Of all of Carl Becker's writings, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, if the number of printings is any criterion, is the most admired. Composed rapidly, between the late fall of 1930 and the spring of 1931, it was easily written because the subject matter of those lectures had been in the forefront of his thinking for many years. On a stylistic level, it is Becker at his most delightful, maintaining an easy legato, wearing his learning gracefully and unobtrusively, witty and charmingly urbane. Yet, for all their beguiling literary attractiveness these lectures derived their importance from the thesis that they advance. In them Becker posited and elaborated a heterodox view. The debt of the philosophes to their thirteenth-century predecessors, he contended, was greater than they were aware of. Despite great differences between eighteenth-century and thirteenth-century modes of thought, there were also many significant similarities. The philosophes were less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval thought than they realized themselves and than we had supposed; in fact, "making allowances for certain important alterations in the bias," their preconceptions were essentially the same as those of the thirteenth century. That similarity went far to explain how, as they demolished the Heavenly City of Thomas Aquinas, they rebuilt it with more up-to-date material.

This startling thesis, engrossing to most readers, he placed in a broader philosophical frame of reference. He maintained that each cultural period had its own distinctive quality, its own set of criticized and more often uncriticized generalizations into which entered, on one level or another of consciousness, the hopes, grievances, inhibitions, and aspirations of the age. This quality or mood, he called, borrowing the phrase from Whitehead, who had already borrowed it from another, "the climate of opinion." In Becker's considered judgment there were notably similar moods or assumptions in the two historical climates of opinion which seemed so utterly different.

As he elaborated his ideas, Becker suggested, rather than expounded in detail, that he, too, knew that the answers which the Enlightenment gave to that "phase of 18 century thought" which interested him differed radically from those put forth earlier. The phase he chose to consider revolved around man's fate and the nature of the universe. We may assume that he was aware of the gap between the other-worldly perspective of Thomas Aquinas and the mundane eighteenth-century conviction which affirmed that man's unsolved problems were soon, that is relatively soon, to be solved on earth. But he was not writing his book to repeat for all what no one disputed, for example, the disparity between the medieval view of nature as a logical concept and the later picture of nature as a neat machine with its own built-in regulator. Almost parenthetically, as though he found it unnecessary to say what everybody knew, he alluded to the difference between the Thomistic view of natural law as a construction of deductive logic and the later doctrine of natural law as the observed harmonious behavior of material things. He chose, deliberately, not to make too much of those differences. His interest lay elsewhere, in the similarities rather than the differences between Christian ethic and cosmology and "the religion of humanity."

What he chose to examine at close range was, first, the fundamental assumptions underlying the different conclusions. In his judgment those assumptions were the same. In both instances, he reminded his listeners, the preconceptions concerning the nature of man and his existence were similar: life was not empty but meaningful; the drama of man's fate was of paramount significance. According to the theologians, man's primitive innocence had been debased into original sin; if the philosophes were to be followed, his natural goodness had been vitiated by unnatural custom. Both outlooks postulated the existence of forces or a power greater than man, a God—however differently conceived and called—and both felt a sense of obligation to explain His ways to man. Christianity and philosophie were also at one in their common assumption that the dignity of the human person commanded respect; both attributed to man certain natural rights and assigned to the proper authorities the role and the duty of protecting him in the exercise of those rights. Possessed of free will and endowed with responsibility for his action, man could satisfactorily work out his destiny. With either interpretation of the cosmic plan before him as an indipensable reference work, he could adjust thought and deed to the providential scheme and improve his lot.

