tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27634649848332260302024-03-05T13:59:38.077-08:00Christopher DawsonHistorian of Religion & CultureUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger129125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-42919370772853997172019-03-04T23:53:00.003-08:002019-03-04T23:53:53.596-08:00Civilization and MoralsNOW IT SEEMS CLEAR that it is impossible to have a purely "practical" morality divorced from an interpretation of Reality. Such a morality would be mere social custom and essentially unprogressive. Progress springs very largely from the attempt to bring actual conditions and social habits into harmony with what are conceived as the laws or conditions of real life. The very conception of morality involves a duality or opposition between what "is" and what "ought to be." Moreover from the very earliest conditions of primitive savagery up to the highest degree of intellectual culture, the ethical standard can be shown to be closely connected with some kind of world-view or conception of reality, whether that is embodied in a mythology, or a philosophy, or is vaguely implicit in the customs and beliefs of the society.<br />
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Now the great obstacle to the attainment of a purely rational system of ethics is simply our lack of knowledge of Reality. If we can accept some metaphysics of Absolute Being, then we shall quickly possess an absolute morality, as the Platonists did. But if we limit ourselves to positive and scientific knowledge of Reality, it is at once evident that we are limited to a little island of light in the middle of an ocean of darkness. Unfortunately, Herbert Spencer's attitude toward the Unknowable will not help us here, for the <i>machina mundi</i> is a dynamic unity, and the part of it we know shares in the movement of the unknown whole. Most philosophies and religions have supposed that there is some kind of meaning or reason in the world process; though there are thinkers like Lucretius (and perhaps Bertrand Russell) who deny this, and yet try to fashion a kind of "island" morality for reasonable humanity shipwrecked amidst the chaos of an irrational universe. Nevertheless the great majority of modern thinkers, in fact modern men, believe profoundly in the existence of progress, and not merely a progress of succession but a progress of improvement. "Life moves on to ever higher and richer forms. Here is an adequate goal for moral effort! Here is justification of moral values! Here is a true foundation for a modern system of ethics!"<br />
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But from a purely rational point of view what does all this amount to? So far from explaining the problems of human existence, it adds fresh difficulties.<br />
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~Christopher H. Dawson: <i><u><a href="https://amzn.to/2EEwuLT" target="_blank">Dynamics of World History</a></u></i> I, I, 4.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-80183828153488681872019-03-04T23:37:00.002-08:002019-03-04T23:37:32.228-08:00"Substitutes for religion"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"THREE forms of activity─the consecration of place, the consecration of work, and the consecration of the social bond itself─are the main channels through which religion finds social expression and acquires a sociological form. . . . But our own culture . . . has been growing progressively more secular. . . . The three main substitutes for religion in the modern age, Democracy, Socialism, and Nationalism, which are typical of the age of transition from a religious to a secular society, are each of them based one one of these fundamental errors. Democracy bases it's appeal on the sacredness of the People─the consecration of Folk; socialism on the sacredness of Labour─the consecration of Work; and nationalism on the sacredness of the Fatherland─the consecration of Place. These concepts still arouse a genuinely religious emotion, though the emotion has no basis in transcendent religious values or sanctions. It is religious emotion divorced from religious belief. Social activities are no longer consecrated by being brought into relation with the transcendent realities and values which are the proper objects of religion. They are, as it were, </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">consecrated to themselves and elevated into substitutes for the ends to which they were formerly subjected."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">~Christopher H. Dawson: "Prevision in Religion." (1934)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-46204194306414988202019-01-11T22:56:00.001-08:002019-01-11T22:56:06.498-08:00BLOG UPDATEREGULAR POSTING TO THIS BLOG WILL RESUME WITHIN A FEW WEEKS.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-32758831649283010492018-09-05T00:27:00.000-07:002018-09-05T00:27:06.511-07:00"The rise of a democratic totalitarianism"<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Four years ago I wrote a small book on <i>Religion and the Modern State</i> which was an attempt to reconsider the problem of the relations of Church and State as they were affected by the rise of the new political ideologies. I pointed out that the issue was not merely a conflict between Democracy and Dictatorship or between Fascism and Communism. It was a change in the whole social structure of the modern world, which affects religion and culture as well as politics and economics. The forces that make for social uniformity and the mechanization of culture are no less strong in England and the United States than in Germany and Italy, so that we might expect to see the rise of a democratic totalitarianism which would make the same universal claims on the life of the individual as the totalitarian dictatorships of the Continent.