English Catholicism and Victorian Liberalism

THE hundred years that have elapsed since the restoration of the English Hierarchy [in 1850] have been a time of slow but uninterrupted progress for English Catholicism. There have been no spectacular triumphs and no catastrophic defeats, but step by step the Church has been gradually recovering her lost position in the life of the nation. And this is no small achievement when one considers how completely the face of the world has changed during the last century: how the old European order and the new liberal order that aspired to take its place have both alike been swept away by new forces that were hardly perceptible in 1850, so that Europe itself and the millennial tradition of Western civilization are now in process of dissolution.

In 1850 English Liberalism, having surmounted the crisis of Chartism, was settling down to enjoy the fruits of the new order that it had created. The collapse of the old regime on the Continent in 1848 and the failure of the revolutionary movements to establish a stable democratic order had combined to strengthen the prestige of English institutions and ideals, not only in our own eyes but in those of Europe. Consequently, it is not surprising that the restoration of the Hierarchy and the reappearance of Catholicism as a living power in nineteenth-century England should have been regarded as a challenge to the spirit of the age, an act of "papal aggression." For the liberal rationalist and the conservative Protestant alike, the Papacy seemed the embodiment of those forces of reaction against which the modern world was in revolt.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the final achievement of the Victorian compromise in which all the leading elements of English society found their place. High Tories like the Duke of Wellington, cosmopolitan pacifists like John Bright, Christian idealists and scientific rationalists, artisans and capitalists, all came together under the leadership of the Queen and the Prince Consort to celebrate the triumphs of science and industry and the dawn of a new era of universal peace and enlightenment. But there was no place for the English Catholics in this festival of national and international unity. The unpopularity of the Oxford conversions combined with that of Irish Nationalism and that of the Papal Government caused Catholics to be regarded with hostility and suspicion by Liberals and Conservatives alike. In their attitude to Catholicism there was nothing to choose between Liberals like Lord John Russell and Tory extremists of the type of Newdegate and Sir Robert Inglis.

Yet in spite of all this, the deeper intellectual tendencies of the age were far less hostile to Catholicism than one would suppose from the expression of popular opinion in Press and parliament. The great writers of the Victorian age, such as Carlyle and Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, were as a rule highly critical of the optimism and self-complacency of Victorian liberalism.

The romantic interest in the Middle Ages which was so characteristic of the nineteenth century affected moralists and historians no less than poets and artists, and produced a new appreciation of medieval Catholicism which did much to destroy the deeply-rooted inherited prejudices of Protestant England. Here, at last, there was common ground on which Protestant men of letters like Ruskin, Anglican scholars like S.R. Maitland, Catholic converts like Kenelm Digby and continental Catholics like Montalembert and Rio could meet and fraternize. The extent to which these influences penetrated English culture is to be seen not so much in its more obvious manifestations ─ in the Oxford Movement, in Young England, or in the Pre-Raphaelites ─ as in a change in the climate of opinion which made the rabid anti-Catholic prejudices of 1850 a thing of the past. Never since the Reformation have Catholics played such a large part in English public life or possessed such close relations with the leaders of public opinion as in the second half of the nineteenth century under the social leadership of Manning and the intellectual leadership of Newman. The conversion of an elder statesman like the first Marquess of Ripon and the political activity of Catholics like the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Emly (William Monsell) and Lord Russell of Killowen, show what a remarkable change had passed over English society during the generation that followed the restoration of the Hierarchy. 

CATHOLICS AND THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE

These changes did not involve any weakening of the Victorian compromise; on the contrary, they strengthened it by broadening its basis and liberating it from religious intolerance. In its essentials the Victorian compromise outlasted the Victorian age and endured until the first world war destroyed its social and economic foundations. It was this unbroken period of peaceful continuity which distinguishes the English development from that of the continent, where the second half of the nineteenth century had proved no less revolutionary than the earlier period ─ where kingdoms and empires were being created and destroyed by war and revolution and where political liberalism was an anticlerical force which threatened the very existence of the Church.

But in England, although the leaders of the Catholic revival ─ Newman no less than Manning ─ were fully aware of the dangers of religious or ideological liberalism, there was never any tendency to identify religious with political Liberalism. On the contrary, the political affinities of the Victorian Catholics were Liberal rather than Conservative, and many of the leading Catholic figures, like Ripon, Acton, Monsell, and Russell of Killowen, were themselves strong Gladstonian Liberals. Thus English Catholicism developed in an atmosphere which was singularly free from political disturbances, and the traditional continental pattern of ideological conflict between Left and Right, between anti-Christian revolutionaries and Catholic reactionaries, remained almost entirely foreign to English life and thought.