It was not only the similarity of those preconceptions, which he himself could no longer accept, to which Becker called attention. He gave concrete illustrations of the similarity in the thinking processes which had enabled the two groups of thinkers to accept as valid the preconceptions from which their conclusions followed. In both centuries an awkward dilemma had arisen to confront the thinkers as they began to formulate their views, the inescapable necessity of determining whether man was in fact living in a universe governed by a beneficent mind or in a world ruled by indifferent force. And on both occasions the accredited spokesmen, without intent to deceive of course, indulged in some coercing of reason to have it solve the dilemma to their satisfaction and proclaim that the will of God or the law of the Supreme Being governed the world. They made reason amenable by different devices, such as explaining that things were not what they actually seemed, by insisting that only co-operative facts need apply to answer awkward questions, or by reaffirming that after all the heart did have its reasons. Whether one expedient was employed or another, or a more subtle combination of them, by their deftly guided thinking process they formulated cosmologies which enabled man, sophisticated yet believing man, to live comfortably with himself, while expecting still greater happiness at some future date and place, not precisely specified.

Such, in brief compass, is the theme of The Heavenly City, the validity of which several able scholars have subjected to searching re-examination. It transpires from the papers presented at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the New York State Association of European Historians, as well as from the discussion from the floor, that many scholars of the Enlightenment had long, if silently, entertained serious reservations. These reservations ranged from criticism of Becker's style to strictures more or less guarded concerning his scholarship and his seemingly unchallenged status as thinker. In the opinion of one commentator, the ten printings of The Heavenly City constituted "an unwarranted success."

The voicing of these evaluations has shaken the equanimity of Becker's faithful admirers, probably more than it would have upset Becker himself. Searching questions concerning the substance of his book would have greatly interested him but without unduly disturbing him. So far as his style was concerned, it is no secret that he recognized with some acuteness the difficulty that a writer experienced in conveying his thoughts through words, a difficulty, he was aware, not peculiar to himself. His comment on the immediate reception of his presidential address to the American Historical Association of the same year (1931) suggests the response he might have made had The Heavenly City been criticized in his lifetime as it was twenty-five years later. "Many historians," he wrote, "won't think much of this address ["Everyman His Own Historian"]. F. J. Turner was much pleased with it. C. A. Beard and Jameson and Burr also. Of course it isn't up to what I had in mind. But that's an old story."

The criticism, which is expounded in detail in several essays of this symposium, runs somewhat as follows: The Heavenly City was deliberately provocative, designed through a willful paradox to stimulate listeners and even shock them. With his customary witty and charming style, playing gaily with words, Becker covered his impatience with his intellectual forebears and veiled a deadly intent to "debunk" the Englightenment. He wished to reveal the naivete of the philosophes, if not also to expose their fraudulence. On a professional level, the critique continues, it would be seen and should be said that Becker showed unsuspected defects as a historian, displaying an ignorance of some facts that he ought to have known and misinterpreting others that everyone knew. In consequence of his failure to grasp what the philosophes were trying to do, in the course of trying to prove that they were unwittingly and unwillingly Christians at their most unchristian moment, he ignored the immense differences which set the two centuries apart and so exaggerated the continuity between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth as to give a totally misleading picture of the Enlightenment. In short, The Heavenly City had all the virtues save one, that of being right.

The trouble arose, the commentaries go on, because Becker disregarded his own warning not to take the term "Heavenly City" too literally. He did not pay enough heed to his own explanation when he said that the philosophes dismantled the Heavenly City of Thomas Aquinas only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials, that he was only maintaining that the dream of infinite progress of mankind and the attainment of human perfection on earth were Utopian illusions. He fell into a trap of his own making when, first, he took his paradox far more seriously than he should have and, second, did so without seeming to be aware of what he was doing. The Heavenly City exposed Becker's feet of clay as a historian, or one foot at least. It showed him up as an innocent, almost ludicrously falling into a trap that he had set for other innocents.

