cited? This was
the point of departure used by Aristotle and St. Thomas in their moral
philosophy. Do they make moral philosophy a corrollary of metaphysics?
And are the Ethics and Politics inductive or deductive? Do they not,
rather, in the way proper to moral science follow the norms for all science
set down in the Posterior Analytics? A science has a proper subject and
proper principles. The establishment of these, which cannot be proved, is
the work of induction. Once established they regulate the whole science;
not in the sense that a flock of conclusions are airily deduced from them,
but that the truth of conclusions and the
of problems, most of
which have been suggested by experience, are manifested through relating ·
them to the principles. This is the way followed by Aristotle in his Ethics
and Politics; even St. Thomas, in his theological treatment of the final
end (Summa Theologiae, I-II, qq. 1-5) marvelously combined the inductive
and deductive methods to manifest the truth of
revealed finality of
human life. We see no good reason to adopt a different approach to the
establishment of a solid moral science; in fact, we doubt that moral science
can be established in any other way.

*

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In his brief introduction to the second volume, Dom Lottin characterizes
the seventh appendix, on the relations of the common good and the private
good, as an historical note dealing exclusively with the doctrine of St.
Thomas. In the note itself, he recalls the recent and still-flourishing controversy on this question and gives a bibliography. There are some, he
explains, who, insisting on the dignity of the human person, look upon

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society merely as a means for perfecting the person; others, on the contrary,
because of man's essentially social nature, look on the individual as part
of a collective whole to which the individual must subordinate himself.
Both sides claim the authority of St. Thomas for their views. The
author then asks: " Exactly what was the position of St. Thomas? " (p.
56) To answer this question he follows St. Thomas' teaching on the subject according to the chronological order of his writings.
In the Scriptum super Libros Sententiarum, St: Thomas is satisfied to
link the common good· with legal justice and law. It is in the Summa
contra Gentiles that we find the first important exposition of his thought,
Book Til, cc. 112-117. The author gives a very careful outline of this
doctrine. The subject is divine providence and divine law. Providence
extends to all creatures, but especially to men. Why especially to men?
Because men act for themselves, are masters of themselves, because they
are free. Now in every regime, the legislator, legislating for free men, has
their proper good in view, legislating for slaves, has their master's good in
view. So too divine providence directs irrational creatures, the slaves of
men, in view of the rational creatures, men, who are governed for their
own sake. Moreover, the parts are for the good of the whole. Now, more
than irrational creatures, men have the quality of being " wholes," because by their intelligence they grasp the whole of being. It is natural,
then, that irrational creatures be governed for the good of men, but that
men be governed for their own sakes. Also if man is governed for his own
perfection, divine government extends to the actions of man, that is to say,
not only to the good of the species, but also to the good of the individual.
From these considerations on providence, continues the author, St.
Thomas concludes to the existence and purpose of law. By law God directs
men's actions to the end, which is Himself. The principal end of the
law is to make men love God. Since men are also social and need the
help of others for their perfection, law directs them to mutual charity.
" Such," concludes Dom Lottin, " is St. Thomas' exposition. In his eyes,
the law has an individual import, leads man to his .personal end, conformable to his dignity as a being .who is created and governed in view of
a strictly personal destiny" (p. 59). And later: "It is obvious that in the
Summa contra Gentiles St. Thomas does not dream of the social character
of law. The law is established for the personal good of each man, that is to
say, to lead him to God, who is, of course, a common good for all, a good
who is the same for all men. This view of St. Thomas will be modified by
a more intimate contact with the texts of Aristotle" (p. 60).
Despite his care, Dom Lottin has arrived at exactly the opposite conclusion from St. Thomas, who says: " By saying that intellectual substances are ordered by divine providence for themselves (propter se), we
do not mean that they are not further ordered to God and to the perfection

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of the universe. They are said to be provided for for their own sake and
others for them, because the goods they receive from divine providence are
not given to make them useful to others, while what is given to other
creatures is given to make them useful to men" (c. 112). These words
of St. Thomas should be given careful consideration by all who approach
the problem of the common good and the individual person. The common
good of the universe (the greatest created good) is an indispensable middle
term in the argument. And in regard to that common good, men are
parts-principal parts, certainly, but parts. St. Thomas does not say, as
Dom Lottin has him say: " man himself is already a whole." Rather he
says: " Intellectual natures have a greater affinity for the whole than other
natures; for each intellectual substance is in a certain way a whole, inasmuch as by its intellect it is capable of comprehending the whole" (ibid.).
Nor is the" whole" here to be understood of God; for the argument begins:
"It is clear that all the parts are ordered to the perfection of the whole."
In this context, it is clear that the " personal " reference. of the divine law
is to be ·understood as it directs the perfection of the principal parts of the
whole. It is essentially a social law, for the lawgiver is primarily directing
all, principal and secondary parts, to the common good of the universe,
but in any way that is conformable to the nature 6f each.
We could continue to examine Dom Lottin's exposition of the thought of
St. Thomas on this problem in his other works up to the section headed:
The Personal and Definitive Thought of St. Thomas. However, from what
we have just seen, we may justifiably doubt that he is the one to disclose
this. We must,. however, mention another conclusion that he deduces from
what he understands to be the doctrine of St. Thomas. " First of all, it
must be firmly maintained that man is a being sui juris, that is to say,
he is not, like an animal, made for another created being. He is, of course,
made for God, his final cause, he is not iiiil.de for any creature. [According
to St. Thomas, man· is made for God and the perfection of the universe, a
created good.] His end is, not to serve another, but to perfect himself.
So also, in strict justice and independently of any contract, which would
create a right in another, he owes nothing to anyone, no more than any
other man independently of such a contract owes anything at all to him in
strict justice. In that consists the dignity of the human personality, completely equal and independent in every man " (pp. 70-71. ·Italics added) .
This incredible conclusion should of itself be sufficient evidence of the
dangers inherent in the exaltation of the human person.

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There is another point on which Dom Lottin chooses to differ from St.
Thomas. Having eXJ'}ained the Saint's doctrine on the infused moral
virtues as distinct from the acquired moral virtues, he asks: "Does this

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creation of St. Thomas translate reality?" The Thomistic doctrine has
not been defined by the Church, the author points out; the fact that it is
left free seems to be an argument against it in the author's mind. At least,
he prefers to follow Scotus and other theologians on this point; the theological virtues are sufficient to supernaturalize all man's activity and to
elevate the acts of the acquired moral virtues to the supernatural level.
It is true, says the author, that all human activities must be supernaturalized and they must be supernaturalized by stable principles. The theological virtues are stable principles and are capable of penetrating all our
activities and supernaturalizing them. But what of the difference of
specification? Dom Lottin does not wish to follow the lead of those who ·
deny a difference in specification. No, it is necessary to maintain the
difference in specification, but this need not involve the distinction between
acquired and infused moral virtues. "Now, what is needed that two acts
be specifically distinct? It is necessary that their norms, their motives be
distinct. We can assure these distinct norms without recourse to two
species of moral virtues, for these norms are on the one hand reason and
on the other hand the theological virtue of faith. An act is good with a
natural morality when it conforms to natural reason, it is supernaturally
good when it conforms to reason enlightened by faith. . . . " (pp. !l22-!l!l3}
Apparently, Dom Lottin does not realize that in this passage he has also
destroyed the distinction of the acquired moral virtues. Temperance and
fortitude, for example, are both virtues, that is, sources of good moral acts,
because they conform to the norm of right reason. But what is the reason
for their distinction? Analogically the same argument is valid in the
supernatural order and is used by St. Thomas in the Summa Theologiae.
St. Thomas taught the existence of infused moral virtues distinct from the
acquired moral virtues and maintained this teaching unchanged. There is
no basis for Dom Lottin's suggestion that in an obscure way the Summa
Theologiae teaches a different doctrine and even less for the very ungracious remark that if St. Thomas were free from the tradition of the
schools, he would have spoken his mind more explicitly.