Even the catastrophic changes of the last thirty-five years have not changed this situation so much as one might have expected. During the present century English Catholicism has continued to develop along the lines that were laid down in the later nineteenth century. The place of Catholicism in English society, which had been won for a favored few in the age of Manning, has gradually been extended to the rank and file of the Catholic body, so that there is no longer any sphere of national life from which Catholics are excluded. And this has been achieved without political conflicts through the gradual leavening of English society by the independent activity of Catholics in every class and profession.

Yet throughout this period the secularization of English culture has proceeded almost without a check, so that our position today is no longer that of a Catholic minority in a Protestant society, but that of a religious minority in a secular or neo-pagan civilization. We have become so accustomed to this change that we are apt to forget its tremendous implications. During the last hundred years English Catholicism has developed under the protection of the Victorian compromise. We have accepted the Victorian principles of individual freedom, religious toleration and the limited character of the State as elementary conditions of existence which hardly needed to be defended. But, in proportion as civilization becomes secularized, all these principles and rights lose their political expression in totalitarian States. 

THE WORLD DEBATE BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ATHEISM

Today all the basic liberties which were formerly regarded as essential conditions of modern civilization are everywhere questioned and often completely abolished, and the new secularist ideologies are establishing themselves as exclusive dogmatic anti-religions which demand the total surrender of the mind and will. It is true that this country is still relatively immune. A feeble gas-jet of freedom still flickers in the dilapidated Victorian basement. But it is obvious that English Catholicism cannot rely on the continuance of the conditions which prevailed during the first century of its restored existence. Sooner or later it must come up against the same forces that prevail in the rest of the world. No doubt this will involve great changes in our apologetic, which, like so much else, is an inheritance from the Victorian age, and which has been dominated for a century by the long-drawn-out controversy with Anglicanism. Today these familiar controversies are overshadowed by the world debate between Christianity and atheism, and we have to deal not with the validity of Anglican orders but with the existence of the human soul and the ultimate foundations of the moral order. This is a tremendous task, since the gulf which separates the world of Newman's "Loss and Gain" or that of Mrs. Wilfred Ward's novels from the world of George Orwell's "1984" or Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" is not one that can be measured in terms of years or generations.

But this change is not necessarily unfavorable to Catholicism. When the secularists themselves are forced to acknowledge "the mystery of injustice" and to see modern civilization sliding into the abyss, it is surely the time for Catholics to make the present age realize the claims of the Church as the City of God and the one hope of humanity.

A hundred years ago, at the time of the restoration of the Hierarchy, it was hard to make Englishmen realize the relevance of these tremendous claims amidst the confused babel of the sects and in face of the complacent optimism of Victorian Liberalism. For even men who were not influenced by Protestant prejudices, like Thackeray or Matthew Arnold, viewed the Church with patronizing tolerance as a picturesque survival from the dead past. 

A CITY OF REFUGE FOR HUMANITY

Today the babel of tongues is becoming silent, and Western man has lost faith in himself and in his future. But the Church still stands as she stood fifteen hundred year ago, as the one earthly representative of an eternal order which survives the fall of empires and civilizations: and the darker become the prospects of secular culture, the more clearly does the Church stand out as a city of refuge for humanity. Now the history of the Church in England during the last century has been a preparation for this new situation. From the beginning of the modern epoch English Catholicism has been a minority movement which has had to depend on its own internal resources and not to look for support to the State and the traditional social order. The very period which has seen the secularization of modern culture has also been an age of Catholic rebirth and restoration in this country.

Consequently, though we have hitherto been protected by the peculiar conditions of an insular national culture, and the persistence of liberal traditions, from the impact of total secularization, we are perhaps in a better position to withstand that attack than are those societies which have possessed a continuous tradition of Catholic culture and the protection of a Catholic State. But we can only do so if we accept the full consequences of the new situation and prepare to face the new issues which this situation involves. These issues are not altogether new; they are, indeed, very similar to those that confronted the Church under the Roman Empire, but they are as remote from those of the Victorian age as those of the Apocalypse are from Newman's "Difficulties of Anglicans."

~Christopher Dawson
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Source: "The Dawson Newsletter" Fall 1993, P.O. Box 332, Fayetteville, AR 72702.

The Challenge Of Secularism

IT is no accident that the introduction of universal compulsory state education has coincided in time and place with the secularization of modern culture.