<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“I think that events have justified this diagnosis of the situation and that few people to-day will question the existence of this totalitarian trend in our own country. It has indeed become the most vital and urgent problem of our time, how this trend is to be reconciled with the traditions of liberty and individualism on which not only the English State but the whole fabric of English culture and social institutions has been built.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">~Christopher Dawson: <i>Beyond Politics</i>. (1939)</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-65570291239291690382018-06-30T23:26:00.002-07:002018-06-30T23:26:28.033-07:00Education and Christian Culture<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“…Christian culture is nothing to be ashamed of. It is no narrow sectarian tradition. It is one of the four great historic civilizations on which the modern world is founded. If modern education fails to communicate some understanding of this great tradition, it has failed in one of its most essential tasks. For the educated person cannot play his full part in modern life unless he has a clear sense of the nature and achievements of Christian culture: how Western civilization became Christian and how far it is Christian today and in what ways it has ceased to be Christian—in short, a knowledge of our Christian roots and of the abiding Christian elements in Western culture.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“When I speak of Western culture I am not using the word in the limited sense in which it was used by Matthew Arnold and the humanists, who were concerned only with the highest level of cultivated intelligence, but in the sense of the anthropologists and social historians, who have widened it out to cover the whole pattern of human life and thought in a living society. In this sense of the word a culture is a definite historical unity, but as Dr. Toynbee explains so clearly in the Introduction to his <i>Study of History</i>, it has a much wider expansion in space and time than any purely political unit, and it alone constitutes an intelligible field of historical study, since no part of it can be properly understood except in relation to the whole.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i><u><a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813216834/philosophynot-20/" target="_blank">The Crisis of Western Education</a></u></i>, Chap. X—The Case for the Study of Christian Culture.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-9926769516169865562018-06-23T23:34:00.003-07:002018-06-23T23:34:33.005-07:00Darwin's Influence<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"THE NATURALIST conception of man has above all been influenced by the Darwinian doctrine of the Origin of Species, and by the evolutionary theories to which this gave rise. The doctrine of a continuous development through the whole of animate nature, and the gradual evolution of the human species under the influence of natural selection, seemed to show that no principle external to the material world need be invoked to account for man: he was of a piece with the rest of nature. Further, the theory of evolution was linked with the earlier liberal theories of political and social advance to form the modern doctrine of unlimited and inevitable material progress, a doctrine fundamentally unscientific and based on an irrational optimism, but which has nevertheless become a part of the mental furniture of the ordinary modern man. As yet, however, the naturalist movement has not received its definitive philosophy. There has been no lack of ambitious attempts to elaborate naturalistic syntheses, but none has been final. Neither Condorcet nor Holbach nor Bentham nor Comte nor Spencer nor Haeckel can be said to be the philosopher of the movement. Nevertheless, in their doctrine of man there is a large element common to all these philosophers. Whether they be Deists, Materialists, or Agnostics, they generally agree that man is a part of the material world; that in the knowledge, the control, and the enjoyment of this world he finds his true end, and that no spiritual principle can intervene in this closed order governed by uniform physical laws. Taking it as a whole, however, modern naturalism is due not so much to any philosophic theory, as to the material triumphs of modern civilization and man's conquest of nature. The realm of mystery before which man feels himself humble and weak has withdrawn its frontiers. Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers. He is no longer the servant of unknown forces, but a master in his own house, and he intends to make the most of his new-found powers."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />~Christopher H. Dawson: <span style="font-size: 11pt;"><i>Enquiries. </i>(1933)</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-66996552078471332142018-06-20T22:42:00.001-07:002018-06-20T22:42:54.056-07:00Humanism and the New Order<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">IN science, the growth of man’s knowledge and his control over nature is accompanied by a growing sense of man’s dependence on material forces. He gradually loses his position of exception and superiority and sinks back into nature. He becomes a subordinate part of the great mechanical system that his scientific genius has created. In the same way, the economic process, which led to the exploitation of the world by man and the vast increase of his material resources, ends in the subjection of man to the rule of the machine and the