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There is no need to try to hide the fact that the criticisms we have
made of this work are fundamental and affect our entire judgment of these
two volumes. We are still most grateful to the author for his prodigious
labors in the field of historical research. The fruit of his work there must
be taken into account in every discussion of moral science. History has
proven itself an indispensable aid to theology. But when historical considerations become a norm of doctrinal judgment, the result is often most
unhappy.
JAMES

Collegia Angelicum,
Rome, Italy

M. EGAN, 0. P.

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The Administration of the Catholic Secondary School. Ed. by M. J.
McKEouGH. Washington: Catholic University Press, 1948. Pp. 180.
$3.00.
The Philosophy of Catholic Higher Education. Ed. by R. J. DEFERRARI.
Washington: Catholic University Press, 1948. Pp. flOfl. $3.25.
The task of reviewing the two volumes of proceedings of the Catholic
University of America workshops on The Administration of the Catholic
Secondary School and The Philosophy of Catholic Higher Education is indeed formidable. To evaluate the many authoritative articles adequately
would require a panel of reviewers as large and as well qualified as are the
original authors. Since this procedure is not feasible, a detailed review of
every article will not be attempted. Rather a selection of certain key
contributions will be made and these will be accorded a more or less extensive analysis and criticism.

*

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The volume dealing with the manifold problems of Catholic secondary
schools is marked by a high degree of practicality and deserves the attention of all who are concerned with the apostolate of teaching in the high
schools. In an article on Staff Participation in Administration, Reverend
Leonard McFee, S. M., describes and analyzes a regrettably common fault
in Catholic secondary schools. That fault is the tendency of school administrators so to regulate the policies and practices of the school that the
faculty is left without knowledge of or voice in the formulation and implementation of such policies and practices. While this fault is understandable, it remains inexcusable, because of the deleterious effects wrought in
the faculty and ultimately visited upon the school as a whole. Several
practical and forthright suggestions are made in the interest of solving the
problem, and they are worthy of the attention of every school administrator.
In addition to the solutions offered another is worthy of attention. Much
of the failure to grant the faculty a real share in the responsibility of school
administration could be avoided if more schools were run according to a
precise set of regulations formulated by. a joint faculty and administration
committee and ratified by the entire staff. This device has the beneficial
effect of delegating real authority to faculty members, departmental heads,
etc. and at the same time leaving the direction of over-all policies in the
hands of administrators where it rightfully belongs.
Most arresting is the article on The Catholic Secondary School and The
Community, written in characteristically vigorous style by Reverend
William E. McManus, Assistant Director of the Department of Education
of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Here the reader will discover
a complete listing of contemporary endeavors to make the Catholic school

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·a vital and dynamic force in the community where it is located. Over and
above these eminently practical devices for furthering Catholic influence,
Father McManus' article contains many observations on the nature and
function of the secondary school in terms of its existence and responsibility
as a moral person. He clearly states, ." The real test of the essential Catholicism of a school is to be found in its curriculum. A school deserves to be
called Catholic if the subject matter and school activities are organized for
the purpose of inducing Christian understandings, attitudes and habits."
(p.
He continues to explain that he would not judge the Catholicism of
a school by the numbers at Communion before football games or examinations, nor by the membership of the Sodality or any other specifically
religious projects. His standard of judgment would be the attitude of
the students towards the FEPC, housing segregation and the Jim Crow
Laws. " The hardest test of Catholicism today is the application of
Christian charity to the Negro issue." (p. 18)
Father McManus would test the student attitudes towards labor unions,
price control, the moral principles involved in the decisions of the United
Nations. He would seek to learn if the students had acquired a Catholic
attitude towards history, literature and the sciences. If this eminently
practical and valid evaluative criterion of the Catholicity of our schools
is to be understood aright, it is necessary to recall certain basic facts about
the nature of Catholic education and the position of the school in the
total process of perfecting the individual through the application of the
pedagogical arts which are essentially cooperative.
Education must be conceived as a potential or potestative whole which
has several potential parts, each of which perfectly participates the nature
of education without, however, exercising the entirety of its functions.
Education, then, is related to the home, Church, state, and school in the
same manner that the human soul is related to its threefold function of
vegetation, sensation, and intelligence. It is the same human soul and the
entire soul that performs the functions of vegetation, sensation, and intelligence, yet the entire power of the soul is not involved in any of these
functions taken separately. Similarly, the home, school, and Church are
all truly educational agencies, but each has formally distinct ends which
specify and regulate their particular and distinctive means, all of which
cooperate in perfecting the individual who is the subject of education.
It follows that each agency has a distinctive function to perform, and that
no agency is perfectly competent to discharge the responsibilities of any
other agency. Thus it becomes clear that Father McManus is not to be
interpreted as placing upon the school burdens which are properly the concern of either the home or the Church.
The school was originally instituted to train " the younger generations

8

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in the arts and sciences for the advantage and prosperity of civil society." 1
In other words, the unique function of the school in the totality of the
educational process is to train youth in the intellectual virtues in an
atmosphere of Christian piety. Consequently, the educator may rightfully
examine the attitudes of hi'gh school students towards those problems
about which the Church has definite teachings as a reliable test of the
Catholicism of the school they attend. Attitudes are, or should be, the
results of intellectual conviction or virtue, and the intellectual virtues are
the immediate object of classroom instruction.
As a matter of fact, the curriculum of the vast majority of Catholic high
schools, which should be a positive and dynamic force in forming the
Catholic attitude in the students, is at best a negative instrument and at
worst a positive detriment to such formation. A curriculum should present
an orderly progression of mental development according to the order of
science and the order of learning. It is safe to say that it would be an
extremely rare teacher in the Catholic high schools who could explain, let
alone defend, the order of the curriculum as it now stands. Almost every
speculative error of history, distilled and refined in the German schools of
the 19th Century and further modified while passing through the centers
of materialistic educational thought in our own c<mntry, has had some influence in shaping the curriculum of the modern American high school.
This same curriculum has been adopted (but never successfully adapted)
for use in Catholic high schools. There is no intellectual center of gravity,
no progression in the arts and sciences, no truly adequate standard of
judgment. Intellectually, the secondary
is a veritable Tower of
Babel. Spiritually, it is no help in attaining the goal of natural and supernatural development, so loudly proclaimed as the purpose of Catholic
scholastic endeavor in the sanguine pages of school catalogues.
A certain amount of moral rectitude -is- needed for progress· in the intellectual disciplines, -and a certain minimum of intellectual perfection is
required for moral living. Progress in the intellectual virtues not only
begets order in the mind, but aids the rectification of the whole man through
the moral virtues. Today, the good effects of the well-ordered curriculum
are generally unobtainable in Catholic secondary schools because the wellordered curriculum is not present. The curriculum is only extrinsically
Christian. That is to say that it has a veneer of Christianity imparted more
or less successfully by teachers most of whom, as the result of their
inculpably faulty education, are .not even prepared to recognize the true
nature of the issues at stake. The curriculum of the public schools, which is
largely the product of the disordered thought of naturalists and liberalists,
differs from that of the Catholic schools only in respect of a course in
1

Pius XI; On the Cliristian Education of Youth (N. C. W. C. trans., p. £9).

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"religion" found in the latter. These "religion" courses are almost universally devoid of intelligent and intelligible order and are thus robbed of
the effects they might otherwise produce in the area of intellectual formation
according to the pattern of Faith.
Serious errors deriving from a misunderstanding of the true nature of
education and the role of the school in the total educational endeavor have
caused many educators to place impossible tasks upon the " religion "
courses of the schools. The very nature of the scholastic environment,
which is essentally artificial and constructed according to the demands of
intellectual rather than moral education, and the whole technique of teaching in classrooms give ample evidence to those who study these elements
carefully that the goal of the " religion " course, like that of other courses,
is the formation of intellectual habits. Those who expect any academic
presentation of divine truth to produce moral betterment as an essential
effect are entertaining hopes that are impossible of fulfillment in the order
of creation as presently constituted. The moral betterment of men is aided
by good instruction, but it is caused by the movements of the free will under
the influence of divine grace. And no book or method of teaching is vested
with a true Sacramental nature.
The " religion " course must stand or fall on its worth as an instrument for
aiding the student to gain an insight into the truths of faith through human
endeavor according to the order of learning and teaching. To expect the
" religion " course to discharge the task of moral formation and spiritual
motivation so necessary in the totality of Catholic education is to deny the
efficacy of the most potent instrumentalities in the entire process which are
the home and the Church. The school is an extension of the home regulated
according to the discipline, wisdom, and spirit of the Church in conformity
with the needs and advantages of the state. It must aid and further the
aims of these various societies, but its unique contributions to the development of the individual must be sought primarily in the domain of the intellect. The school is not a substitute for any of the educational agencies
it aids and in virtue of the authority of which it operates. Consequently,
the curriculum, which is the distinctive instrument of the school must be
constructed according to the laws of metaphysics and psychology. The
course in sacred doctrine must hold the place of preeminence in Catholic
schools, but it must rest upon the firm foundations of intellectual integrity
and psychological possibility. When these essential factors are properly
ordered and disposed it will be much easier to permeate the entire school
with the true spirit of Christian piety, for then the good offices of nature will
have been placed at the service of divine grace.
Thus the full force of Father McManus' statement becomes evident:
" The unique function of the Catholic school, one which it alone may per-

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form, is the guidance of students towards a Catholic way of life through
the correlation and integration of religion with the school's subject matter
and activities." (p. IS) Those portions of Father McManus' article which
are conclusions from and applications of the doctrine previously analyzed
need no comment except praise. His views are eminently reasonable and
are presented in a most readable style. This article richly deserves to be
read by everyone concerned with the apostolate of Catholic education.
The National Catholic Welfare Conference- could do a signal service to
the cause of education by distributing reprints of this article to every
Catholic educator in the country.

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In the symposium, Tke Philosophy of Catholic Higher Education, there
is a great deal of mature thought on a wide variety of subjects. The roster
of authors and the relevance of their articles to contemporary problems will
earn this excellent volume a place on the desk-rather
the book-shelfof all who have any concern with the problems of Catholic education at
the college and university levels. So great is the diversity of subjects discussed that it is not possible to do justice to every article in a limited
review. There is one problem, however; that looms large in many of the
articles and is expressly considered in two of the contributions. That is
the problem of the position of theology as a subject of instruction in the
curriculum of the Catholic college.
It seems most fitting that this symposium should be begun by a challenging article on Philistinism and Education by Father H. A. Reinhold,
the well-known contribtuor to Orate Fratres. The searching analysis into
the causes of the superficial Christianity of many Catholic graduates will
almost certainly meet with some disagreement, but it will undoubtedly
force an examination of the academic- cpnscience upon many educators.
And that is a very_ good result, for it will make many more receptive to
the suggestions contained in the later articles.
In the article on The Content and Methodology of the College Religion
Program, Father Eugene M. Burke, C. S. P., offers a logical statement of
some of the reasons in favor of introducing courses of Theology into the
curriculum of the Catholic college. The article is not intended to be exhaustive of the many elements of this considerable problem, but it will
serve to introduce college administrators to a matter that demands attention. The problems relevant to theological courses in the undergraduate
curripulum may be grouped under three headings: first, theology in relation to the curriculum; second, theology in relation to the students and,
third, theology in relation to pedagogy. Father Burke's brief treatment
deals chiefly with the first two classes of problems. Similar considerations
are offered in an article on Education for Life as a Member of the Mystical

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877

Body of Christ by Father Shawn G. Sheehan (pp. 68-72). An appreciation of the problems involved in introducing theology into the undergraduate curriculum clearly manifests that these authors have intended
rather to stimulate thinking than to present ultimate solutions.
Much of the thinking opposed to theology for undergraduates focuses
upon the problems of pedagogy. These may be grouped into questions
relating to the content, method, and order of presentation. These problems
are susceptible of solution in the light of certain principles which it may
be well to set forth with a view to continuing the thought begun in the two
articles under consideration. Out of the vast deposit of theological wisdom,
which truths are to be selected for presentation to undergraduates with a
view to the limits of time necessarily imposed by the modem curriculum?
To arrive at an answer to this question, sQme fundamental truths must be
borne in mind. The proper and immediate goal of courses in theology is
the scientific and sapiential knowledge of the truths of divine revelation.
Consequently, whatever is truly essential to this ,science and wisdom must
be treated in undergraduate courses.· Secondly, the ultimate use of this
theological knowledge is the personal sanctification of the student. Consequently, those truths that are especially conducive to this end must
receive special emphasis within the framework of theology. Finally, the
proper function of the laity which is the common vocation of all laymen
is to mediate between the spiritual and temporal orders, either through
Catholic Action or Catholic activity. Therefore, whatever is conducive
to this end must receive special emphasis within the framework of theology.
The validity of the first principle regulating the content of theology for
by an appeal to the science of medicine.
undergraduates can be
The absolutely fundamental perfection of the science of medicine demands
a knowledge of anatomy and diagnosis. If these elements are lacking,
one could not be said to possess the science of medicine, but only some
kind of disposition toward the science. Likewise, anyone whose knowledge
does not comprise the essential truths of revelatiol). does not possess the
habit of theology, not even in a rudimentary form. Concretely, the
essentials of theology are contained in the basic tracts of St. Thomas'
Summa, whose intention it was to present a complete synthesis of theological wisdom. Within the framework of this basic content, other truths may
receive special emphasis in view of the particular end to which the science
is to be employed. This is precisely what is done in seminaries, where
theology is presented with a view to its use in the service of the magisterium of the Church as exercised by her priests.
So closely has this
principle of emphasis guided the authors of seminary manuals that these
books could only be used as works of reference, but never as texts, in
courses for the laity. The truths that must be emphasized for the laity
are those which are specially conducive to their sanctification, not only in

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relation to the general destiny of the Christian soul, but with particular care
to include those truths that have peculiar relevance to the contemporary
milieu. Thus the second principle regulating content will demand variations
in emphasis and in non-essential content to insure the continuing value of
the theology course for laymen.
The essential conclusions of theology will receive varying degrees of
emphasis in courses for the laity according to the exigencies of personal
sanctification, which is the individual general vocation of each layman, and
of the general social vocation which is to mediate between the spiritual and
temporal spheres in this world. Among the non-essential conclusions of
theology, those which are perenially relevant to the individual or social
vocation of the laity must receive special emphasis. Such non-essential
conclusions that are only temporarily relevant to the lay vocations will
receive emphasis only as long as circumstances warrant their inclusion in
the course. For example, there are many who truly possess the habit of
theology, the permanent ability to think logically in the light of divine
revelation, but who are not well versed in some special and non-essential
branch of theology such as the subject of industrial justice. Similarily,
there are many good doctors who truly have the habit of medical science
but who are not versed in all the conclusions of ophthalmology which are
not essential to medicine. In the same way, the courses for the laity could
be designed to prepare men to think theologically according to the needs
of their vocation without pretending to acquaint them fully with the whole
extent of the science. As special needs arise certain tracts would receive
more thorough treatment. In our own day, many special conclusions from
the principles of justice that should guide Catholic thought on international
problems would receive special emphasis. Another generation might well
study these conclusions in a less detailed fashion and more in their principles in order to give greater consideration to other and more relevant nonessential conclusions. But both groups of students would be educated in the
beginnings of the habit of theology.
It can easily be seen that a text suitable for the instruction of undergraduates would necessarily differ greatly from the manuals of theology
used in seminaries. The specialized purpose of such manuals makes them
unsuitable for instructing the laity except as source books and works of
reference. The Summa Theologica offers greater possibilities as a text
than do the manuals. For one thing, the scope of the Summa is wider
than that of the manuals. In his Prologue, St. Thomas states that he
proposes " .... to treat of the things that pertain to the Christian religion
in such a way as befits the instruction of beginners." In line with this
purpose he intends to avoid the " . . . multiplication of useless questions,
articles and arguments . . . (and the) frequent repetition ... (that
begets) weariness and confusion in the minds of the readers." The Summa

