Chapter VII · THIS UNBELIEVING WORLD (continued 2)

I like to think that “The Story of Philosophy” has been bought in such quantities because it is, to a very great and very charming extent, The Story of the Philosophers. Durant’s ability as a writer of biography amounts almost to genius. Nor are his accounts of the philosophers’ philosophies often other than good bits of skillful summing-up interspersed with apt quotations. My only misgivings revolve around the stories of Durant—those paragraphs of criticism and seemingly personal opinion with which he usually ends his chapters—around those and certain omissions. What have we here, the story of philosophy, or only the story of a certain bias purporting to be the story of philosophy?

As was to be expected of a born biographer, Durant follows the method of using environment to explain belief. The pessimism of Schopenhauer is due to the fact that he lived in the first half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Holy Alliance, when Waterloo had been fought, the Revolution was dead, and the Son of the Revolution rotting on a rock in a distant sea. “Something of [Schopenhauer’s] despair came from the pathetic distance of St. Helena.”⁠[214] And when “Mme. Clotilde de Vaux (whose husband was spending his life in jail) took charge of Comte’s heart, his affection for her warmed and colored his intelligence.” So Comte’s later Religion of Humanity was due to the happiness of his illegitimate union, just as his earlier Positivism had been due to the marital infelicity which led him to attempt suicide in the Seine.

It is the method by which Taine years ago sought to explain all English literature. Durant is an environmentalist—which, after all, is better than being a mad hereditarian. One is tempted to enquire into his own environment, his college, his religious and philosophical surroundings, and to read dates and geography between his lines. But I cannot bring myself to apply either the environment or the heredity hypothesis to the exclusion of that entity which comes from neither, that ego which learns or does not learn from its contact with that which is not itself.

That Durant is not himself a philosopher, is evident—and in his favor. We really do not need another philosopher just now—of the sort we would be likely to get. He has no system of his own, no universal touch-stone, no central thesis giving unity to his several beliefs. In his mind Kant, Darwin and Bergson meet, but no more mingle than do oil and water. An emulsifying tertium quid is lacking. This lack should have made him an ideal historian of other men’s theories. And it almost did.

But there is another lack. The complete historian should have a complete experience. He should have been submerged in the main stream of thought, even if he has failed to sound all its dead-waters to the bottom. And if environment and the accident of birth do not offer him such experience, he should have that thirst for knowledge which leads to exploration and discovery.

The Durant ego lacks precisely that. It was born in a lake, and it has no thirst for the sea. Like certain aquatic creatures, it takes what floats into its mouth, but makes no explorations. What Durant has given us is simply not the story of philosophy. It is merely a series of interesting comments upon the curriculum of a certain type of college which does not even belong to the University of World Thought. This provincialism is unfortunate, for it is certain to deceive provincial readers with the idea that they have listened to the whole story.

It is difficult, after the reading of a book which is an avowed recapitulation of many foreign opinions, to say what an author’s own opinions may be. It is evident that Durant is no Catholic; not quite so evident whether or no he is a believing Protestant. He seems to have little sympathy with Protestantism as a whole, and less yet with Fundamentalism. It may be safe to say that his personal bias takes the direction of a vague Humanism.

To quote, without taking the greatest precaution not to pass off some mere explanatory paraphrase as the author’s own, would be so unfair that I hesitate to quote at all in proof of anything. There are, however, certain passages which are clearly Durant, and not Plato, Aristotle or Nietzsche boiled down—though even here we must be on guard lest what we see is Durant under the momentary influence of his subject, not Durant in his daily habit. It is the wind which does not blow, the things which he does not say, that speak most eloquently and surely of the man.

Chapters, and most of them long chapters, are given to Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Nietzsche; a chapter to three contemporary Europeans—Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce and Bertrand Russell; and a final chapter to the three American moderns, George Santayana, William James and John Dewey. There are adequate pages devoted to Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, and many a lesser light. Some, you will note, are pre-Christian; some are atheistic; some deistic, monistic, or agnostic. It is a chorus which is irreligious with a vast predominance, with here and there a tolerant voice for modernistic Protestantism. Bishop Berkeley, represented by a few paragraphs, stands practically alone as the exponent of a particular faith.

It will be said that this is the story of philosophy, not of theology. But I cannot see the force of the explanation. Theology is certainly philosophy; and why should one man be barred because he begins with the assumption that God has revealed Himself in an Incarnation, and another admitted who begins with the assumption that God has revealed himself in the human will of a super-man devoted satanically to selfish ends, or is in the process of revealing himself in an élan vital, or begins with the assumption that there is no God? Surely the historian is not bound to believe every philosophy he outlines. And surely the Christian assumption is no more of a foregone conclusion than are the others.

