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PARTISAN REVIEW
errors of bourgeois democracy, and as morally legitimate revul–
sionsagainst this unendurable heritage. They show a praiseworthy
concern for the souls of men but they have taken the wrong road
to salvation. They exemplify "virtues gone mad." Their errors
cannot be corrected by a return to the spiritual indifIerence of
bourgeois humanism but by an acceptance of the Catholic way of
life which will preserve the positive features of the totalitarian
cultures, Italian, German, or Russian, while pruning the deplorable
excesses that flow from a false metaphysics.
And now let us hear M. Maritain in defence of the war.
"The thing which I want to say at once and that I want
to cry from the house tops is that the spiritual situation of
Europe has completely changed and that the salvation of
Europe has begun ... the striking indication of this change
is the Russo-German alliance. It has completed the unmask–
ing of the enemy.... Everyone now realizes that ... there
is only one revolution; and this revolution is in essence
directed against the first principles of all Christian civil–
ization, against everything which indicates the mark of God
on man, against everything which implies respect for the
human person, for justice and for truth, against everything
which relates to greatness and liberty of the human soul.
. . . The declaration of war against Germany by England
and France on Sunday, the third of ;September, was not
simply an action that had become politically necessary. It
was also an admirable evidence of the strength of soul and
of the moral greatness of these two countries.... The world
saw that the democracies ... were willing to remain faith–
ful to the reason for their existence ... that the men of
France and England, of those two ancient Christian lands,
risked in the perils of a hellish war both their lives and
their dearest goods and the incomparable heritage of
civilization of which they are the guardians.
(Commonweal,
Oct. 13, '39)
Yesterday France and England, according to M. Maritain,
were capitalist democracies accursed by bourgeois humanism;
today they are "those ancient Christian lands," guardians of "the