The charges are impressive. What is one to make of them? Certainly, one can appreciate the irritation of professional historians over the spectacle of a distinguished fellow craftsman casting a kind of spell over his readers and persuading them to accept as a comprehensive explanation his highly refracted picture of the eighteenth century. No doubt, also, by his paradoxical insistence upon similarities, he made readers all but forget about the differences. Of course, Preserved Smith and Kingsley Martin were available in English to remind readers of the differences, even if for many years Hazard and Cassirer had still to be read in the original. The historians who point out that Becker was not as familiar with the scientific movement of the Enlightenment as he might have been are certainly right. One wonders, however, how much that scholarly lapsus seriously impaired his understanding that such scientific knowledge as the eighteenth century did possess had developed from cumulative efforts and that its belief in progress, at least on a conscious level of thought, was an empirically attained conclusion.

Neither sound, believing Christians nor philosophical skeptics, to employ Hume's ironic juxtaposition as Becker did, are entirely happy over the way in which the latter coupled the modes of thought of the two centuries. Blurring patent dissimilarities and deliberately identifying Thomas' God with Voltaire's Supreme Being, Christian "grace" with philosophical "virtue," and "immortality" with "posterity," was audacious but somewhat less than appealing to men whose strong convictions such intellectual badinage affronted. Conversely, to men of sanguine temperament, less concerned over the dilemmas of philosophy than edified by its consolations, his reminders of the failure of the age to explain the existence of evil in a universe governed in harmony with the laws of nature partook not of irony but of unwarranted, even unnecessary, morbidity.

What the critics overlook was that the conclusions he had reached gave Becker himself slight comfort. The awareness that faith and sentiment had come to the rescue of right reason in the Age of the Enlightenment only superficially gave the impression of affording him ironic amusement. The Heavenly City, for all its flashes of wit, was somber not insouciant, not playful but grim. The humor was wry with a clear intimation that the last laugh was on man, on Becker, himself. Like the students whom he had been instructing for many years, he presumably knew that the Enlightenment was both the historical culmination of preceding challenges to Christianity and the point of departure for the credo and the hopes of the two centuries which followed. But the course of human events in those centuries, particularly at the moment that he was writing, had belied hope, and not least the hope that he himself had once entertained. Like many another thinker, Becker was convinced in 1931 that the perfectibility of man and the progress of the human race was the Great Illusion of modern times. The "religion of humanity" was as little—or as much—tenable as the orthodox Christianity which it had supplanted. It was high time, he was suggesting, that one took a close look at the origins of that illusion.

No one could have been more personally sympathetic than Becker to the aspirations of the followers of the philosophes; no one more impersonally convinced that they were never to be realized. He had rejected Christian theology while still a young man. The acids of modernity had destroyed whatever faith he may once have had that human destiny was entrusted to the care of a deity. Science had eliminated the fixed points established by traditional religion and metaphysics to enable man to distinguish between good and evil. But his confidence was also eroded that reason would flood the world with the light of understanding. Here was the crux of his difficulty.

Far from sharing the generous trust that Dewey placed in the capacity of man to be educated, he was dejected by the monumental and seemingly inexhaustible store of human stupidity and cruelty. Like the satirical novelists and publicists of the twenties, he was disheartened and depressed by the intellectual vulgarity of prosperous American democracy, the power drives, complacency, and smugness of the successful, the meanness, envy, and small-mindedness of the masses. As a historian he had not failed to note the widening gap between the ideal of democracy and the nineteenth-century reality. When the great depression fell like a blight upon the lives of his contemporaries, he looked with sadness and with bitterness on the waste land around him and the trail of misery in the wake of prosperity. He could not view with equanimity the gathering of the forces of totalitarianism abroad or, at home, rest unmoved by the spectacle of hungry and angry and bewildered men responding to appeals to their passions and their fears.

Where in all these manifestations of man's weaknesses was the guiding creative force of reason! Did not the plight of mankind, leaders playing cynically upon men's emotions and followers resonding on a primitive level of fears and taboos, give confirmation to Becker's profound beliefs concerning the subjective nature of men's thinking and its purposive and selective character? Was it not evident, as he maintained, that ideas came to the surface of consciousness only for the sake of behavior? Whether he derived that conviction from Dewey or James or from others does not matter. Like Sterne, but without whimsey, Becker also believed that "millions of thoughts are every day swimming in the thin juice of a man's understanding without being carried backwards or forwards till some little gust of passion or interest drives them to one side."

"For good men and bad, ignorant and enlightened," he wrote, "reason and aspiration and emotion—what we call principles, faith, ideals—are without their knowing it, at the service of complex and subtle instinctive reactions and impulses." What was true of the thinking process in general was also specifically true of the thinking process of historians. History, like philosophy, also reflected and dealt with the presuppositions, frustrations, and hopes of its time. Try as he would, the historian could not escape the impress of his epoch. Its assumptions in the main were his assumptions; its frame of reference was his, regarding time and space, man and nature, life on earth and the hereafter. Its values tended to be his values; its truths, his truths.

Becker was writing The Heavenly City in 1931, the same year that he composed and delivered his famous address, "Everyman His Own Historian." In that resounding manifesto of historical relativism he put forth in its most polished and perfected form the philosophy of history that he had been developing from 1910 on, when he first expressed his views in an essay, "Detachment and the Writing of History." And in The Heavenly City he was using the Enlightenment as a case study, a specific illustration of his broader theoretical arguments. He also utilized the opportunity of discussing the philosophes to intimate that he had as little confidence in the reform projects currently propounded by the twentieth-century descendants of the philosophes as he had in the proposals of the earlier apostles of reason.

History, he maintained in "Everyman," was not and could not be actuality. History was written history, and written history was affirmation, a foreshortened and incomplete representation of a reality that once was. To represent all the evidence that ever occurred was clearly impossible, for the historian of necessity had to work with traces. Assuming it were possible to have all the facts, it would still not be desirable. The worth of history as affirmation of a vanished reality consisted, if it possessed any worth at all, precisely in the selectivity exercised by the researcher and the writer. To carry on research without knowing what one was looking for was a waste of the researcher's time; and the published findings of an effort so conceived would be an abuse of the reader's confidence.

The honest researcher prided himself naturally on coming into the court of history with clean hands. It was only his hands and the notepaper they carried which were clean. Whether he knew it or not, his mind and his heart were already smudged. They bore the impress of ideas and emotions—principles if one approved of them, otherwise prejudices—that he had somehow already acquired. Whether the historian knew it or not, it was those ideas and emotions which overwhelmingly inclined him to make the selections of past evidence that he did. It was not a case of his sticking to the facts; it was a case of the facts sticking to him.

Since history was an inside job, an affair of the mind and heart, "historical facts," not vanished realities, were the data with which the historian worked. Those facts, continued Becker, were of course the best possible affirmation of the reality that professional honesty and expert scientific training could give. Nevertheless, they had the defects of their qualities. They were still not the real thing. They were only records of the real thing that had happened once, like Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon or Booth's shooting of Lincoln. With those records, some lengthy, some brief, and all necessarily if unwittingly refracted, since the observer was part of the observed, the historian worked. For all his conscious detachment the historian too was part of the observed in his procedure of examining reality through the historical facts. In selecting some and excluding others he was guided by his likes and dislikes, by his standards and values. So the historical facts did not speak for themselves. He spoke for them; and through them he expressed what he held to be the truth. Hence the facts were always relatively true, relative to the times and the emotional and philosophical needs of the age. "O History," Becker apostrophized the Muse, "how many truths have been committed in thy name."

The self-evident truths of the eighteenth century were then of a piece with those of the thirteenth; those of the twentieth, with those of the eighteenth. All were variations upon an architectonic model of deception, all illustrations of the persistent and deep desire of men to find a unitary pattern in historical developments, to devise a single mold into which all the facts could be fitted. All those explanations of what had been before and would be again were essentially deterministic, grounded on the premise that history obeyed laws. In consequence all appealed to history, bidding it offer salvation and justice to men and prove to humanity that there was to be a happy ending to present discontent or misery.

