Excerpts from The Drama of Atheist Humanism by Henri de Lubac

I must warn students of de Lubac's tendency, despite huge scholarship, to fall into the trap which he normally deplores, viz. That the mere success of a movement in human affairs supports the argument for its worth. He also betrays the European intellectual's pretended contempt for pamphleteers and journalists, in other words for any non specialist who would dare to engage in debate with such as he. Imagine no Dean Swift, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C. S. Lewis etc! But knowing how French writers, with needling wit,  can prick the backsides of buffalos until they bellow, never mind simply deflate swollen egos, we may overlook this lapse. However the great Urs von Balthasar wrote in his essay to de Lubac's work, the following pertinent conclusion:

"He manages …. to arrive at clear positions that have remained as guidelines for the conversations of christians with their atheistic brothers. This fact will probably prove to be a greater testimony to life than the theoretical discussions of the issue of whether or not a real human being is capable of assuming a position beyond God."

He began his preface …" As he investigates the sources of modern atheism, particularly in its claim to have definitely moved beyond the idea of God, he is thinking of an ideology prevalent today in East and West that regards the Christian Faith as completely outdated: In the West this ideology is even more sharply expressed than in the East (specifically) in the positivism of linguistics scholars who assert not only that every sentence containing the word "God" is a meaningless one that precludes any further conversation but also that the word virtually "destroys meaning". But this extreme statement is firmly grounded in the great sources of that contemporary atheism that purports to have "moved beyond God" and whose basic forms are represented here (in the book). They are Feuerbach (before him Hegel and, after him and influenced by him, Marx) then Nietzsche … the polar opposite of Kierkegaard and later of Dostoevski, and finally with reference to his "mysticism" of the Eternal Return, and lastly, Auguste Comte .. this "high priest" of his own brand of "positive religion" is the most commanding — though largely unnoticed — presence in all forms of present-day positivism and anthropological antimetaphysics."

With all this in mind, read on — if you dare!!!
 
 

We have been witnessing for some time, not only extraordinary events that are drastically changing the face of the world, but one event in depth, which is changing something in man himself. ... [Some useful considerations on this same subject will be found in L'Homme nouveau. Etudes de pastorale, vol. s (Louvain, 1942), by R. Aubert, C. Moeller, A. Minon and A. Dondeyne.]
 
 

There have, of course, been many changes since the early ages of our humanity up till the present! But, during the whole course of the historical period, these changes appeared to be circumscribed, in many respects, within rather restricted limits.

There were, in particular, at least apparently, periods of ebb and flow; there were alternations between civilization and barbarism, between the foundation and the collapse of empires. Civilization left man close to nature, participating in its rhythm, happy to have attained, like nature, certain moments of fullness and fruitfulness, resigned in advance to falls as fatal as the succession of seasons or as the turns of the wheel of fortune.

From the time of his awakening, he was already, to be sure, this impatient animal, discontent with his lot, ready for uprisings and revolts. . . . But these were only sporadic and localized phenomena, like a sudden rise of a fever; not the regular steps of a planned march, not the progressive phases of a conscious and methodical action.

Now here in our own age a new ambition is born. An idée force has emerged. Man has, little by little, raised his head against this destiny that was weighing him down. He wants to escape the fatalities that, from time immemorial, he had learned to believe were invincible.

How has this been produced? Under the influence of some distant causes, thanks to the concourse of some favourable conditions? We are not going to analyse it.

It will be enough for us to discern, at the foundation of this transformation, three facts of consciousness among others, three simple, very general facts, about the very relative newness, whose whole importance stems from their increasingly vast expansion and their increasingly systematic character. The first of these facts, as well as the most general and the most banal, is faith in science.
 
 

Descartes
 
 

Built up by experimental research and having achieved its precision thanks to mathematics, positive science was not born yesterday. After the long eclipse that followed its beginnings in the Greek and Hellenistic age, it was reborn in the Middle Ages, particularly beginning with the fourteenth century, in order to triumph at the time of Galileo Descartes and Pascal.

But still in the seventeenth century, was often considered only as the means of satisfying a noble curiosity or of procuring some practical advantages.

Despite Descartes, faith in science as having to assure the happiness of the greatness of humanity, worship of research as being the highest ideal that can be set, is much more recent.

Moreover, in its beginnings, positive science conquered only a limited field: after that of astronomy, that of the physical sciences. Chemistry and biology really began to be added to it only during the eighteenth century. Then it was the turn of the human sciences: political economy, sociology, psychology.

