Twilight of Civilization

This is the title of a book comprising several lectures given by Jacques Maritain, one of the great Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century—just prior to the Second World War, yet it is relevant still.

As this excerpt reveals, the names may have changed but the anti-God strategy is still much the same.

“The forces in the presence of which we now find ourselves are, in principle, anti-Christian. It might be better to call them “anti-Christic,” for at this point there is not so much a question of doctrinal opposition to Christianity as an existential opposition to the presence and the action of Christ in the bosom of human history. I should like to analyze briefly the spiritual and religious implications of these forces, especially of Nazi racism and Communism. It is useless to speak of Fascism from this point of view, since, for several reasons which I have not the time to elaborate, the religious or mystical dynamism of Fascism is quite weak. Because of this, too, it is difficult for Fascist state-worship not to feel, in this respect, the influence of other and more virulent forms. It has definitely been enslaved by German racism.

“Let us first of all consider the principle of racism. Racism is, as I said at the outset, above all an irrationalist reaction. German racism—nourished by a most absurd pedantry (but in such cases as this the more absurd the pedantry, the greater its effectiveness)—is a pathological protestation of nature, with its brutal force surging up from the hidden depths of the nourishing earth, with its needs for euphoria and power and with that implacable rage which is capable of exalting mere instinct when spirit, betraying itself, flings itself into the abyss of animality; it is a pathological protestation against a clericalism of pure reason which in the course of the nineteenth century had promised a heaven on earth but had possessed no understanding of nature nor sense of human distress.

“Thus is developed a mystical hatred of truth itself, intellectual or moral, a mystical hatred of wisdom and of all asceticism; but concomitantly there arises a sort of powerful religiosity, the religiosity inherent to the human substance in its most elemental physical fibres. God is invoked, but only by virtue of the natural desire rooted even in the fleshly vitality of man. Because of the fundamental process of reaction which I have just pointed out, this God is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and of love, excluding Him and hating Him. Through an extraordinary spiritual phenomena, one believes in God and still does not know Him. The idea of god is asserted, but at the same time it is disfigured and perverted. A god which will end by identifying himself with some invincible forces at work in the blood defies the God of Sinai and the God of Calvary, burls a challenge to the transcendent Being, to HIM WHO IS and who inhabits inaccessible glory, the WORD which was in the beginning, the God or whom it has been said the He is Love. We are face to face, not with pseudo-scientific atheism but with a demonic paratheism, or pseudo-theism which if it rejects wisdom, is at the disposal of all forms of occultism and is no less anti-Christian, is even more corrupting that atheism.” (Maritain, J. (1945) The Twilight of Civilization, London; Sheed & Ward. Pp. 18-19)