The Year of Our Lord 1943

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs, 206 pages

Samuel Johnson famously quipped that when a man knows he is to be hanged, it "concentrates his mind wonderfully."  For Christian thinkers in Europe and America, the catastrophe of the Second World War wonderfully concentrated their minds on the problem that liberal democracy could not, on its own, provide a convincing account of human nature to rival those proposed by fascist and socialist ideologies.  In The Year of Our Lord 1943 Alan Jacobs explores the disparate ways a number of disparate philosophers and poets, including Jacques and Raissa Maritain, TS Eliot and Simone Weil, CS Lewis and WH Auden, sought to rectify that deficiency.  Despite substantial differences, their thoughts all focused on culture and education, not only their necessity but also their limitations - indeed, all were insistent that any education which sought to contribute to the building up of the human person must preeminently be an education in limits and ends.

Jacobs perceptively highlights both the sympathies and antipathies among his subjects.  He is clear about his own biases, or is possibly simply unable to resist the occasional editorial comment, and those biases do not prevent him from being fair to those with whom he disagrees.  It is from this attitude that he is able to conclude with the observation that, at a point in history when the technical appears to have vanquished the human, Christians can find comfort and inspiration in their faith that history is itself ruled, not by a process, but by a Person.