mechanization of human life. Finally, in the political and social sphere, the revolt against the medieval principle of hierarchy and the reassertion of the rights of the secular power led to the absolutism of the modern national state. This again was followed by a second revolt—the assertion of the rights of man against secular authority which culminated in the French Revolution. But this second revolt also led to disillusionment. It led, on the one hand, to the disintegration of the organic principle in society into an individualistic atomism, which leaves the individual isolated and helpless before the new economic forces, and, on the other, to the growth of the bureaucratic state, the “coldest of cold monsters,” which exerts a more irresistible and far-reaching control over the individual life than was ever possessed by the absolute monarchies of the old regime.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So we have the paradox that at the beginning of the Renaissance, when the conquest of nature and the creation of modern science are still unrealized, man appears in a god-like freedom with a sense of unbounded power and greatness; while at the end of the nineteenth century, when nature has become conquered and there seems no limits to the powers of science, man is once more conscious of his misery and weakness as the slave of material circumstance and physical appetite and death. Instead of the heroic exaltation of humanity which was characteristic of the naturalism of the Renaissance, we see the humiliation of humanity in the anti-human naturalism of Zola. Man is stripped of his glory and freedom and left as a naked human animal shivering in an inhuman universe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Thus humanism by its own inner development is eventually brought to deny itself and to pass away into its opposite. For Nietzsche, who refused to surrender the spiritual element in the Renaissance tradition, humanism is transcended in an effort to attain to the superhuman without abandoning the self-assertion and the rebellious freedom of the individual will—an attempt which inevitably ends in self-destruction. But modern civilization as a whole could not follow this path. It naturally chose to live as best it could, rather than to commit a spectacular suicide. And so, in order to adapt itself to the new conditions, it was forced to throw over the humanist tradition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hence the increasing acceptance of the mechanization of life that has characterized the last thirty years. Above all, in the period since the war [WWI] there has been a growing tendency toward the de-intellectualization and exteriorization of European life. The old fixed canons of social and moral conduct have been abandoned, and society has given itself up to the current of external change without any attempt towards self-direction or the preservation of spiritual continuity. But this acceptance of new conditions is in itself negative, and possesses no creative quality. It points to the dying-down and stagnation of culture rather than its renewal. Nor is this surprising. For centuries, Western civilization has received its impetus from the humanist tradition, and the dying-away of that tradition naturally involves the temporary cessation of cultural creativeness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>Christianity and the New Age</i>, Chap. 1.<br /></span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-62637466319066879752018-03-21T02:53:00.000-07:002018-03-21T02:53:38.582-07:00On Man: Heir of all the Ages<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>By G.K. Chesterton</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">IF the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs. He is certainly not the kind of heir who ever visits his estate: and, if he really owns all the historic lands of ancient and modern history, he is a very absentee landlord. He does not really go down the mines on the historic property, whether they are the Caves of the Cave-Men or the Catacombs of the Christians, but is content with a very hasty and often misleading report from a very superficial and sometimes dishonest mining expert. He allows any wild theories, like wild thickets of thorn and briar, to grow all over the garden and even the graveyard. He will always believe modern testimony in a text-book against contemporary testimony on a tombstone. He sells the family portraits with much more than the carelessness of Charles Surface, and seldom knows enough about the family even to save a favourite uncle from the wreck. For the adjective ‘fast’, which was a condemnation when applied to profligates, has become a compliment when applied to progressives. I know there are any number of men in the modern world to whom all this does not in the least apply; but the point is that, even where it is obviously applicable, it is not thought particularly culpable. Nevertheless, there are some of us who do hold that the metaphor of inheritance from human history is a true metaphor, and that any man who is cut off from the past, and content with the future, is a man most unjustly disinherited; and all the more unjustly if he is happy in his lot, and is not permitted even to know what he has lost. And I, for one, believe that the mind of man is at its largest, and especially at its broadest, when it feels the brotherhood of humanity linking it up with remote and primitive and even barbaric things.