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379

is not limited by a specific and specialized purpose as the manuals are.
Consequently, if the above principles regulating the content of theology for
undergraduates were applied to the Summa, the result would resemble the
original much more than if the same principles were applied to a manual
designed for the instruction of seminarians. The method of presenting
theology to undergraduates may be worked out according to principles that
are based upon the nature of theology on the one hand, and the nature of
the learning process and the capacities of undergraduates on the other.
The conclusions of such an inquiry should establish a speculative basis for
the practical implementation of theological courses for undergraduates according to the norms of pedagogy.
In the problem of the proper order in which to teach theology to the
laity one encounters many difficulties. An element of this problem is the
fact that many experts unfold the science in different ways. The problem
or order is more concerned with the facility with which the habit of theology
can be grasped by the student than with the question of whether such a
habit pertains to his perfection in the realm of education. -It is a problem
of perfection rather than of essence. Here, as in other matters, the example
of St. Thomas offers profound instruction as well as safe guidance. In
establishing the, order of the Summa he was guided by the exegencies of
divine truth considered in itself as well as in relation to the needs of the
student. A glance at the Prologue of the Summa shows that he wrote in
the face of problems similar to those encountered today. The " multiplication of useless questions, articles and arguments and the frequent repetition " which burden the student are charges made against many kinds of
instruction in sacred doctrine in our own times. The logical unfolding of
doctrine, the harmonious interrelation of dogmatic and moral truths which
characterize the Summa more than any theological work would certainly be
a blessing if they were introduced into collegiate courses.
It is most encouraging to those interested in theology to notice the shift
in emphasis in articles relating to theology for the laity. Recently the
question of whether theology should be presented to undergraduates seems
to have given way to the problems of how theology should be taught to
them. This attitude is reflected in the symposium on The Philosophy of
Catholic Higher Education. Many of the articles in this volume deal with
problems that are essentially theological. All the contributions have
theological overtones. On the whole, the book gives evidence that Catholic
educators are coming to realize the profound truths expressed by Cardinal
Stritch in his opening remarks to the members of the Catholic Theological
Society: of America meeting last
in Chicago: "Many problems confronting us today are not only philosophical but also theological. For
example, the whole idea of education is a theological problem. . . . In-

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sidious error in this field must be attacked not only from the viewpoint
of the educator, but also from the viewpoint of the theologian." 2
THOMAS c. DONLON, 0. P.
Fenwick High School,
Oak Park, Ill.

Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion. By REIDAR THOMTE. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1948. Pp. fl30, with index. $3.50.
This is a straightforward, synoptic account of Soren Kierkegaard's
views, with special stress upon his religious thought. Now that Kierkegaard's personal life is fairly well known and his works made accessible in
English, the main need is for a series of analytic studies which will advance our understanding of his mind. There are many literary, esthetic,
philosophical, and theological aspects which are yet to be uncovered and
assessed. But Kierkegaard himself was most concerne,d about what it'
means to become a Christian in a world that is Christian in name alone.
Thomte's book is orientated to this major preoccupation of his life's work
and hence provides an introduction to the very heart of his outlook.
In his arrangement of materials, the author follows a pattern which
has become by now almost traditional with scholars in this field. The
early chapters explain the various stages of life; a central group of chapters
consider the transition from natural religion to Christianity; the latter
part of the book is devoted to some specifically Christian concepts. One
of the later chapters-an explanation of " Socratic midwivery " or the
method employed by Kierkegaard in his literary productions-might well
have been placed earlier in the discussion. The reader needs advance
preparation for the puzzling use of pseudonyms in almost all of Kierkegaard's early books. But whereas most Kierkegaardian students are content with paraphrasing the original text, Thomte supplies the reader with
generous quotations at every phase of the exposition. As he rightly
observes (pp. 17; 73, n. 69), direct samplings are essential to an appreciation of the moods and nuances embodied in the various pseudonyms. Moreover, Thomte employs his knowledge of the Danish' language to make
direct translations from previously inaccessible portions of the copious
Journals and from important secondary studies. Occasionally, he corrects
the accepted English version of ·Kierkegaard's books in regard to key
passages.
At the outset, it is admitted that Kierkegaard cannot be called a
philosopher in the usual sense. Thomte refers to his stand as a Lebens• Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the Catholic Theological Society
of America, New York, Paulist Press: 1949, p. 8.

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381

anschauung (p. vii) . This designation is exact enough, provided that the
point of contrast-between a life-view and an absolutist system is set forth.
When Kierkegaard rejected the literary conventions and standpoint of
philosophy, he was reacting against Hegelianism with the aid of the
Romantic reverence for "life" and individual destiny. Similarly, in
maintaining that metaphysics does not constitute a distinctive stage of
life, he was underlining the radical inability of an idealistic systematism
to treat of the contingent act of existing. Yet this does not preclude the
presence of some implicit metaphysics of a non-absolutist sort. This i.s
admitted at least twice by Thomte himself, when he refers in passing to
the" metaphysical" background of Kierkegaard's conception of the human
self and subjectivity (pp.
fll5) . But the relation between this
latent metaphysics and the formal religious teaching is left undetermined.
Because of this omission, there are some shortcomings in the present
treatment. What is lacking is a fundamental discussion of the meaning
of existence in relation to time, history, and eternity. Unavoidably, such a
consideration would penetrate deeper into philosophical and theological
issues than Thomte has deemed it advisable to go. Thus, in mentioning
Kierkegaard's attitude towards the proofs for God's existence (pp. Hl-H!),
he does not bring out clearly enough that Kierkegaard reserves the term
" existence " for Christ alone and usually speaks of the " eternity " of God
rather than' of His existence. From the philosophical standpoint, we would like
to know whether Kierkegaard would grant that human reason can ascertain
the eternal being of God, even when the term " existence " is restricted
to temporal realities. For an answer, the dose dependence of Kierkegaard
upon Kant's criticism of the ideal of human reason would have to be
weighed. On the theological side, there arise some unanswered difficulties concerning the manner in which temporal existence is predicated of
Christ. Thomte states in one place (p. 88) that eternity and temporal
existence are contraries, and later on (p. llQ) that the task of existing is
to bring the eternal into the sphere of the temporal. These passages can
be reconciled if one avers to Kierkegaard's conviction about the different
modes of existence. There is a way of existing which does attempt to exclude the influence of God and eternity, but his judgment about this
attitude is that it is also self-contradictory and destructive of human values.
The authentic synthesis of time and eternity is achieved in Christ, Who is
also our pattern. Thomte calls the incarnate presence of God in time " unhistorical" (p. Ql6), but this does not accurately reflect Kierkegaard's
conception. According to the Kierkegaardian notion of history, the incarnation and earthly life of Christ constitute the highest and most
paradoxical form of historical existence. Here again, it should not be
concluded from Kierkegaard's opposition to a purely relativist view of
history that he simply withdrew the existence of Christ from history. He

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repudiated the " higher critical " method because it proposed a substitute
for faith and because it ignored the different modes of historical existence.
In his concluding chapter, Thomte seeks to justify the absence of an
independent estimate of the great Danish thinker with the remark that no
one who truly appreciates Kierkegaard's labors "could desire to furnish a
critical estimate of his philosophy, for he finds himself standing under
judgment" (p. £04). This sentiment is of a piece with an attempt to
rest faith exclusively upon the ineffable experience of the believing individual (p. £17) . In both cases, the dialectical element in Kierkegaard is
played down to the point of surrendering critical conscience and objective
truth. No principles for evaluating Kierkegaard's religious thought are
supplied in this study. On the other hand, it does allow Kierkegaard to
speak for himself on many important questions. Especially welcome are
the sections allotted to Kierkegaard's religious and edifying discourses,
which are usually overlooked by scholars.
JAMEs CoLLINs
St. Louis University,
St. Louis, Mo.

