 Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples. |
| The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism. |
| No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion. |
| The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms. |
| Yet humanitarianism is not a purely Christian movement any more than it is a purely humanist one. |
| It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends. |
| Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers. |
| For humanism also appeals to man as man. It seeks to liberate the universal qualities of human nature from the narrow limitations of blood and soil and class and to create a common language and a common culture in which men can realize their common humanity. |
| If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear. |
| But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them. |