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Christopher H. Dawson</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Mr. Christopher Dawson has written studies of historic and prehistoric problems which have been admired by men distinguished in every way, and especially distinguished from each other. His work has been most warmly praised by critics as different as Dean Inge and Mr. Aldous Huxley and the Rev. C. C. Martindale. But I, for one, value his researches for one particular reason above the rest: that he has given the first tolerably clear and convincing account of the real stages of what his less lucid predecessors loved to call the Evolution of Religion. Whether myths and mystical cults were really evolved along one consistent line, I do not know. But theories about mythology or cults or mysteries were most certainly not evolved along any consistent line. They cut across each other and almost immediately became a tangle of contradictions. First we had the Sun Myth illuminating everything like the sun, and enabling Bishop Whately to prove that Napoleon was a mythical character. Then we had Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, who said that everything came from ghosts and graves and the worship of ancestors; and then Professor Frazer, who (with all his genius) could not see the sacred tree for the golden bough. Now whatever else be true of these theories of evolution, they are not evolved. The grave does not grow out of the sun; nor even the oak out of the grave; and on no possible theory is Frazer a development of Spencer. They are contrary guesses; and if there is evidence for all of them (as no doubt there is), the evidence only increases the confusion. Mr. Dawson has ordered the confusion without contradicting the evidence; and his conclusion is that there were, broadly, four stages in the spiritual story of humanity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The first notion, with which the lowest and most primitive savages seem to have begun, was very like the notion with which many of our Higher Thinkers hope that all humanity will end. It was a broad belief in what is now called ‘the spiritual element in life’; in a spirit almost impersonal but still superior to our material minds; of which we may gain encouraging glimpses and visions. This is the stage of the Shaman, or medicine-man, who, as an independent individual mystic, can tap the vast and vague supernatural power that pervades the world. By special magic rites, with special material objects, herbs or stones or what not, he could release the mysterious force. For note that this is not pantheism; the sacred tree is hidden in the wood or the dryad is imprisoned in the tree. Now I could not be content with this magic, whether or no it would suit the Higher Thinkers. But I have no sympathy with a man who has no sympathy with this magic; I count no man large-minded or imaginative who has not sometimes felt like a medicine-man. It is quite natural to me, walking in the woods, to wonder fancifully whether whistling back the note of a certain bird, or tasting the juice of a certain berry, would release a glamour or give back a fairyland. I call that being the heir of all the ages.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The second stage is that of the static archaic culture, in which a whole people live a ritual life, generally founded on the seasons of seed or harvest, in which there is no distinction between sacred and profane, because ploughing or fishing are religious forms; and no distinction between king and priest, because the Sacred Emperor rules the whole round of ritual life like a god. China and Egypt and other cultures were of that sort. Here again, I should be dissatisfied with a religion that was a pageant of nature; for I feel the soul, in Sir Thomas Browne’s noble phrase, as something other than the elements, that owes no homage unto the sun. But I am much more dissatisfied with a man, pretending to be a man of culture, who merely despises that ritual. I can never see the pageant of harvest without feeling that it is religious, and it gratifies me to think that I am feeling like the first Emperor of China. I call that being the heir of all the ages. The third phase described is the rise of the world religions, the moral and universal religions; for Buddha and Confucius and the Hebrew Prophets and the first Greek philosophers appeared roughly about the same time. And with them appeared the idea expressed in Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase: that the soul is greater than the sun. Henceforth the conscience is more than the cosmos. Either it condemns the cosmos, or ignores the cosmos, as in Buddhism; or it gives it a mystical meaning, as in Platonism; or it sees it as an instrument for producing a grander good, as in Judaism and Christianity. Now I do not myself care about the Buddhist extreme, which almost unmakes the world to make the soul. I do not like Nirvana, which seems indistinguishable from death. But I would not be seen dead in a field, not in the field of any paradise, negative or positive, with the man who has no admiration for the superb renunciation of Buddha, or for the Western equivalent, the star-defying despair of the Stoics. No man has really been alive who has not some time felt that the skies might fall, so that the justice within his conscience should be done; and in the richer tapestry of the Christian there is also a dark thread of the Stoic. I call that being the heir of all the ages.