Nor even if it be granted that the story of philosophy, because of the current use of the word, is naturally a story of secular philosophy, does Durant come off any better. The Chinese philosophers and the Vedantic philosophers of India may be said to be so widely separated from us in time and space that they do not belong in a history of our culture. That was more true in the days when Durant was a boy than it is today. But let it pass. What about the Scholastics?

The Scholastics were not only theologians, but philosophers and scientists; they dominated the thought of Christendom for a thousand years, and still dominate a large section of Christendom, not counting their influence in quarters where it is felt rather than recognized.

Durant admits that his treatment of Scholasticism is “inadequate,” but excuses himself with the plea that the inadequacy was due to lack of space. But he finds space for ten and a half pages about Benedetto Croce—and no page at all for St. Augustine, Albertus Magnus, or St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Angelic Doctor’s name, however, is mentioned. It appears in a pictorial table of “philosophic affiliations,” constructed in the manner of a family tree. According to this table, Aquinas stems from Aristotle, who stems from Plato, who stems from Socrates, who stems from the Sophists. There is also a branch line of affiliation extending to the left like a bar sinister, connecting the great scholastic with Christian Theology followed by a question mark. I do not fathom the meaning of the question mark. But Christian Theology (?) itself stems from Zeno the Stoic, and he from Diogenes, and he from Antisthenes, and he from Heraclitus. There is yet another branch line leading from Antisthenes, touching Socrates, and ending in Aristippus, of the house of Democritus and Leucippus.

So Aquinas appears to be quite free from any unquestioned philosophic affiliation with St. Augustine, Albertus Magnus, St. Paul, or even Jesus Christ. We begin to be glad that Durant had no room for an “adequate” treatment of the Scholastics.

Unfortunately, he does not quite drop them with the chart. In a note “To the Reader” he refers to them as “half-legendary.” It is odd that a school which included the leading thinker, secular or sacred, of the Thirteenth Century, the age of Dante, should have become legendary in the New York of 1926, from which Durant dates his book.

Turning from legends, we come to Benedetto Croce, who, writes Durant⁠[215] “is a sceptic with an almost German gift for obscurity ... an anti-clerical who writes like an American Hegelian ... an Italian Catholic who has kept nothing of his religion except its scholasticism and its devotion to beauty.” And lo, we are back to legend again! “Perhaps the comparative infertility of Italy in the philosophy of the last hundred years,” Durant goes on, “is due in some part to the retention of scholastic attitudes and methods even by thinkers who have abandoned the old theology.” Adding,⁠[216] “He [Croce] is, after all, a product of the scholastic tradition ... he is a germanized Italian.”

Now it is quite true that, though Thomas Aquinas was a native of the Kingdom of Naples, he studied under Albertus Magnus at Cologne—probably during the year 1244; returned to Cologne in 1284; and perhaps visited it several times thereafter. But both he and his illustrious master were scholastics of the school of St. Augustine, who died in the year 430. The one German thing about St. Augustine is that Eucken, the German philosopher, says of him: “If our age wishes to take up and treat in an independent way the problems of religion, it is not so much to Schleiermacher or Kant or even Luther or St. Thomas that it must refer as to Augustine, and outside of religion, there are points upon which Augustine is more modern than Hegel or Schopenhauer.”

Durant surely cannot mean that a living Italian has been “Germanized” through having absorbed the teachings of a master who died in 1280 and was the follower of another master, in Hippo, who died in 430. As one of the chief tenets of Scholasticism is that the Christian creed can be proven by reason alone without recourse to Revelation, Croce of course had to repudiate his scholasticism, German or not, along with his religion. All that can remain to him, if anything remains, is a certain training of the mind. Whether he has shown the effects of such training, or made good use of it, is a matter of opinion. What Durant shows here is total unfamiliarity with his subject. He is merely applying certain notions which he picked up uncritically from unauthorative sources. But having mentioned this Scholasticism which he seems not to have read, he goes on, re Croce, to ask: “How could an Italian be unkind to a Church that had brought all the world to Canossa, and had levied imperial tribute on every land to make Italy the art-gallery of the world?”

My own rather extended acquaintance of the art-galleries of the world has heretofore inclined me to believe that Italy has been more sinned against than sinning in this regard—and that in Italy, itself, such stolen masterpieces as are to be seen were largely stolen from the Church and placed in galleries belonging to an anti-clerical state. But perhaps I am mistaken—and mistaken also in thinking that since 1870 the Pope has been self-imprisoned in the Vatican when in reality he has been roaming for the (until very recently) irreligious Italian Government abroad, stealing pictures. Or was it before 1870 that the thieving from foreigners was done—during the days when Italy was overrun with foreign armies, and the term Italy was a mere “geographical expression?” Does he refer to the marble treasures of the Vatican rescued from war and neglect in Greece and elsewhere? Or were the thefts of a still earlier date, when most of Europe was comparatively barbarian? I can think of one such instance. Some of the decorations for St. Mark’s, Venice, were brought by the Venetian merchants from the Orient—as was the body of their patron saint.

But Durant continues: “So Italy remained loyal to the old faith, and contented itself with the ‘Summa’ of Aquinas for philosophy.”

When? Why, until Giambatista Vico came. He “stirred the Italian mind again; but Vico went, and philosophy seemed to die with him. Rosmini thought for a time that he would rebel; but he yielded. Throughout Italy men became more and more irreligious, and more and more loyal to the Church. Benedetto Croce (born in 1866) is an exception.”⁠[217]

What Durant must mean is that the more irreligious one becomes the more loyal one naturally is to the Catholic Church. If that be true, the Italian Risorgimento (the political movement which led to the union of Italy under an anti-clerical government) was certainly most loyal—and it expressed its loyalty by taking the Church’s temporal empire away from it! But in what respect was Croce an exception to this devotion and this irreligion?

For one thing, he was nearly killed beneath the ruins of a house at Casamicciola during the earthquake of 1883. For another, he was “given so thorough a training in Catholic theology that at last, to restore the balance, he became atheist.”

But this, apart from the training, was precisely what the Risorgimento did, so there is no exception here. The exception, then, must lie in the fact that he did not remain loyal. He could not get enough of the Catholic theology out of his system to be loyal to the Catholic Church—though he could be loyal enough to imitate the Risorgimento in repudiating it! This, as Durant himself says⁠[218] of Croce’s philosophy in general, “is as clear as a starless night.”

I wish to record my entire agreement with this final verdict as to the Croce philosophy. From the most absurd premises in the world, Durant has somehow arrived at a correct and satisfactory conclusion.

But he does not stop here. He goes on to say that Croce “slides easily into logical casuistry and refutes more readily than he can conclude.” It is easy to see that Scholasticism is being held to blame here. Durant does not like Scholasticism, and he does not like Croce. Not that there is the slightest evidence that Durant ever read a single scholastic author. I am merely assuming that he has. And he would like to derive the cause of one dislike from the source of the other. So he permits himself to use the word “casuistry” as loosely as Browne would have us believe St. Paul used theological terms—that is, he uses it as an old lady sitting by the fire might use it, to denote sophistry, and sophistry to denote an unsound argument. A philosopher could never have so forgotten the original meaning of casuistry as the art of dealing with cases of conscience, especially when writing of Croce with the idea that he was a scholastic. But perhaps it was the “German” scholasticism of his subject which fogged the Durant mind at this point.

But how explain the following? He tells of Croce becoming Minister of Public Education and a Senator, and denouncing the World War. Then he adds: “But Italy has forgiven him now; and all the youth of the land look up to him as their unbiased guide, philosopher and friend.”⁠[219]

Had Durant but said, “The anti-fascist wing of the Intelligencia, most of whom are far from young and cling to the atheistic French Revolutionary philosophy of the Risorgimento, look up to Croce,” the statement would have been true—in so far as a member of the Intelligencia may be said to look up to anybody. Every unbiased person who has spent much time in Italy of late knows that most of the youth of that country today look upon Mussolini, and not Croce, as their guide, philosopher and friend. And Mussolini is a Catholic. Has Durant never heard of the Black Shirts or of the March on Rome?

But perhaps I am wrong in finding fault with Durant’s fondness for catering to popular misconceptions which no doubt he shares. He quotes his favorite Bergson as saying, “The time given to refutation in philosophy is usually time lost. Of the many attacks directed by the many thinkers against each other, what now remains? Nothing, or assuredly very little. That which counts and endures is the modicum of positive truth which each contributes.”

One wonders how this modicum is to be discovered without criticism, and is informed (still by Bergson) that “the true statement is of itself able to displace the erroneous idea, and becomes, without our having taken the trouble of refuting anyone, the best of refutations.” Is this not saying that a garden will grow more flowers if one does not criticise it by trying to pull up the weeds? Is it not sheer nonsense to talk of erroneous ideas displacing themselves without anybody taking the trouble to refute anything, when there was never a time in the history of man when ideas, true and false, did not have to meet the objections of the fault-finder? No; Durant assures us that Bergson speaks with “the voice of wisdom herself,” and that when we “‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ a philosophy we are merely offering another one.”

Merely, you understand. Then all philosophies are indifferent mixtures, one as good as another. Here is pragmatism mixed with laissez-faire. And like pragmatism (which at one and the same time holds that whatever you think is true is indeed true for the moment and as far as you are concerned, and that nevertheless the test of truth is the fruit it bears), it does not understand itself.

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