Where the whole educational system has been dominated by a consciously anti-religious ideology, as in the Communist countries, the plight of Christianity is desperate, and even if there were no persecution of religion on the ecclesiastical level, there would be little hope of its survival after two or three generations of universal Communist education. Here however the totalitarian state is only completing the work that the liberal state began, for already in the nineteenth century the secularization of education and the exclusion of positive Christian teaching from the school formed an essential part of the program of almost all the progressive, liberal and socialist parties everywhere.

Unfortunately, while universal secular education is an infallible instrument for the secularization of culture, the existence of a free system of religious primary education is not sufficient to produce a Christian culture. We know only too well how little effect the Catholic school has on modern secular culture and how easily the latter can assimilate and absorb the products of our educational system. The modern Leviathan is such a formidable monster that he can swallow religious schools whole without suffering from indigestion.

But this is not the case with higher education. The only part of Leviathan that is vulnerable is his brain, which is small in comparison with his vast and armored bulk. If we could develop Christian higher education to a point at which it meets the attention of the average educated man in every field of thought and life, the situation would be radically changed.

In the literary world something of this kind has already happened. During my lifetime Catholicism has come back into English literature, so that the literary critic can no longer afford to ignore it. But the literary world is a very small one and it does not reflect public opinion to anything like the degree that it did in Victorian times. The trouble is that our modern secular culture is sub-literary as well as sub-religious. The forces that affect it are in the West the great commercialized amusement industries and in the East the forces of political propaganda. And I do not think that Christianity can ever compete with these forms of mass culture on their own ground. If it does so, it runs the danger of becoming commercialized and politicized and thus of sacrificing its own distinctive values. I believe that Christians stand to gain more in the long run by accepting their minority position and looking for quality rather than quantity.

This does not mean that Catholicism should become an esoteric religion for the learned and the privileged. The minority is a religious minority and it is to be found in every class and at every intellectual level. So it was in the days of primitive Christianity and so it has been ever since.

The difference is that today the intellectual factor has become more vital than it ever was in the past. The great obstacle to the conversion of the modern world is the belief that religion has no intellectual significance; that it may be good for morals and satisfying to man's emotional needs, but that there is no such thing as religious knowledge. The only true knowledge is concerned with material things and with the concrete realities of social and economic life.

This is a pre-theological difficulty, for it is impossible to teach men even the simplest theological truths, if they believe that the creeds and the catechism are nothing but words and that religious knowledge is not really knowledge at all. On the other hand, I do not believe that it is possible to clear the difficulty away by straight philosophical argument, since the general public is philosophically illiterate and modern philosophy is becoming an esoteric specialism.

The only remedy is religious education in the widest sense of the word. That is to say a general introduction to the world of religious truth and the higher forms of spiritual reality. By losing sight of this world, modern secular culture has become more grievously impoverished than even the non-Christian cultures, for those cultures agreed in recognizing the existence of a higher supernatural or divine world on which human life was dependent.

Now the Christian world of the past was exceptionally well provided with ways of access to spiritual realities. Christian culture was essentially a sacramental culture which embodied religious truth in visible and palpable forms: art and architecture; music and poetry and drama, philosophy and history were all used as channels for the communication of religious truth. Today all these channels have been closed by unbelief or choked by ignorance, so that Christianity has been deprived of its natural means of outward expression and communication.

It is the task of Christian education to recover these lost contacts and to restore contact between religion and modern society — between the world of spiritual reality and the world of social experience. Of course this is not what is usually meant by education, which is usually confined within the narrow limits of schools and examinations. But instruction cannot achieve much unless it has a culture behind it, and Catholic culture is essentially humanist in as much as there is nothing human which does not come within its sphere and which does not in some way belong to it.

Thus Christian culture is a very rich and wide culture: richer than modern secular culture, because it has a greater spiritual depth and is not confined to a single level of reality; and wider than any of the oriental religions because it is more catholic and many-sided. For the average modern man, however, it is more or less a lost world and one from which even the modern Catholic has been partially estranged by his secular environment and tradition.

Thus we have a double task, first to recover our own cultural inheritance and secondly to communicate it to a sub-religious or neo-pagan world. I do not believe the second of these is as difficult as it appears at first sight, because people are becoming more and more aware that something is lacking in their culture: and there are many who are still far from positive religious belief but who possess a good deal of intellectual curiosity about religion which may become the seed of something more.