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I will not complete the four phases here, because the last deals with the more controversial question of the Christian system. I merely use them as a convenient classification to illustrate a neglected truth: that a complete human being ought to have all these things stratified in him, so long as they are in the right order of importance, and that man should be a prince looking from the pinnacle of a tower built by his fathers, and not a contemptuous cad, perpetually kicking down the ladders by which he climbed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">—from <i>Avowals and Denials, A Book of Essays</i> by G.K. Chesterton (1934)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-77809404392741034612018-02-28T16:35:00.004-08:002018-02-28T17:01:41.144-08:00"Where the world is going"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"IT IS TRUE that we do not know where the world is going. We cannot say it must go towards a Christian culture any more than towards destruction by atomic warfare. All we know is that the world is being changed from top to bottom and that the Christian faith remains the way to salvation, that is to say, a way to the renewal of human life by the spirit of God, which has no limits and which cannot be prevented by human power or material catastrophe."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-75336710984883425692018-01-24T22:39:00.000-08:002018-01-24T22:39:15.213-08:00“Two kinds of men”<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">THE sociology of St. Augustine is based on the same psychological principle which pervades his whole thought—the principle of the all-importance of the will and the sovereignty of love. The power of love has the same importance in the spiritual world as the force of gravity possesses in the physical world. As man’s love moves him, so must he become; <i>pondus meum amor meus, eo feror quocumque feror.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And though the desires of men appear to be infinite they are in reality reducible to one. All men desire happiness, all seek after peace; and all their lusts and hates and hopes and fears are directed to that final end. The only essential difference consists in the nature of the peace and happiness desired, for, by the very fact of his spiritual autonomy, man has the power to choose his own good; either to find his peace in subordinating his will to the divine order, or to refer all things to the satisfaction of his own desires and to make himself the centre of his universe— “a darkened image of the divine Omnipotence.” It is here and here only that the root of this dualism is to be found: in the opposition between the “natural man” who lives for himself and desires only a material felicity and a temporal peace, and the spiritual man who lives for God and seeks spiritual beatitude and a peace which is eternal. The two tendencies of will produce two kinds of men and two types of society, and so we finally come to the great generalization on which St. Augustine’s work is founded. “Two loves built two cities—the earthly, which is built up by the love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly which is built up by the love of God to the contempt of self.” (<i>City of God</i>, XIV, xxviii)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher Dawson: <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813215439/philosophynot-20/" target="_blank">Enquiries into Religion and Culture</a></i>, Ch. XII—St. Augustine and His Age.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdr1-Dy8PpMdrBKKeuZs0ricWpyMoBn_7y5-TBqidFoDxgdn1C6kZReW1BimoxL5yQq3w0QusXOuBaRkxc8ydHJy7cz_nkZH8MuwST1NLSfjclgNCcW4JsC2ZlDbLPC_Rk0VgBfXm87D8/s1600/dawson-enquiries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdr1-Dy8PpMdrBKKeuZs0ricWpyMoBn_7y5-TBqidFoDxgdn1C6kZReW1BimoxL5yQq3w0QusXOuBaRkxc8ydHJy7cz_nkZH8MuwST1NLSfjclgNCcW4JsC2ZlDbLPC_Rk0VgBfXm87D8/s320/dawson-enquiries.jpg" width="207" /></span></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQR5tyyCnEPS3IrhW2nOuWm57fysTSaQZ8lDbZKlF1ybRo49SqHbi_gKCVw8MgULvjkmoucSb3gjOEITnJmcdxAKRiCnuDqhcApQS7bXo4llOrmqODS01SCAzAWqOuPClw9NF6SyIh_Ps/s1600/triumph-of-st-augustine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1208" data-original-width="900" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQR5tyyCnEPS3IrhW2nOuWm57fysTSaQZ8lDbZKlF1ybRo49SqHbi_gKCVw8MgULvjkmoucSb3gjOEITnJmcdxAKRiCnuDqhcApQS7bXo4llOrmqODS01SCAzAWqOuPClw9NF6SyIh_Ps/s640/triumph-of-st-augustine.jpg" width="476" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"The Triumph of St. Augustine" by Claudio Coello. <br />Oil on canvas, 1664; Museo del Prado, Madrid.</td></tr>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-63576585294790657522018-01-24T22:24:00.001-08:002018-01-24T22:24:23.890-08:00"Public education"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“...the establishment of a universal system of public education inevitably changed the relations of education to the state.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"It is this above all else which has caused the mind of our society to lose its independence, so that there is no power left outside politics to guide modern civilization, when the politicians go astray. For in proportion as education becomes controlled by the state, it becomes nationalized, and in extreme cases the servant of a political party.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher Henry Dawson: <i>Understanding Europe.</i></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-32716408282051820922017-11-02T01:12:00.003-07:002017-11-02T01:12:57.990-07:00"The existence of some spiritual principles"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“ALL the great historic civilizations of the past recognized the existence of some spiritual principles or ends of this kind and made them the key of their interpretation of reality and their concepts of moral order. Hence a system of education like that of the modern secular state which almost totally ignores the spiritual component in human culture and in the human psyche is a blunder so enormous that no advance in scientific method or educational technique is sufficient to compensate for it. In this respect we are inferior to many far less advanced cultures which have retained their consciousness of a spiritual order, for wherever this consciousness exists the culture still possesses a principle of integration.