A little more than one century ago, in his celebrated Cours de philosophie positive, Auguste Comte proclaimed the advent of the "positive age" (succeeding, he said, the theological and metaphysical ages) through the foundation of "social physics", or "sociology.

This was the great novelty - then, it is true, much more imagined than effective, but today very real - man himself became, like external nature, the object of positive science, submitted to the same methods of investigation, and, consequently, it should be readily added, for the first time able finally to know himself, since positive science is the only rigorous type of knowledge, expelling all dreams, all imaginary visions of empty religions and philosophies.

Despite its claims, the positivism of the last century still represented a capitulation of science before man.

Comte had reproached all "theologism" for having "given man the advantage over the world". But, fearing what he called "a blind and dispersive specialization" and subordinating analysis to synthesis as well as progress to order, he had ended by demanding that his disciples, the priests of the future, renounce the pursuit of an impossible objectivity, in order to sanction ideal concepts that responded to the needs of the heart.

He had gone so far as to bring back the fetishism of the "primitives" Precisely those who had not followed him on this path had not attained perfect positivity.
 
 

[Cf Edmond Walbecq, Essai critique sur la religion d'Auguste Comte, 5947 thesis (Theology Faculty, Catholic Institute of Paris); part one: "Les Présupposés de la religion de l'Humanité"]
 
 

A vague mysticism still protected humanity from the attacks of knowledge; it constituted a kind of "sentimental entity" in which those now living had to be resolved.

This subjectivism having finally been reduced, today the whole man, it is said, is integrated into science. Now - and this is the second fact - this science is not only theoretical science, the more rigorous and more precise modern analogue of what the aesthetical contemplation of the cosmos was for the ancients. It is an "operating science". It is completely oriented toward the possession of the world. It is said that the age of purely critical as well as of purely retrospective thoughts, just as of supposedly disinterested systems, is over.

The sciences of the past were themselves only a springboard. Man has a practical end, and he looks ahead. It is no longer for him a matter of tasting some speculative intoxication but, according to the end already glimpsed by Bacon and soon clearly assigned by Descartes, of making himself "master and possessor of the forces of nature".

Technique thus no longer appeared to be an inferior genre, like a utilisation more or less refused by a science fearing to be degraded: it was recognised as its necessary extension.

Knowledge of the laws of the universe is, in the hands of man, a tool to be used in acting on it. And the range of the Cartesian dream is revealed to be increasingly vast, at the same time as this dream is made increasingly attainable, to the degree that science is developed and monopolises the human domain.
 
 

[Cf. above, Part Two, Chapter 3, section a: "The Priesthood of the Scientists". 13 Henri Waflon, lecture at the Palais de Chaillot, June so, 1945, for the inauguration of the Encyclopædia de la Renaissance francaise. 14 Let us add, with M. Guilbaud, this further comment: "It is in the conquest itself that knowledge is achieved. The traditional division into pure science and applied science is subsiding from day to day": Science et technique, in the review of the twenty-fourth university days, Easter 1947.]
 
 

The great utopians of the beginning of the nineteenth century revived it. The mission of man, according to Fourier, is the "management of the Globe". "Everything by industry, everything for it": such was the watchword given by Saint-Simon, whose "new Christianity" looked like an "industrialism".

And we know that one of Auguste Comte's slogans was: "To know, so as to provide". The idea of a new value and a new significance of human work sprang up everywhere and gradually conquered minds.

In this, capitalism and socialism, those two great antagonistic forces, were in agreement: they were like the two faces of the same movement that carried away the entire century.

A new type of civilization was conceived and began to be achieved: the industrial type of civilization, a civilization of work. The work of Proudhon and that of Karl Marx, just like the activity of the old Saint-Simonians, converged in its formation.

Man felt destined to organise the planet with a view to its maximal output. He undertook to transform the world through his work.15 But, since man, too, had become an object of science like all the rest, why would what was true for the external world be any less true for man himself?

The dream of technology and its first major achievements coincided, moreover, with a sudden awareness of social unity and with a powerful surge of social aspirations which were also something new in humanity. To the transformation of nature, they thought, must thus be added the transformation of society. Social science gave rise to "social engineers". And, since it was the whole man who had become the object for himself, it was the whole man, too, who was henceforth going to be manipulated and worked like an object.

One after the other, an applied biology, an applied psychology, an applied sociology were founded.... Through science, man was going to make himself "master and possessor of

the human forces".
 
 

[Cf. Jean Lacroix, Socialisme?, "Le Forum" series (ELF., 1946]
 
 

A whole "technology" of man developed. And this is the third fact.