The Philosophy of Anaxagoras. By FELIX M. CLEVE. New York: King's
Crown Press, 1949. Pp. 180. $3.00.
The appearance of a work on the earlier Greek philosophers, and especially one on Anaxagoras, should certainly interest the modern philosopher.
The very fact that today we have in many instances repeated the errors of
these earlier thinkers, should make us anxious to see these minds in their
development. Then, when the author in his foreword expresses his intention
of revealing precisely this development, eschewing as he says, " our notions
which have arisen from later periods of human thought ... ," the reader
is prepared to give him full attention.
Mr. Cleve has accomplished a necessary piece of work. He has carefully considered the various fragments of Anaxagoras and given them all
careful ev.aluation. His analysis is always painstaking. If he at times
seems to press the text too far, he is able to point out equivalent lacks in
other interpreters of the passage concerned. He has made a very thorough
attempt to give us the systematic thought of his subject. As he says, he
is rightly more concerned with the thought of Anaxagoras rather than any
particular historical interest which it may have. Add to these facts the
evident scholarship of the author, his ability to see in the other Greek
writers their affinity to the thought of Anaxagoras, his easy style and the
pleasing format of the book, and we have a work that will command
interest.

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888

Unfortunately the author's reach seems to exceed his grasp. Although
he has condemned the anachronistic application of modem notions to the
thought of earlier writers, Mr. Cleve begins (p. 13) to talk analogously
of a " molecular union " with respect to the " elements " of Anaxagoras.·
In later references (pp. 17, 18, 21 ff.) the analogous term seems to become univocal. At all points in this reference the author has apparently a
confusion between the dialectical analysis of nature which is the province
of the experimental scientist and the scientific (demonstrative) analysis
which belongs to the philosopher of nature. One could almost say that he
reflects the confusion of his subject on this matter. This may be "objective " reporting, but it must necessarily hold difficulties for the student.
Furthermore, there is a doubt in the reader's mind whether this confusion
in the report of the writer is reflective or originative. This doubt is
furthered when (p. 41) the author uncritically explains the AnaX:agorean
elements with the use of algebra.
It is also very confusing to find a critical analysis of one Greek writer
coupled with a great enthusiasm for the same said writer. This is an
especial difficulty when we find in the same work a quite unsympathetic
appreciation of the works of at least two of the other Greek writers who
have an acknowledged validity. When Mr. Cleve deals with Plato and
Aristotle he exhibits none of his flair for readh1g into their words the
thought that must have prompted their writings. One gets the feeling that
a closer study of these men before attempting the analysis of Anaxagoras
would have greatly enhanced the present treatment.
The editorial compression of a book review must necessarily do an injustice to the thought of the author. Any appreciation of the work tends
to appear fulsome while criticism seems an accusation of sophistry or at
least an implication that the author lacks intellectual integrity. In an attempt to obviate such an interpretation, I should like to consider in more
detail Mr. Cleve's conception of the Nous of Anaxagoras.
The author is one of the few who have appreciated the distinction l,>etween
the Nous of Anaxagoras and "the omnipotent God of the Bible, who
creates the world out of nothingness to be subservient to His ends." Here
he is very careful to define the two notions and show, in spite of other
interpretations, their evident incompatibility. Also he is not content to
describe Nous as an artist restricted to "mere moulding, mere ·building
U[l but once .... " For Mr. Cleve Nous " ... is a Hellenic artist, the
architect of the world, a mathematical and physical intelligence of the
highest rank, but of a might only relatively highest. A skilful mechanician,
knowing all that can be made of the world, but performing as well all the
conditions indispensable for accomplishing the chosen possibilities." As
he says, " . . . moulding but once the various organisms and then abandoning them would not have sufficed." In some way Nous must be respon-

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sible for the continued existence of its works. The analysis elaborates this
theme with the full equipment of the author's scholarly impedimenta. It
is lacking, if it is a lack and not a mere quibble of a perfectionist, in that it
fails to correlate this notion with that of the Demiurgos of Plato or the
Nature of Aristotle. Also a further insight into the operation of Nous might
be gained by a fuller appreciation of the notion of prime matter as
developed by Aristotle. This, I believe, would accord with the author's
intention to present the mind of Anaxagoras rather than any historical
figure of him. On the other hand, his brisk treatment of Aristotle's remarks about Anaxagoras seems to miss the context of these remarks. The
label, polyhistor, which Mr. Cleve has used for Aristotle seems to be taken
too inclusively. However, these faults, if they are faults, do not detract
from the real contribution which Mr. Cleve makes. Lovers of Philosophy
(since there are few if any Philosophers) will certainly not miss the opportunity to become acquainted with this latest addition.

R. A. KocouREK
College of St. Thomas,
St. Paul, Minnesota

Separation of Church and State in the United States. By ALVIN W. JoHNsoN and FRANK H. YosT. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1948. Pp. 283, with index. $4.50.
The same moderate usefulness possessed by Johnson's original work,
The Legal Status of Church-State Relationships in the United States, published in 1934, may be claimed for its present revision and enlargement.
Recent issues, and relevant court decisions, are briefly treated. There is
" no claim made that this study is in any way a definitive treatise on the
subject " (p. i). And indeed it is not. The opening chapter, on religious
liberty in the colonies and the background of the First Amendment, is
deplorably inadequate; the second chapter, on the religious element in
America's. first schools, is positively misleading in its account of the genesis
of the public school system and the progressive secularization of public instruction. The remaining chapters are more useful in that they bring forward the leading cases on various controversial phases of the relation
between religion and government, especially in the field of education. The
two chapters on Bible reading in public schools illustrate the historical
reluctance of Protestantism to admit that it should be separated from
the state as educator. And the chapter on anti-evolution laws are illuminating in regard of the effect of the fundamentalist religious conscience
on legislation. The discussion of citizenship and the bearing of arms throws

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BOOX REVIEWS

some light on the situation of pacifism in American life and law. And the
whole book, rather contrary (I think) to the intentions of its authors,
contributes to the impression that the famous wall of separation between
church and state was not from the beginning the formidable piece of
masonry that it is now represented as being. Similarly, one has the impression that the political philosophy embodied in the Declaration of
Independence, with its definite religious overtones, is increasingly less controlling of legislation and court
I take it that nothing could be
more alien to this original American theory of state and society than contemporary secularistic and positivistic legal attitudes.
No part of the book has any profundity, even from a legal point of view;
there is, for instance, only the most timid handling of the problem involved
in the transmission of the Bill of Rights to the states via the Fourteenth
Aniendment. And the authors carefully avoid the jurisprudential chaos
visible in recent Supreme Court decisions, in the Jehovah's Witnesses line
of cases and in the Everson and McCollum cases. Moreover, there is no
awareness of the altered situation of the problem of religious liberty in
consequence of the profound sociological changes of the last half-century;
one finds instead the old unconscious assumption that the only enemy of
religious liberty is " government," and the somewhat new assumption that
both religion and the state will flourish in direct proportion to the radicality
of their separation.
The value of the book therefore is simply in its assembly of citations; it
has no value as a piece of legal analysis. And the defects doubtless derive
from the standpoint of its authors, which is quite visibly Seventh Day
Adventistish; witness, for instance, the long treatment of Sunday laws.
The objective character of Johnson's earlier work is fairly well preserved,
.but there is here and there a slant in the direction of Protestants and Other
Americans United for Separation of Church and State (with which both
authors seem to be associated) . The authors' standards of judgment, insofar as they transpire at all, seem based on the anarchic concept of religious
liberty characteristic of the Seventh Day Adventists.
JoHN CoURTNEY

Woodstock College,
W oodatock, Md.

