PARTISAN REVIEW
Duhamel, who is a confirmed individualist, asked how could a dictatorship–
even of a non-totalitarian type-be combined with the free development of
individual beings, which alone makes human life tolerable. "Ah," answered Dr.
Salazar, "in order to explain this to you, I would have to speak of the distinc–
tion between the individual and the person." Mauriac fully enjoyed this philo–
sophical answer, addressed by a dictator to a novelist.
Here is not the place to go into the niceties of the distinction.
Briefly the individual is man as a natural organism whose existence is
contingent on the behavior of a material system in space and time: while
the person "subsists entirely in the very subsistence of his spiritual soul."
The point of the story is that M. Maritain, accepting the distinction
made by Dr. Salazar, disagrees with him about its compatibility with
dictatorship. M. Maritain is a democrat; Dr. Salazar decidedly is not.
Yet they both believe in the intrinsic dignity of the subsistent person.
But conceived in their terms there is no known logic by which it can be
established that such persons require one or another form of political
life for their development.
It is highly significant that M. Maritain is
careful not to charge Dr. Salazar with being a bad Catholic or tax him
with inconsistency. Yet this is what he should have done if the transcen–
dental dogmas of Catholic theology necessitate belief in the democratic
society rather than in the hierarchical corporative state.
Since Mr. Toynbee is not a theologian one would gladly overlook
a certain fuzziness in his discussion of these matters despite his insistence
upon their central importance. But one cannot overlook what must be
called his theological imperialism. For that is what it means to say that
there is little hope that constitutional world government and peace can
be established until the peoples of this planet, or their regimes, accept
both the theology and the authority of the Church Militant upon earth.
As if it were not sufficiently difficult to win people of different reli–
gious and political faiths to agreement on empirical matters necessary
to insure their survival as well as the survival of their different faiths!
Mr. Toynbee would add to our tasks the conversion of all the peoples of
the world to one parochial variant of one religion, universal in intent,
but parochial in origin, organization, and dogma. But can we dismiss
so easily the evidence that for all their religious differences many groups
at different times have found it possible to work out a viable civic life
together
without
agreement on first or last things?
If
Mr. Toynbee has seriously explored any other way of solving our
problems save by "enrolling ourselves as citizens of a
Civitas Dei
of
which Christ Crucified is King," there is no evidence of it. The nearest
he comes to it is in his discussion of what he characterizes as "a purely
this-worldly view," which for him embraces every variety of secularism,
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