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>The Crisis of Western Education</i>, Part III, Chap. XV—Western Man and the Technological Order.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-83634801516227646332017-10-22T00:29:00.001-07:002017-10-22T00:29:21.046-07:00"Social schizophrenia"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“WE are faced with a spiritual conflict of the most acute kind, a sort of social schizophrenia which divides the soul of society between the non-moral will to power served by inhuman techniques and a religious faith and a moral idealism which have no power to influence human life. There must be a return to unity—a spiritual integration of culture—if mankind is to survive.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher Dawson: <i>Gifford Lectures, 1947: Religion and Culture.</i> </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-34713856035189259112017-07-09T03:30:00.001-07:002017-07-09T03:30:35.659-07:00"We are inferior to many far less advanced cultures"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“ALL the great historic civilizations of the past recognized the existence of some spiritual principles or ends of this kind and made them the key of their interpretation of reality and their concepts of moral order. Hence a system of education like that of the modern secular state which almost totally ignores the spiritual component in human culture and in the human psyche is a blunder so enormous that no advance in scientific method or educational technique is sufficient to compensate for it. In this respect we are inferior to many far less advanced cultures which have retained their consciousness of a spiritual order, for wherever this consciousness exists the culture still possesses a principle of integration.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>The Crisis of Western Education,</i> Part III, Chap. XV—Western Man and the Technological Order.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-90525338404108242832017-07-09T03:28:00.000-07:002017-07-09T03:28:01.385-07:00"Modern secularized culture has become a closed world"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“THE present situation is that modern secularized culture has become a closed world and has lost all contact with the higher world of spiritual reality. In the past this higher world was rendered intelligible and visible to Western man through the medium of Christian culture, which provided a whole series of ways of approach adapted to the different types of mind and the different forms of intellectual activity. Today all these avenues have become closed by ignorance, prejudice or neglect, and they have to be re-opened by the spiritual and intellectual action of Catholics, each working in his own field towards the common end, and it is here the work of the educated Catholic is of such importance. There is an apostolate of study as well as an apostolate of action and of prayer.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>The Crisis of Western Education</i>, Part III, Chap. III—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. (1961)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-25313261351362740972017-06-04T12:19:00.003-07:002017-06-04T12:19:54.567-07:00"A completely secularized culture is a world of make believe"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“NOW it is not the business of Christianity to defend our secularized Western culture from the menace of social or political revolution. From the Christian point of view there is not much to choose between passive agnosticism or indifferentism and active materialism. In fact, both of them may be different symptoms or phases of the same spiritual disease. What is vital is to recover the moral and spiritual foundations on which the lives of both the individual and the culture depend: to bring home to the average man that religion is not a pious fiction which has nothing to do with the facts of life, but that it is concerned with realities, that it is in fact the pathway to reality and the law of life. This is no easy task, since a completely secularized culture is a world of make believe in which the figures of the cinema and the cartoon-strip appear more real than the figures of the Gospel; in which the artificial cycle of wage earning and spending has divorced men from their direct contact with the life of the earth and its natural cycle of labor and harvest; and in which, even birth and death and sickness and poverty no longer bring men face to face with ultimate realities, but only bring them into closer dependence on the state and its bureaucracy so that every human need can be met by filling in the appropriate form.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher Dawson: <i>The Crisis of Western Education</i>, Chap. XIII—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-62952700317362435632017-06-04T12:17:00.003-07:002017-06-04T12:17:23.949-07:00"Their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“AS soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. The subordination of morals to politics, the reign of terror, the techniques of propaganda and psychological aggression can be used by any power or party that is bold enough to abandon moral scruples and plunge into the abyss.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">─ <i>Religion and World History: A Selection from the Works of Christopher Dawson,</i> Part III, Ch. 7.