MuRRAY,

S. J.

BRIEF NOTICES
La gnoae V alentinienne et le temoignage de Saint !renee. By
M.-M. SAGNARD, 0. P. Paris: J. Vrin, 1947. Pp. 668.
The study of Gnosticism presents several interesting features. These
sects, Christian or pagan or a mixture of both sets of ideas, form an important chapter in the history of religion, of philosophy, and of ideas. They
have been quite influential in their times and have exercized a greater influence on later ages than is generally recognized. In particular, they have
put forth one notion which has come to the fore again and again and
which also plays a definite role in certain contemporary ideas on human
nature. This is the conception of man as tripartite, as consisting of matter
or body, soul or principle of life, and spirit or an element which pertains
to an order different from that of sensible reality. Adumbrated in Plato's
myth of the chariot (in Phaedrua) and also by Aristotle's notion of" Noua
coming from without," the theory of the three constituents has perhaps
never been worked out so consistently and given so much fundamental
importance as in the systems of Gnosticism. Although the Gnostic doctrines soon ceased to be effective or to win followers, they lived on in a,
so to speak, subterraneous manner to reemerge during the Renaissance and
at all times when the so-called Pythagorean mysteries or others of a similar
nature attracted attention. It would seem feasible to divide all theories
on human nature into three groups: monistic, dualistic, and trialistic. Even
within orthodoxy one notices occasionally traces of the trialistic, if not
doctrine, at least, expression. One need only recall the use of the term
mens in St. Augustine and many of his medieval followers (e. g. St. Bernard) . It was also a problem not devoid of interest, -whether or not such
traditions were alive in the " dialectics " of Hegel and still are alive in
certain contemporary philosophies, as in that of L. Klages who conceives of
" spirit " as the " antagonist of the soul."
A study, therefore, which widens and deepens our knowledge of Gnostic
doctrines has more than a merely historical relevance. Sagnard's voluminous treatise deserves recommendation not only because of the interest of
the topic but also because of the scholarly manner in which the author
deals with his subject matter. What we know of Gnosticism we owe mostly
to reports in the writings of the Christian Fathers directed against these
heretical systems. Among these writings the Adveraua Haereses by St.
Irenaeus holds a prominent place. Text, literary tradition, reliability of
this work are carefully analyzed by the learned Dominican. Equal care
is given to the presentation of Gnostic ideas in the Letter to Flora by the
Gnostic Ptolomee, to the fragments of Heracleon, the notes by Theodote,

886

BRIEF NOTICES

887

and the reports by Hippolyte. The Gnostic system is discussed in all its
details. One is thus appraised of the utterly fantastic ideas which make
up a large part of this doctrine, which however, appears as much more
intelligible than it did on the basis of previous treatises on the subject.
Although the author is concerned mainly with the ideas peculiar to Valentinian and his school-a long chapter deals with the teachings of Marcus
the Mage and his "arithmology "--one learns many things about the general spirit of Gnosticism.
It is impossible to summarize the Gnostic ideas which the author
presents in a clear manner, but for which he needs many· pages, because of
the many involved and difficult views which characterize these doctrines.
Thus, it must suffice that this work be pointed out as one which no
student. either of the early battles of the Church for the preservation of
orthodoxy or of the history of religion and philosophy will peruse without
great profit. Particularly, the analysis of Valentinian Gnosis in regard to
the Oriental, Greek, and Christian elements it contains is highly interesting,
as is the proof of the reliability of the sources used by St. Irenaeus and
his presentation of his antagonists. Many misunderstandings occurring in
older works are corrected, and the understanding of the Gnostic systems is
rendered easier by diagrams and tables. A useful bibliography, an index
of names, and a glossary of Greek words, especially of the technical terms
in Valentinian Gnosis, are added.

Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts. By BERNARD BERENSON.
with indexes. $4.00.
York: Pantheon, 1948. Pp.

New

Mr. Berenson has written a book-perhaps treatise is a more accurate
word-that is difficult to read and more difficult to analyze. The reason
for this difficulty in a tract on aesthetics is to be found in the fact that the
author's arrangement of material is itself a violation of one of the canons of
aesthetics, namely, that the diversity of elements in things beautiful should
be harmonized in such a way that the beholder is struck with and delighted
by their perceptible unity. The work is marked by a wide acquaintance
with the landmarks of culture presented in agglomerate form. The book
resembles a well-stocked pantry more than a carefully prepared and
easily digestible banquet.
The reader would do well to remember throughout the book two
passages that occur late in the rather lengthy introduction. The author
states that " . . . art history is the history of art as an experience and is
indifferent to questions of beauty." (p. 39) Further on he confesses: "I
am one of those lovers of sights and. sounds of whom Plato in the Republic
(476 B) speaks with pity, who 'delight in beautiful tones and colors and
shapes and in everything that art fashions out of these, but their thought is

388

BRIEF NOTICES

incapable of apprehending and taking delight in the nature of the beautiful
in itself.' He would call me a philodoxos and not a philosopher (ibid.
480 E) and I should not be angry, 'for to be angry with truth is not
lawful.'" (pp. 39-40)
From this it seems the author's intention was not to write a speculative
treatise, although the title would indicate otherwise. In point of fact, he
does not succeed in avoiding incursions into the field of aesthetic philosophy,
and his speculative essays are generally devoid of clarity of thought and
precision of expression. The gross nature of many of his obiter dicta,
especially in the fields of religion and ethics (cf. pp. 113 ff.) is in sharp
contrast to the genuinely refined perceptions expressed elsewhere on topics
germane to the subject of the book; e. g., the discussion of color in art (p.
79), or the description of aesthetic experience (p. 84). AU of which gives
emphasis to the adage about the shoemaker and his last; Mr. Berenson is
widely acquainted with the field of art, but makes a remarkable poor showing outside its confines.
If read against the background of an acquaintance with Thomistic aesthetic, this book will have some limited value as a source of embellishment for
some of the nearly cryptic principles of that theory. However, the author's
preoccupation with the "City of Man" (with implied opposition to the
" City of God ") (p. 184) , and his light treatment of things divine as in
some Biblical references (p. 16, 37) , together with many philosophical confusions and recrudescent errors serve to diminish the value of the work
taken as a whole. Those interested in the historical aspects of art have a
better choice among the more general works that leave greater opportunity
for independent judgment and are not heavily encumbered by confused
conception and repetitious expression.

White Magic.

By C. GRANT LooMIS. Cambridge, Mass.:
Academy of America, 1948. Pp. Q50, with index. $5.00.

Mediaeval

As an " Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend " under the
heading of White Magic, this book classifies the miracles of Christian
hagiography, not precisely as miracles but insofar as the miracles were accompanied by certain formularies or signs, used by the saints in their
thaumaturgy.
By reason of these formularies or signs, says the author,
the miracles enter the realm of folklore and become a manifestation of
human expression common to all peoples and all religions. Perhaps it
would be quibbling to point out that the word " magic " signifies the production of unexpected effects through a skillful manipulation of occult but
natural causes; whereas " miracle " by definition exceeds the powers of
nature, having God as its cause, the saint as His instrument. Magic is
praeternatural, the miracle, supernatural.

BRIEF NOTICES

389

To achieve his purpose, Professor Loomis has certainly been thorough
in his research; witness the fact that over half the book consists of source
notes and analogues for the various miracle types outlined in the text. Yet
it seems that his efforts are an example of an author's mind determined
beforehand to prove his case, and not one of objective investigation. As
an example of one of the signs or formularies for which he is searching,
there is cited the following (p. lOS) : " In the legend of St. Clotilde, we
learn how the blind and deaf were cured by Remi who wet his fingers with
saliva and applied them to the eyes and ears of the affi.icted persons, pronouncing the word Hephta (ouvrez-vous) ." The source given for this,
however reads thus: "It was fitting
Petites Bollandistes, VI, p.
that Clovis approach the regenerative waters of Baptism first. The Bishop
of Reims [St. Remi] led the illustrious catechumen to the entrance of the
baptistery and, as Christ did when He cured the blind and the deaf, [Mark,
VII, 34] touching the ears of the monarch with fingers moistened with
saliva, he pronounced the word Hephta (be thou opened)." Evidently,
then, there is no question of a miracle or miracle formula on the part of St.
Remi here, but simply an account of the rites preceding the Baptism of
Clovis, husband of St: Clotilde-rites still in fact employed by the Catholic
Church [cfr. Rituale Romanum, p. 15].
In his eagerness to verify his aprioristic theories, the author has fallen
into a blatant error in the use of his sources. These same preconceptions
have resulted in a book which has reduced the miracle to the level of the
Paul Bunyan feat; to the arbitrary classification of a manifestation of
human expression. In approaching the subject of the miraculous, it is of
paramount importance to realize what miracles are, that they are
possible, that they have happened. A miracle in itself is an effect exceeding
the powers of natural causes, either in itself, in the manlier in which it is
produced, or because of the subject in which it is effected. Sufficient
guarantee of the possibility of miracles is God, the Author and Conserving
Cause Who, since He freely created can also freely transcend the powers of
nature. History and the testimony of the senses attest to the fact of
miracles. Historical criticism also attests to the excrescences of exaggeration
and superstition that have accumulated about the lives of the saints, with
a too eager tendency to cry " Miracle." In spite of exaggeration and
superstition, however, the basic actuality must not be ignored. There have
been miracles not only in the superstitious days of the Middle Ages, but
also in the super-critical days of modern times. Prof. Loomis' work tends to
cast a shadow on this truth.
That he is able to classify miracles in such categories as Air, Earth,
Fire, Water, etc. should not be surprising, since the miraculous is a suspension or a transcendence of the natural order and of natural causes.
Nor is it surprising that miracles were performed with accompanying words,