For Becker such belief was illusion. It was in the nature of life not to fulfill hopes, of revolutions to be betrayed. After the philosophes, there was the French Revolution; after the Marxists, totalitarian Russia. Thinking man, if he were truly wise, would renounce hope. To free himself from the tensions that hope engendered was to escape disappointment, to save himself, if worst came to worst, from the agony of despair. If he followed that counsel, life could not hurt him. Most fittingly Becker ended The Heavenly City with a quotation from Marcus Aurelius: "The man of forty years, if he have a grain of sense, in view of this sameness, has seen all that has been and shall be."

To many young readers of the 1930s and 1940s, who had been raised on a rich diet of ironic or cynical explanations of the human scene, his bleak conclusions carried powerful appeal. At the same time those some years older, and of course wiser, felt curiously let down, several of them breaking into print to protest the spectacle of one of America's most thoughtful and admired historians letting his contemporaries down in the great crisis, and either callously or unwittingly refusing to place his uncontested understanding and immense prestige behind the intense yearning of bewildered and unhappy men to enjoy the consolations of history.

Becker himself was far from happy over the conclusions he had then reached. But for several years more he repeated them in his writing, even raising the query in despondent essays whether liberalism after all was not only another way station along the road that humanity had traversed, whether democracy had not played out its role. After plumbing the depths, he was ultimately to regain his buoyancy and reaffirm the credo that his rigorous intellectualism had all but crushed. However, before he could persuade others to believe in those essential values of life in which instinctively and almost reverently he placed his trust, he had first to get out of the dead end to which his thinking had led him. He could not feel justified in trying to bring "spiritual first aid" to humanity, as he wryly reproached others for attempting to do, until he resolved the paradox of holding that truth exists to be searched for while at the same time asserting that man could attain no more than relative truth. His task, because its emotional implications made it more difficult than a retrospective formulation suggests, was to bring opposites together into a co-ordinated whole. He had to square the conviction that the earth would grow cold and "all the imperishable monuments of man will be as if they had never been" with faith in man.

He had to bring together the view that man was no more than a chance deposit on earth and that "science offered only anesthesia in this life and annihilation in the next" with his predisposition to like people who "went on behaving as if human ideals mattered." He had to reconcile his denial of the possibility of attaining absolute truth with his feeling that the distinction between truth and error nevertheless was useful, that the relative truths which the mind of man could attain were still relative to some unknowable but greater reality than their particular needs or desire, truths hence worth living and dying for.

Becker solved his problem in the one way left him. To remain confidently and innocently wrong with Condorcet and Madame Roland, he could not. He would not, being Becker, make a tragic display of his pain and cry out, with Pascal, that the eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrified him. Nor had he any inclination to accept Hume's tart suggestion for philosophical skeptics and "fly back to revealed truth with the greatest avidity." Terrified, he was not; believe in revealed truths, he did not. What he could and did do was to join together the two halves of his personality which had never before fitted exactly and put into a single whole the half that was the child of the generous humanitarian Diderot and the other half that was the pupil of the tough-minded-Hume.

The Diderot in him wished to be of service to mankind. To serve was to act. But to act one needed belief in what he was doing. Otherwise the will was paralyzed and one carried on a shadowy existence on the most dreary of levels, on the persuasion that effort was futile and achievement empty. So Becker had first to reassert his belief that life in spite of everything was meaningful and man's fate, while tragic, still significant. It was man's destiny, he said, to be crushed by a universe which was unconscious of what he was doing here and offered him only annihilation in the future. Yet insignificant as man was, he alone and no other creature was aware of it. No one else, too, knew what he knew, that the conception of a universe of infinite spaces which crushed him was his creation, "his most ingenious invention, his supreme work of art." If man was weak because he stood alone, he was also most strong when he stood alone, if for no other reason than that there was no other way for him to stand or act. And act, he had to.