Let me cite merely two examples. On the one hand, eugenics. The practical idea of a methodically organised "human selection" dawned. Thanks to progress in biology, man could now direct his own biological evolution, and he had to do so if wanted to be on top of the tasks that awaited him.

It would be a question only of negative measures, like preventing certain undesirable procreation through processes such as sterilisation; more must be dared: it was necessary to produce in a positive way the appearance of a superior race; and, in order to do so, to specialise breeders, to refine methods of fertilisation, and so forth.

Or, another example: political propaganda, so necessary for draining all individual energies toward one great goal, would be based on a systematic exploitation the fundamental principles of experimental psychology, in particular those of Pavlov's theory of "conditioned reflexes".

The understanding of the behavioural mechanisms brings with it the possibility of manipulating them at will.

From then on, one can set off definite reactions from people in directions determined in advance. Of course the possibility of influencing men had already existed from the time man existed, spoke and had relations with his peers; but this was a possibility that worked blindly and that required great experience or special aptitudes: this was, in a way, an art.

Here we had this art becoming a science, which could calculate, predict and act according to controllable rules. An immense step forward loomed in the sociological domain.

With this third fact, if we take it in all its complexity, one of the great novelties of our epoch takes shape, fraught with promise and danger: humanity discovered itself - grasped itself -

as an object, in the twofold sense of this word "grasp", that is, both to understand by means of one's intelligence and to take hold of with one's hands. With a view to maximal output, it took charge of itself. It was going to forge its own destiny.
 
 

[Sergei Chakhotin, Le Viol des foules par Ia propagande politique, French trans. (Paris: Gallimard, 5939), p. 32. The author seems to think that, if the end of propaganda is sound, the latter, remaining unchanged in its processes, would no longer constitute a violation: pp. 43, 113 and 525.]
 
 

Up until then, thrown into an adventure of which it had neither control nor even, to tell the truth, awareness, it had let itself go, the plaything of obscure forces.

So it had not made progress.

It had turned, in a way, on itself. This is what had now been set in motion. Its evolution would henceforth be induced, directed, unified. To what progress could it not, then, lay claim! It was in all fields that it said, with Julian Huxley: "It substituted the possibility of conscious control of evolution for the previous mechanism of the blind chances of variation."

Having attained, it thought, mastery of biological, psychic and social phenomena, it had no doubt of being able henceforth to act on itself with the same success that it had already known in the applications of the material sciences.

And in those who, being aware of this great fact, wanted to work to increase it, a double tendency arose toward elements that had formerly often been contradictory but which were now united to attain their culmination together: a tendency at once organisational and revolutionary.

The two words of the positivist slogan are too weak to describe them; they do not say "order and progress", but "revolution and organisation", or rather "organising revolution". For this was the end of the fantasies, the competition, the squandering of liberal anarchy.
 
 

[Julian Huxley, Essays of a Biologist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 5929), p. x, preface (written in 5923). 151 Ibid., p. viii: "Furthermore, as the grasp of principles in physico-chemical science led speedily to an immense new extension both of knowledge and of control, so it is not to be doubted that like effects will spring from like causes in biology. . . . Applied physics and chemistry bring more grist to the mill; applied biology will also be capable of changing the mill itself. The possibilities of physiological improvement, of the better combination of existing psychical faculties, of the education of old faculties to new heights, and of the discovery of new faculties altogether - all this is no Utopian silliness, but is bound to come about if science continues her current progress."]
 
 

It was also the end of romantic, sentimental and libertarian revolts. Only a powerful, realistic and, when need be, hard initiative, unifying the efforts of all to the service of a common plan, would permit humanity to break with its routines and its servitudes in order to construct itself.

That this belief in the power of rational organisation was, at least in part, a compensatory phenomenon, in a century in which certain irrational forces were unleashed more violently than ever - and in which the problem of the irrational imposed itself increasingly in all orders of thought - is very possible.

It was in this way that we once saw theories of the universal power of the popes develop at a time when the rise of nationalities and the rebirth of the ancient public law brought about a decline of the papacy on the political level. That such a belief penetrated large sectors at the very moment when a serious methodological crisis was opening up in the sciences of man is a fact that seems rather clear.

That it was expressed, at times even by authentic scholars, in a variety of ever-recurring scientistic systems, likely to discourage the most sympathetic examination by the simplism and self-complacency that were displayed there, cannot be denied.
 