9

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BRIEF NOTICES

signs, devices, or gestures. This proves, not that the miracles are a patterned expression of some tendency in man's nature, but that God, either
acting Himself or through His saints, has acted in accord with man's
nature. "Nothing is in the intellect unless it first be in the senses" has
its application here. In order that men might fully understand that they
were witnessing a miracle, sounds, signs, words were employed-sensible
things which would engage their attention.
This book cannot be considered ·an attack on the miraculous; it is just
not that violent. Rather it ignores any consideration of the objective truth
of miracles, and goes on its merry, scholarly way to verify its preconceived, quite invalid conclusions. One may also resent the occasional
grouping, by implication, of the Sacred Scriptures with folk legend, or of
Christ's miraCles with folklore. Ignoring the false premises indicated in
the Introduction, it can be said that the book is an occasionally amusing,
more often drily monotonous, recital of miracles, but quite harmless.

Sacramental Penance in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. By J. A.
SPITZIG. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press,
1948. Pp. fl07, with index. $Q.OO.
This doctoral dissertation is a further effort to throw light upon the
teachings of the theologians of the medieval period, and to show the overall uniformity of doctrine and the gradual clarification of ideas during that
period. The Masters of those days, including St. Thomas Aquinas, benefited by and in some instances greatly depended upon the contributions
of their predecessors.
The present study concentrates upon sacramental satisfaction in the lflth
and 13th centuries,-which led later to the definition by the Council of
Trent. It is divided into two parts. The first considers the theology of
sacramental satisfaction, which is prefaced by two chapters on the nature
and contemporary teaching on satisfaction in general. The theology of
satisfaction has been very capably exposed by the author in this section,
which emphasizes the need, possibility, and manner of both extra-sacramental and sacramental satisfaction. The reader gains a greater appreciation of these elements in the way of salvation.
The second half investigates this doctrine among the theologians of the
1flth and 13th centuries, an important era in the history of theology. Admittedly, the list of Masters is not taxative; it is representative and sufficient to indicate the traditional teaching. The chapter on the 1flth century
includes eight names from Peter Abelard to Peter of Blois; that on the
13th century contains Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, St. Albert, St.
Thomas, and Duns Scotus.

BRIEF NOTICES

S!H

The chronological inclusion of Scotus in the 13th century must not be
taken too strictly. Moreover, doctrinally, throughout the whole question
of satisfaction, he differed radically from his l£th and 13th century predecessors. Fr. Spitzig is forced to recognize the oppositions existing between
the teaching of Scotus and St. Thomas (and the other theologians). On
the fundamental point of the effects of sacramental satisfaction in the
state of mortal sin, the materia of the sacrament of penance and the
validity of absolution when confronted with the unwillingness of the
penitent to accept the penance imposed the two theologians are irreconcilable. Fr. Spitzig, in the interest of all possible uniformity, tends to
tone down and to minimize these differences.
The procedure of this dissertation follows a rigid pattern within each
chapter and relative to the individual theologians: the nature, works,
effects, necessity, possibility, and conditions of satisfaction, vicarious and
sacramental satisfactions. Rather needlessly in some cases the material
is thrust into this procrustean bed and the whole becomes monotonous
for the reader. The bow to popular terminology (p. ix) does not seem to
be sufficient reason for using the term sacramental penance in the title
and sacramental satisfaction throughout the entire body of the dissertation.
Very commendable work has been done on the revival of the sacramental
satisfactory value of penance in the state of serious sin.

Fundamental8 of Logic. By SYLVESTER J. HARTMAN. St. Louis: Herder,
1949. Pp. £71, with bibliography and index. $3.50.
Here, at last, is a textbook that can justly claim to be Aristotelian.
The author faithfully follows the order of the Organon and likewise carefully avoids inserting any extraneous material from psychology. This is
an advancement over previous works, since most logic textbooks offend
the Aristotelian mode by dividing their subject into formal and material
logic and by treating of matters proper to psychology. Another advantage
of Fr. Hartman's book is that it has a realistic point of view on how much
a college student can learn in a semester's course of logic. Fundamental8
of Logic is for the most part a sentence outline of logic, a series of
definitions on the
all of which is made enjoyable to the student
by means of copious examples.
The work is divided into six parts treating of concepts and terms (which
corresponds to the "Categories"); judgments and propositions (which
Aristotle treats in the " On Interpretation ") ; immediate and mediate inference:, the syllogism (found in th® "Prior Analytics "); the scientific
method (corresponding roughly to the " Posterior Analytics " and the
" Topics ") ; and finally of fallacies (called by Aristotle " On Sophistical

392

BRIEF NOTICES

Refutations ") . Actually the author is not explicit in the fact that he is
following Aristotle so closely. The main point is that he does. The section on fallacies is particularly good. Occasionally the author is rather
loose in his definitions. For example, he says: " Law in its primary sense
may be-briefly defined as the expressed will of the divine or a human lawgiver." (p. 171) St. Thomas, of course, considered it as an ordination of
reason. It is true that Fr. Hartman can probably reconcile his definition
with that of the Angelic Doctor, but loose terminology is too often a source
of confusion to the youthful philosophical mind. Nevertheless, in spite of
some minor defects, this textbook will gain a generous welcome in any
college classroom.

BOOKS RECEIVED
Aquinas, St. Thomas, On Being and Essence. Toronto: Institute of
Medieval Studies, 1949. Pp. 68, with index. $1.50.
Bell, B. I., Crisis in Education. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949. Pp.
with index. $8.00.
Berdiaeff, Nicolas, Le Sens de l'Histoire. Paris: Aubier, Editions Montaigne,
1948. Pp. 221.
Blackstone, B., English Blake. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1949. Pp. 478, with index.
Blanshard, P., American Freedom and Catholic Power. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1949. Pp. 350, with index. $8.50.
Bochenski, I., ed., Bibliographische Einfiihrungen in das Studium der
Philosophie. Bern: A Francke Ag., 1948. 1. Allgemeine Philo(I. Bochenski & F. Monteleone) pp. 42, with
sophische
index; S fr. 2.80. 4. Kiergegaard, (Regis Jolivet) pp. 88, with index;
S fr. 2.80. 5 . .Antike Philosophie, (Olof Gigon) pp. 52, with index;
S fr. 8.80. 6. .Arabische Philosophie, (P. J. De Menasce) pp. 49, with
index; S fr. 880. 8. .Aristoteles, (M.D. Phillippe), pp. 48, with index;
S fr. 3.80. 11. Der Logische Positivismus, (Karl Diirr) pp. 24, with
index; S fr.
Boole, G., The Mathematical .Analysis of Logic. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1948. Pp. 82. $8.75.
Bouchat, C. J., Pray like that! Windsor: J. R. Charette, 1949. Pp. 75.
$.25.
Bourke, V. J., Introduction to the Works of St. Thomas .Aquinas. New
York: Musurgia, 1948. Pp. 80.
Brillet, G., Isa'ie. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1948. Pp. 160.
Brucker, H., Freedom of Information. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Pp.
807, with index. $4.00.
Buckley, J., Man's Last End. St. Louis: Herder, 1949. Pp. 261, with
index. $3.50.
Carritt, E. F., An Introduction to Aesthetics. London: Hutchinson's
University Library, 1949. Pp. 151, with index. 7s 6d.
Cayre, F., Initiation ala Philosophie de Saint .Augustin. Bruges: Desclee
de Brouwer, 1947. Pp. 882, with index.
Chaine, J., Le Livre de la Genese. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1948. Pp.
526. 600 fr.
Compton, A. H., et al., Man's Destiny in Eternity. Boston: Beacon Press,
1949. Pp. 245, with index. $2.75.
De Beauvoir, S., The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1948. Pp. 163, with index. $8.00