The Hume in him, once the hurdle of the problem in epistemology was cleared, forced him to re-examine more closely what it was he held significant and of value in the meaningful existence of man. He had to define or perhaps redefine what men like himself had to live for. Here, too, Becker found he could go about his business only by an act of the will. Choosing to believe had to be a precondition of thinking about whatever it was he believed. Having over the course of many years examined and rejected in turn all other social ideologies, he reaffirmed his faith in democracy. Democracy, he knew, did not conform too closely in its earthly form to the ideal pattern laid up in heaven. At least it was an illusion close to the heart's desire, more just than any other he knew, more likely than any other to give expression to the dignity and worth of man.

Thus Becker discovered that he too, like the philosophes, had no alternative but to reconcile diverse and pragmatic experience with faith. Within five years of the writing of The Heavenly City, he was saying in Progress and Power that even though today was dreary, tomorrow might be better. Even though history could not justify man's infinite perfectibility, the data did show that the power of man's mind and hand had vastly increased. That incredible tapping of new sources of power and relentlessly rapid utilization of new implements might outstrip man's capacity to control the power he had released, in which case mankind was embarked on a blind joy ride that could end only in a cosmic smashup. Perhaps, alternatively, the promise that new power held forth was only that of progressive dehumanization of mankind, only a steady advance toward the spiritual automation of a humanity doomed to live the rhythmic group life of happily conditioned termites and bees.

He held it likely, when he wrote Progress and Power, that a far more cheerful solution impended. He thought it possible, with the rate of technological advance slowing up and the cultural lag narrowing, for man gradually to attain a high degree of social stability by "leaving it" to the machines. Leaving it to the machines meant, first, accepting life on the terms of a technological, industrialized civilization and, then, by social planning, adjusting his needs and many of his ways to it. The long-sought-for material security and social peace could then be attained, perhaps the scourges of war and poverty be abolished. In that happier tomorrow when man's power established the reality of progress, the sustaining idea would become irrelevant and unnecessary, and men could simply and modestly proclaim the worth of human values and their loyalty to them. With power ensuring material security, they would become free to enjoy as they could not now, in their time of troubles, the miracle of the mind—free to probe and test, learn and err, build and dream, and not cruelly be betrayed by their hopes.

In 1935, in Progress and Power, Becker was like Ulysses, happy in coming home from a long voyage. He was like Candide, after an eternity of disillusionment, finding solace in a final illusion—in the better world of tomorrow, better if not altogether new, in which man would at least have a chance to cultivate his garden with dignity, tolerance, and forebearance. Five years later still, in 1940, when the tide was running hard against the democracies, the reconciliation of stubborn facts and faith was completed. Becker's hesitation lay behind him. Fortunately, he wrote, some generalities still glittered, not least faith in humanity:

To have faith in the dignity and worth of the individual man as an end in himself, to believe that it is better to be governed by persuasion than by coercion,… to believe that in the long run all values are inseparable from the love of truth and the disinterested search for it, to believe that knowledge and the power it confers should be used to promote the welfare and happiness of all men …—these are the values which are affirmed by the traditional democratic ideology. But they are older and more universal than democracy and do not depend upon it. They have a life of their own apart from any particular social system or type of civilization.

Condorcet, hiding alas in vain to escape death, found solace for his fate in penning his triumphant Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind. To Becker, with Nazism overrunning the bulwarks of democracy, also were given the consolations of philosophy. In The Heavenly City he had reached the conclusion that it was man's fate to seek the thread of justice in the labyrinthine processes of history. That conclusion he reaffirmed in his last years—not with the old ironic disclaimer that hope of salvation was an empty one, but with relief that there were consoling lessons still to be learned from the eternal flux. If faith in infinite progress was not one of them, happily there were other values to defeat despair and imbue men like himself with guarded hope for the future. The wave of the future was the wave of the eternal past, neither the determinism of Thomas nor of Condorcet, but man's freedom to stand or fall, man's responsibility to man for his moment on earth.