Book review - Oh, the Humanities!
Alan Jacobs: The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of Crisis
Reviewed by Ross Douthat
In the spring of 1946,
W.H. Auden came to Harvard to read a poem to the university’s Phi Beta Kappa
chapter. Titled “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times,” the poem
envisioned a postwar world in which, the war-god Ares having quit the field,
public life would be dominated by a renewed contest between “the sons of
Hermes” and “Apollo’s children” — the motley humanists against the efficient
technocrats, the aesthetes and poets and philosophers and theologians against
the managers and scientists and financiers and bureaucrats.
These two factions,
Auden suggested, could ideally coexist: The Apollonian genius is for government
and rule, and “the earth would soon, did Hermes run it,/Be like the Balkans.”
But the Apollonian spirit, ever ambitious, cannot bear to leave the humanists
to their poems and ideas and arguments, and so it seeks to expand its empire
outward:
But jealous of our
god of dreams,
His common-sense in
secret schemes
To rule the heart;
Unable to invent
the lyre,
Creates with
simulated fire
Official art.
And when he
occupies a college,
Truth is replaced
by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations,
Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.
During his visit,
Auden met James Conant, then the president of Harvard and a man associated with
the Apollonian transformation of the modern university, its remaking as a
scientific-technical power-house with its old religious and humanistic purposes
hollowed out. “ ‘This is the real enemy,’ I thought to myself,” Auden wrote of
the encounter. “And I’m sure he had the same impression about me.” This anecdote appears
near the end of “The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in An Age of
Crisis,” a new book by the Baylor professor Alan Jacobs.
Auden is one of his main subjects; the others are T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil,
Jacques Maritain and C.S. Lewis, a group of religious thinkers whose wartime
writings Jacobs depicts as a sustained attempt, in the shadow of totalitarian
ambition and liberal crisis, to offer “a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich
Christianity” as the means to a postwar humanistic renewal in the West... read more:
