The Puzzle Of Nationalism
Modern Nationalism and Religion.
by Salo Wittmayer Baron.
New York, Harper, 1947. 363 pp. $5.00.
Nationalism, like evolution, is one of those elements of the human social scene that are as intractable in fact as they are malleable in theory. Belonging to a nation is the result of a choice, to be sure, but the choosing is (if one may credit tradition) seemingly rooted in the nature of things and, like Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” is an act of preferential decision to exist as a human being rather than as an uprooted abstraction. But just what is it that makes the man without a country different from his fellows? To ask the question is to indicate that nationality continues to be as difficult to define as it is seductively easy to describe. Professor Baron’s lectures, originally delivered under the Rauschenbusch Foundation of the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, do not rid the problem of its thorns. Yes, they no doubt render it even harder to handle by coupling nationalism with so vital and variable a matter as religion.
Dr. Baron is of course not the first writer to have been fascinated by this union. But there is no other book on the subject so broad in scope, so judicious and temperate of spirit, and so carefully supported by what one can only tritely call prodigious learning.
It would be unjust to say that Dr. Baron has read too much. As a matter of fact, almost every reader who has concerned himself with the subject will miss in the extensive bibliographical notes references to material that has seemed to him of signal value. Seen from one point of view, nationalism is so deadly a poison that no record of its virulence will seem adequate; and viewed differently, it may appear so elementary a group commitment that questioning its validity is comparable to inquiries into the value of kindergartens and baseball teams. Accordingly, one cannot help feeling that Dr. Baron’s lectures are concerned with too vast a field. They deal with modern nationalistic thought, fascist and Communist doctrinaires, Catholic internationalism, Protestantism, Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy. There are pages about Zionism, and allusions to Franco Spain. The reader will be escorted from Fichte to Maurras, to Pius XII, to Herzl, to Lenin. The sum total of these parts is, however, rather more of a bundle than a composition.
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Dr. Baron’s treatment of history is, to be sure, scholarly in the best sense. Many otherwise unimpeachable men have been convinced that the record of the past is of no value because they have been deluded by the estimate charlatans have placed upon it. The true historian therefore has the honor of his craft very much at heart. He knows how difficult to practice that craft is; and so he tends to be the most irenic and possibly also the most satirical of mortals because he is at one and the same time humble in the presence of unfathomable mystery—the mystery of the human will and its motives—and satirical by reason of the almost inevitable hiatus between man’s commitments and the evidence on which these are based.
You may take as an illustration Dr. Baron’s treatment of Charles Maurras, the protagonist of French reaction. He points out with subtlety, and sometimes with malice, the contradictions in this polemical writer’s thought. Maurras never wished to admit that he believed in “race,” despite his virulent and sometimes ludicrous anti-Semitism; and he insisted that he was a defender of Catholic tradition, even though everything he wrote indicates that for him Christianity was a kind of plague. But I think that Dr. Baron fails to grasp the phenomenon of L’Action Française because on the one hand he does not evaluate properly the significance of L’Avenir de l’Intelligence in the French writer’s scheme of things, and because on the other hand he cannot believe that Pope Pius XI’s repudiation of Maurras was a consequence of his concern with the survival of elemental Christianity. Dr. Baron has a marked reverence for the prudence of the Papacy, and this sometimes leads him to disregard the fact that the best pontiffs—and Pius XI was one of them—have thrown prudence to the winds when there was question of the Gospel. On the other hand, Maurras was terribly disturbed, as all humanists are, by the failure of democracies to conserve the aristocracy of the intelligence. This is assuredly a real problem. I should myself suggest that the true strength of nationalistic emotion is derived from the feeling that intellectual distinction results from the assiduous cultivation by a nation of its indigenous intellectual fields. Of these language is, perhaps, only a symbol.
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But let us look at the problem of nationalism as a whole. “Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God.” That is a statement of choice hallowed by time. Must the “people” profess the same belief in the same God? Or does religious faith, held in common, take precedence over national ties? Or, finally, are patriotism and religion disparate things which must be kept apart? These have always been, in our Western world at least, fateful questions, and Dr. Baron deals with them in an admirably objective spirit. He can read himself into various states of mind with rare skill. It is with reluctance and some temerity that I conclude that what he comes up with finally is a simplification rather than a solution. He might properly reply, tu quoque, and I should have no answer.
Nationalism is for him the centrifugal force in history. It is that which breaks the human sum into fractions, and its disruptive power is greatly increased when religious fervor is blended with patriotism. Optimistically, he holds that apart from the centripetal energies crystallized in what we term the values of our civilization, there have latterly been set in motion currents leading to a new unity—technology for instance, which has made obsolete the small-scale tribal loyalties bred by dependence upon limited space areas. And above all, there is the United Nations, prelude to the oneness of the peoples and their governments, which appears now to give the established religions a new opportunity to lead humanity towards the moral solidarity which will ensure peace.
But whether the sense of national solidarity be based on an awareness of cultural community or upon so rudimentary a concern as security, its strength seems to derive from the fact that it gives those who subscribe to it a feeling that they belong to a worthwhile unity. Can international confederations awaken the same response? They undoubtedly could if a sufficient number of intellectual leaders felt that they provided a framework inside which the mind could feel at home. Such leaders might then even be in revolt against their own peoples, for the sake of the liberation of all the people. They might, perhaps, be Gandhis, fasting for the sake of humanity. But there is no evidence that such a feeling is even emerging; and therefore I do not believe that the spokesmen for the major religions, even if they themselves were persuaded that nationalism could now swiftly be superseded, could induce large numbers of people to transfer their loyalties to the United Nations.
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If we ask why this should be so, we shall raise still another question which leads to the heart of Dr. Baron’s analysis. Why have men like Fichte (or Hegel, who is dealt with too cursorily) been tempted to suggest that the state must profess a religion, and why have others, not always such egregious charlatans as Alfred Rosenberg, felt that the best religion was that which most effectively summarized their peoples’ needs and views? It seems to me that the answer is that in the final analysis some moral values must be recognized as legal tender for the whole community. Thus we in America are saying that honesty is the irreducible minimum of our national ethic, and are basing our antagonism to the Communists on the fact that these are found to dissemble, to pose as what they are not, and to hide behind impermanent facades. Since there is no recognizable pragmatic sanction for even such values as honesty, the mention of them leads immediately to religion.
Well, it is perhaps because national ethical heritages are intertwined with religious beliefs—in an organic rather than a Fichtean sense—that men are so reluctant to abandon nationhood. Your statement that the next war means total destruction, or your contention that one world is preferable to a hundred worlds, does not carry conviction because the one world has no demonstrable ethical or religious tradition. Dr. Baron’s book points by indirection to this difficulty. I can only wish that it had mapped out the problem more realistically and fully. It is to be hoped that this volume will be only the prelude to further studies, because there is certainly no one in this country so competent to pursue them as its author.
I shall add in conclusion some remarks which are not intended to be strictures—the field of nationalism is so vast and important that a long time must pass before it is mastered—but which I hope may serve as queries that will stimulate thought. There is first of all the matter of Christian resistance to Nazism. This has been summed up, in terms of both strength and weakness, in a magisterial article by Max Pribilla, which I regret Dr. Baron appears not to have seen. It is ironical, at any rate, that he should cite with approval one of the weakest of the German Catholic prelates, while leaving unmentioned the real lion of the household, who was the Bishop of Muenster. To say that there was no strong riposte to Rosenberg’s Mythus is also to ignore the heroic efforts of anti-Nazi Bonn scholars, whose book was published at the peril of their lives and is not mentioned by Dr. Baron. And there is secondly the matter of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant religious heritage. Is this as much an affair of Calvinism as Dr. Baron suggests? Or is it not important to note the influence of Anglicanism, both in its 17th-century orthodox form and in the guise of Methodism? These are details, no doubt. But history is the fateful assembly of fragments. We may dispute among ourselves the pertinence of any part. But valuable history is the residue which remains after our disagreements have been resolved.
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