 

Underlying these views, we discern in a certain number a new conception of thought itself. The latter would be by essence constructive, not contemplative; creative, not representative. Its essential function would not be to bring out as objectively as possible a fixed, pre-established order of truths and values but to create new values and to accomplish them in deeds. A conception prepared, or rather already formulated, in the last century by Marx and Nietzsche.

Agreement on so fundamental an idea by these two antagonistic thinkers is an indication of its powerful influence. We know the thinking of Marx on Hegelianism, the final end of all speculative philosophy, and the famous declaration at the end of the Theses on Feuerbach: "Up to the present, philosophers have interpreted the world As for Nietzsche, the "death of God" marked for him the end of any idea of an objective True or Good.
 
 

[Cf above, Part One, Chapters, sections 3 and 4. F. F. Alquié has recently risen in opposition to these, tendencies: cf "Une Philosophie de l'ambiguité?", in Fontaine, vol. 59, p. 48.]
 
 

Engines of Death
 
 

That, in fact, the first results of the action that this belief determined proved to be less than encouraging; that, for example, new inventions immediately became engines of death; that so far man has still not been able to master mechanisation; that he has succeeded most of the time only in increasing his anguish and in multiplying his sorrows - all this is still only too true.

But we will not pay too much attention to this. Is it necessary to stare at the sun for long to be convinced of its brightness? The greatest ideas seem miserable when they have passed through petty minds. The most incontestable innovations do not find adequate interpreters at first glance. And after all, it is not happiness that man seeks, it is not pleasure.

Besides, a priori there is no objection to trusting in time. A great experience does not bear fruit immediately, it is natural for it to bring about some disruption at first, and a few initial disappointments do not constitute a peremptory argument against it. Does not the fact that all this atrocious misery has not deterred him from it, or, if one prefers, the fact that this formidable jolt has not awakened him from his dream - does not this fact alone already speak in favour of the profound instinct that propels him?

The two wars whose bruises we bear have been two heavy blows of the battering ram against an edifice of dreams: they have shaken the edifice, not destroyed it, and the crisis that was opened in many consciences has often only increased its hold. So it is not the banal, although assuredly powerful, objection of the pessimist that deserves to hold us back at first.

Based on a sombre present and on still more sinister predictions, this objection is in fact, swept away in many by hope, and all the sarcasm that it arouses leaves this hope intact.
 
 

["There is nothing for which man is less made than happiness or of which he tires more quickly" (Paul Claudel, Le Soulier de Satin)]
 
 

This is enough to make us take it seriously and to make the trouble of examining the solidity of the ideas that form it worthwhile. But, precisely, after having given a sceptical smile, should one not become indignant? Is it not in fact a forbidden dream that is at issue here? A demoniacal ambition? If catastrophe must be predicted for it, is this not because man is in the process of "biting into the forbidden fruit", of usurping a role that cannot be his, of upsetting the order of the cosmos, of encroaching on the rights of God?

Prometheus
 
 

Several have wondered this. With some, it is scarcely more than a reflex of timidity or nostalgia for the forms of life and culture whose undeniable charm have vanished forever from our eyes: through the effects of a retrospective illusion, the price paid for these forms of life is often forgotten.

With others, an exacerbated romanticism develops an opposition in principle to any technical civilization and substitutes for the outdated idol of progress the "new idol of the curse of progress".

Some have given proof of so complete an ignorance of the scientific movement that it is not worth the trouble to discuss it with them.

Certain others, however, who do discern the fullness of this movement wish to see in it only an arrogant restlessness. These, without cursing science itself or even technology, condemn the dream of construction they inspire. They consider this will to transform the world, society and even man himself to be an even more monstrous collective revival of the crime of Prometheus.

They persistently remind man then that he is a creature, that he is a part of a universe with laws that are independent of his mind just as of his will, that his first duty is to submit in all things to the real, to the object, and to respect the order established by Providence.

This traditionalist state of mind, which was not born yesterday, is still alive today. From it proceed those pamphlets denouncing in every respect what is being sought in our time and characterising it as so many signs of degeneration.
 
 
 
 

In this "universe in a state of psychic evolution" which is ours, as fixed as it may have been in its essential framework since the appearance of the human race, consciousness is raised through moments, as it were, with the perception of new dimensions and values. Now it seems very likely that we have been in one of these moments of awakening and transformation. A new humanism? That is undoubtedly to say too little; a kind of new man is being constituted, transforming at one stroke the idea that man has had more or less up to now of himself of his history, of his destiny. In idea, therefore, as well as in fact, it is something like an extraordinary "shedding of skins".