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-24153972047766292172017-05-27T00:48:00.000-07:002017-05-27T00:48:06.699-07:00"The pathway to reality"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“NOW it is not the business of Christianity to defend our secularized Western culture from the menace of social or political revolution. From the Christian point of view there is not much to choose between passive agnosticism or indifferentism and active materialism. In fact, both of them may be different symptoms or phases of the same spiritual disease. What is vital is to recover the moral and spiritual foundations on which the lives of both the individual and the culture depend: to bring home to the average man that religion is not a pious fiction which has nothing to do with the facts of life, but that it is concerned with realities, that it is in fact the pathway to reality and the law of life. This is no easy task, since a completely secularized culture is a world of make believe in which the figures of the cinema and the cartoon-strip appear more real than the figures of the Gospel; in which the artificial cycle of wage earning and spending has divorced men from their direct contact with the life of the earth and its natural cycle of labor and harvest; and in which, even birth and death and sickness and poverty no longer bring men face to face with ultimate realities, but only bring them into closer dependence on the state and its bureaucracy so that every human need can be met by filling in the appropriate form.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher Dawson: <i>The Crisis of Western Education</i>, Chap. XIII—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-57351232446773602222016-11-19T21:22:00.002-08:002016-11-19T21:22:39.429-08:00"The forces of destruction"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“OUR generation has been forced to realize how fragile and unsubstantial are the barriers the separate civilization from the forces of destruction. We have learnt that barbarism is not a picturesque myth or a half-forgotten memory of a long-passed stage of history, but an ugly underlying reality which may erupt with shattering force whenever the moral authority of a civilization loses its control.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>Gifford Lectures, 1948: Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.</i> </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-25153652699737906972016-09-27T17:52:00.000-07:002016-09-27T17:52:00.877-07:00"Christians have allowed civilization to become secular”<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“IF the Christian faith contains such vast sources of spiritual energy and power, if the Church is the divine organ of world transformation and the seed of a new humanity, how has it come about that the world—above all the Christian world—has fallen into its present plight? From the Christian point of view it is easy to understand persecution and external adversity and failure, but it is far harder to face the failure of Christianity on the spiritual plane. For it is not simply that modern civilization has become secularized, it is that Christians have allowed civilization to become secular.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>The Judgment of the Nations</i>, Part II, Chap. 4.—Return to Christian Unity.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-1433214070674539792016-08-08T16:19:00.000-07:002016-08-08T16:19:09.037-07:00"The profound pessimism of Luther"<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">THE profound pessimism of Luther saw in Nature nothing but the kingdom of death and the Law of Nature as a law of wrath and punishment, and thus his extreme supernaturalism prepared the way for the secularisation of the world and the abolition of objective standards.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But the revolt against <a href="http://thomasofaquino.blogspot.com/2016/08/catholic-encyclopedia-natural-law.html" target="_blank">Natural Law</a> did not only spring from</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaWAIGCARlQT5IAzrODsSzWOhTh1RYHZ8Pbj_5x-RyOqWEJLYoXxBy7WRNSyt_WsDrk8OkDvUWz2zeeXsgDO107IRIWiMNFfgCdmv__j-Fuunaq5wTkKxMVTt-I4HCx7Fankk1NQFaid4/s1600/Martin-Luther-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaWAIGCARlQT5IAzrODsSzWOhTh1RYHZ8Pbj_5x-RyOqWEJLYoXxBy7WRNSyt_WsDrk8OkDvUWz2zeeXsgDO107IRIWiMNFfgCdmv__j-Fuunaq5wTkKxMVTt-I4HCx7Fankk1NQFaid4/s1600/Martin-Luther-2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Martin Luther</td></tr>
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the other worldliness of Luther and the Reformers. It found an even more powerful support in the worldliness of the Renaissance statesmen and thinkers. Already before the Reformation <a href="http://thomasofaquino.blogspot.com/2015/03/jacques-maritain-machiavellianism.html" target="_blank">Machiavelli</a> had produced his Intelligent Man’s Guide to Politics which studies the art of government as a non-moral technique for the acquisition and maintenance of power, thus depriving the state of its religious character as the temporal organ of divine justice and making the interests of the state the supreme law by which all political acts must be judged. This is the source of the “new jurisprudence” which took the place of the common law of Christendom and which Leo XIII explained in his political encyclicals<b>*</b> undermined the moral foundations of Western Civilization.