898

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BOOKS RECEIVED

Deferrari, R. J. with Sr. M. I. Barry and I. McGuiness, A Lexicon of St.
Thomas Aquinas, fasc .. I (A-C) .. Washington: Catholic University
Press, 1948. Pp.
$12.50.
De La Boullaye, H. P., La Spiritualite lgnatienne. Paris: Editions Pion,
1949. Pp. 507', with index. 540 fr.
Deman, Th., transl., La Prudence (II-II, q. 47-56). Ed. des Jeunes.
Tournai: Desclee & Cie., 1949. Pp. 554, with notes. 75 frs. belges.
Dewey, J., Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1949.
Pp. 271, with index. $2.75.
Doronzo, E., De Poenitentia, (Tom. I). Milwaukee: Bruce, 1949. Pp.
560. $7.50,
Dorszynski, J. A., Catholic Teaching on the Morality of Falsehood. Washington: Catholic University Press, 1948. Pp. 126, with index. $1.50.
Ekbery, G. E., First Principles of Understanding. Oxford: Blackfriars,
1949. Pp. 18. ls 6d.
Fairchild, H. N., Religious Trends in English Poetry, (Vol. HI: 1780-1830).
New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Pp. 559, with indexes.
$6.75.
Florand, F., Les Etapes de la Simplicite. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1948.
Pp. 201. 200 fr.
Gardet, L. and Anawati, M.-M., Introduction
la Theologie Musulmane.
Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1948. Pp. 550, with indexes.
Geyl, P., Napoleon For and Against. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1949. Pp. 477, with index. $5.00.
Gibbons, M., Little Nellie of Holy God. Westminster: Newman Press,
1949. Pp. 62, with index. $.75.
Gibran,. K., Tears and Laughter. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.
Pp. 143. $:i!.75.
Gilby, T., Barbara Celarent. New York: Longmans, 1949. Pp. 316, with
index. $4.00.
Gilson, E., Saint Bernard. Paris: Librairie Pion, 1949. Pp. 373. 450 fr.
--, Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Institute of Medieval
Studies, 1949. Pp. 230, with index. $3.50.
Goodhart, .A. L., English Contributions to the Philosophy of Law. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Pp. 44. $1.50.
Grabmann, M., Das Seelenleben des Heiligen Thomas von Aquin. Freiburg,
Switzerland: Paulusverlag, 1949. Pp. 124, with index.
Hartman, S. J., Fundamentals of Logic. St. Louis: Herder, 1949. Pp. 277,
with index. $3.50.
Higgins, T., Man As Man. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1949. Pp. 618, with
index. $3.75.
Hofstadter, R., The American Political Tradition. New York: Knopf,
1948. Pp. 407, with index. $4.00.

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395

Hok, R. C., Edouard Estaunie. New York: Columbia University Press,
1949. Pp. 116, with index. $2.25.
Huber, Father, The Mystical Rose. Westminster: Newman Press, 1948.
Pp. 79. $1.75.
Inge, W. R., Mysticism in Religion. London: Hutchinson's University
Library. Pp. 168, with index. 12s. 6d.
Kaftal, G., Saint Catherine in Tuscan Painting. Oxford: Blackfriars,
lOs 6d.
1949. Pp. 133, with illustrations.
Kemp, E. W., Canonization and Authority in the Western Church. London:
Oxford University Press, 1948. Pp. 196, with index.
Kuhn, H., Encounter with Nothingness. Hinsdale: Henry Regnery, 1949.
Pp. 190. $3.00.
Latko, E. F., Origen's Concept of Penance. Quebec: Universite Laval,
1949. Pp. 106, with index.
Lebreton, J. and Zeiller, J., The History of the Primitive Church. (2 vols.)
New York: Macmillan, 1949. Pp. 1272, with index. $Hi.50.
Lowith, IC, Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949. Pp. 267, with index and notes. $4.00.
Luce, A. A., The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Edinburgh:
T. Nelson and Sons, 1949. Pp. 271. with index. 25s.
Mabbott, J. D., The State and the Citizen. London: Hutchinson's
versity Library, 1948. Pp. 180, with index. 7s 6d.
Marcel, G., The Philosophy of Existence. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1949. Pp. 104. $2.75.
Merton, T., Seeds of Contemplation.
Norfolk: New Directions, 1949.
Pp. 201, with index. $3.00.
--,What is Contemplation. Holy Cross: St. Mary's College, 1948. Pp.
25.
Messner, J., Social Ethics. St. Louis: Herder, 1949. Pp. lotH, with index.
$10.00.
Michonneau, G., Revolution in a City Parish. Oxford: Blackfriars, 1949.
Pp. 210. 7s 6d.
Mitterer, A., Elternschaft und Gattenschaft. Vienna: Herder, 1949. Pp.
160, with indexes. S 31.40, sfr. 13.60.
Neill, T. P., Makers of the Modern Mind. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1949. Pp.
302, with index. $3.75.
Nelson, L., Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1949. Pp. 233, with index. $3.75 ..
Northcott, C., Religious Liberty. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Pp. 128,
with index. $2.00.
Noss, J. B., Man's Religions. New York: Macmillan, 1949. Pp. 823, with
index. $4.50.

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BOOKS RECEIVED

O'Neill, J. M., Religion and Education under the Gonstitution. New York:
Harper, 1949. Pp. 350, with index. $4.00.
Paton, H. J., The Moral Law. London: Hutchinson's University Library,
1948. Pp. 151, with index. 15s.
--, The Categorical Imperative.
London: Hutchinson's University
Library, 1947. Pp. 283, with index. 2ls.
Philbrick, F. A., Language and the Law. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
Pp. 263, with index. $3.75.
Riciotti, G., The Life of Christ. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1948. Pp. 719, with
index. $7.50.
Roche, E., The De Primo Principia of John Duns Scotus. Saint Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute, 1949. Pp. 170.
Rogers, F. R., Treason in American Education. New York: Pleiades, 1949.
Pp. 189, with appendices. $3.00.
Roucek, J. S., Slavonic Encyclopedia. New York: Philosophical Library,
1949. Pp. 1456, with appendix. $18.50.
Scanlon, A. L., ed., Natural Law Institute Proceedings. (Vol. I, 1947.)
Notre Dame: Notre Dame University, 1949. Pp. 150.
Selsam, H., Handbook of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers,
1949. Pp. 128. $1.50.
Sertillanges, A.-D., Le Probleme du Mal. Paris: Aubier, 1948. Pp. 414.
Sheen, F., Peace of Soul. New York: Whittlesey House, 1949. Pp. 292.
$3.00.
Spitz, D., Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought. New York: Macmillan,
1949. Pp. 317, with index. $4.50.
Suzuki, D. T., Introduction to Zen Buddhism. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1949. Yp. 1.36, with index. $3.75.
Swenson, D. F., The Faith of a Scholar. Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1949. Pp. 160. $2.50.
Tabb, W., The Atomystic Way. New York: Exposition Press, 1948. Pp.
63. $£.00.
Wahl, J., A Short History of Existentialism. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1949. Pp. 58, with index. $2.75.
Ward, L. R., Blueprint for a Catholic University. St. Louis: Herder, 1949.
Pp. 406, with index. $5.00.
Wecter, D., et al., Changing Patterns in American Civilization. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. Pp. 187. $2.50.
Weyand, N., ed., Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins.
New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949. Pp. 477 with indexes. $5.00.
Wieman, H. N., The Directive in History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1949.
Pp. 158, with index. $Q.OO.