But the other condition is more difficult to fulfill, for even the Catholic minority, which is conscious of its traditions has very few opportunities for the study of Catholic culture. On the one hand we have the highly specialized studies of the ecclesiastical seminary; on the other a wide range of university studies in which isolated scraps of Christian culture can be acquired through history and literature but which gives no opportunity for any general inclusive or synthetic study of Christian culture as such.

It seems to me that the time has come when the universities should consider whether it is not possible to do more for Christian studies. The Christian culture of the past was an organic whole. It was not confined to theology; it expressed itself also in philosophy and literature, in art and music, society and institutions; and none of these forms of expression can be understood completely unless they are seen in relation to the rest. But under existing conditions this is impossible. You can study some parts of the whole in detail but never the whole itself.

To understand the development of Christian culture it must be studied in all its three phases — Ancient, Medieval and Modern; Patristic, Scholastic and Humanist; Byzantine, Gothic and Baroque. At the most it is possible to study one of the first two parts of these triads in isolation from the rest, while the third cannot be studied at all. The result of this situation is that we tend to view Christian culture exclusively in one of its phases only. And the effect has been to narrow our whole conception of the subject so that we fail to see how it transcends the limitations of any particular age or social environment.

Of course it may be objected that the subject is too vast a field to be studied as a whole. But the same may be said more or less of any great culture — such as Hellenism or Islam or the civilization of China — yet in those cases any specialized study of the past must be accompanied by a general study of the whole.

It is true that Christians do not always recognize this. There are many, especially among the Protestants and the sectarians, who look on Christianity and culture as alien from one another and who regard the world of culture as part of "this world," the world that lies in darkness under the dominion of evil. In their extreme forms such views are irreconcilable with Catholicism. Nevertheless there is a kind of Catholic Puritanism, which separates itself as far as possible from secular culture and adopts an attitude of withdrawal and intransigency. Now this attitude of withdrawal is perfectly justified on Catholic principles. It is the spirit of the fathers of the desert and of the martyrs and confessors of the primitive Church. But it means that Christianity has become an underground movement and that the only place for Christian life and for Christian culture is in the desert and the catacombs. Under modern conditions, however, it may be questioned if such a withdrawal is possible. Today the desert no longer exists and the modern state exerts no less authority underground in the subway and the air raid shelter than it does on the earth and in the air. The totalitarian state — and perhaps the modern state in general — is not satisfied with passive obedience; it demands full cooperation from the cradle to the grave.

Consequently the challenge of secularism must be met on the cultural level, if it is to be met at all; and if Christians cannot assert their right to exist in the sphere of higher education, they will eventually be pushed, not only out of modern culture, but out of physical existence. That is already the issue in Communist countries, and it will become the issue here also, if we do not use our opportunities while we still have them. We are still living internally on the capital of the past and externally on the existence of a vague atmosphere of religious tolerance, which has already lost its justification in contemporary secular ideology. It is a precarious situation, which cannot be expected to endure indefinitely and we ought to make the most of it while it lasts.

I believe that it is the field of higher education that offers the greatest opportunities; first on the ground of economy of effort, because a comparatively small expenditure of time and money is likely to produce more decisive results than a much greater expenditure at a lower level. And secondly because this is the sphere where there is most freedom of action and where the tradition of intellectual and spiritual freedom is likely to survive longest. Moreover the need for action is especially urgent in this field, because the social changes of the last half-century have extinguished the old tradition of independent private scholarship to which historical studies owed so much in the past. Most of all, perhaps, was this tradition strong among Catholics, where men like Lingard and Acton and Edmund Bishop gave their lives to the study of Christian history and culture without academic position or economic reward. But today the disappearance of the leisure class makes this kind of unorganized individual scholarship impossible. Either the Church or the universities must carry on the tradition and make themselves responsible for the maintenance of studies in the culture of Christendom, or the work will not be done at all.

~Christopher Dawson: The Challenge Of Secularism (Catholic World, 1956).

Why Dawson Opposed Our Bourgeois Mind

By R. Jared Staudt

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt 6:24).

"This Gospel passage provides us with proper framework to evaluate Christopher Dawson’s controversial essay, “Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind.” Dawson is not an economist and is not writing an economic treatise. As an historian of culture and ideas, he is criticizing a particular mindset or spirit which has fundamentally shaped and governed the modern world. Dawson’s central thesis throughout his corpus is that religion is the very heart of culture. He recognizes that today our heart is not religion, but rather wealth. The problem is not capitalist economics, but rather the mind or soul with which it is practiced and the lack of a genuine religious framework to guide it. For Dawson, the bourgeois soul worships wealth and earthly prosperity above God, and thus practices a new secular religion."

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