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Niccolo Machiavelli</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It leaves no room for the consecration of the state to God which is so solemnly and sacramentally expressed by the traditional rite of the coronation of Christian kings. On the contrary, it involved the secularization of the state and the desecration of law and authority. By emancipating the prince from subordination to a higher order, it destroyed both the principle of order and the principle of freedom in the state itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This false political realism which denies or ignores spiritual realities is no less fatal to the Christian tradition and no less destructive of Christendom as a social reality than was the false spiritualism of Luther. Indeed, its influence has been wider and deeper, since it has not been restricted to certain countries and peoples, but has influenced the thought of Catholics and Protestants alike, and has grown stronger with the progressive secularizing of our civilization. The thought of Luther belongs to a different world from that in which we live; he was still a man of the Middle Ages, though he was in revolt against medieval Catholicism. But the thought of Machiavelli is still alive in the modern world and finds expression in the words and deeds of modern politicians and dictators. As Pius XII writes in this Encyclical “<a href="http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12SUMMI.HTM" target="_blank">Darkness over the Earth</a>,” “Today the false views held in earlier times have been amalgamated with new invention and misconception of the human mind. And this perverse process has been pushed so far that nothing is left but confusion and disorder. One leading mistake we may single out as the fountain head, deeply hidden, from which the evils of the modern State derive their origin. Both in private life and in the State itself and, moreover, in the mutual relations of State with State and country with country, the one universal standard of morality is set aside, by which we mean the Natural Law, now buried away under a mass of destructive criticism and neglect.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>The Judgment of the Nations,</i> Part II, Chap. 2—Christian Social Principles. (1942)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><b>*</b> Leo XIII: <i><a href="http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13sta.htm" target="_blank">Immortale Dei</a></i>, and <i><a href="http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Leo13/l13liber.htm" target="_blank">Libertas Praestantissimum</a>.</i></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Judgment of the Nations</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">■ <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813218802/philosophynot-20/" target="_blank"><i>The Judgment of the Nations</i> at Amazon</a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-76833353344025692992016-08-08T15:53:00.002-07:002016-08-08T15:53:19.156-07:00"Common principles and common ideals"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“EVERY society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-48156565023271495342016-07-26T00:41:00.001-07:002016-07-26T00:41:04.614-07:00"Desecularisation of modern civilisation"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“The desecularisation of modern civilisation is no easy matter; at first sight it may seem a hopeless task. But we can at least prepare the way for it by desecularising our intellectual outlook and opening our eyes to the existence of the spiritual forces that create and transform civilisation.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i>Enquiries into Religion and Culture,</i> Intro.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-41421475848003682962016-07-26T00:39:00.001-07:002016-07-26T00:39:11.471-07:00“The great fault of modern democracy"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“The great fault of modern democracy ─ a fault that is common to the capitalist and the socialist ─ is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness....</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The great curse of our modern society is not so much lack of money as the fact that the lack of money condemns a man to a squalid and incomplete existence. But even if he has money, and a great deal of it, he is still in danger of leading an incomplete and cramped life, because our whole social order is directed to economic instead of spiritual ends. The economic view of life regards money as equivalent to satisfaction. Get money, and if you get enough of it you will get everything else that is worth having. The Christian view of life, on the other hand, puts economic things in second place. First seek the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added to you. And this is not so absurd as it sounds, for we have only to think for a moment to realise that the ills of modern society do not spring from poverty in fact, society today is probably richer in material wealth than any society that has ever existed. What we are suffering from is lack of social adjustment and the failure to subordinate material and economic goods to human and spiritual ones.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2763464984833226030.post-24048081679012134962016-06-29T14:17:00.003-07:002016-06-29T14:17:39.995-07:00"The traditional forms of the family"<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">“The peoples who allow the natural bases of society to be destroyed by the artificial conditions of the new urban civilisation will gradually disappear and their place will be taken by those populations which live under simpler conditions and preserve the traditional forms of the family.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">~Christopher H. Dawson: <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813215439/philosophynot-20/" target="_blank">Enquiries into Religion and Culture</a>.</i></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com