Christianity as the Soul of the West

THE modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution. The one remaining problem that we have got to consider is where that religious solution is to be found.

Must we look for some new religion to meet the new circumstances of the changing world, or does the Christian faith still supply the answer that we need?

In the first place, it is obvious that it is no light matter to throw over the Christian tradition. It means a good deal more to us than we are apt to realise.

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism. To a far greater extent than science or philosophy, it has determined our attitude to life and the final aims of our civilisation. Yet on the other hand we cannot fail to recognise that it is just this religious element in Western culture that is most challenged at the present day. The majority of men, whatever their political beliefs may be, are prepared to accept science and democracy and humanitarianism as essential elements in modern civilisation, but they are far less disposed to admit the importance of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. They regard Christianity as out of touch with modern life and inconsistent with modern knowledge. Modern life, they say, deals with facts, while Christianity deals with unproved and incomprehensible dogmas. A man can indulge in religious beliefs, so long as he treats them as a private luxury; but they have no bearing on social life, and society can get on very well without them.

Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture. This attitude is most in evidence in Soviet Russia, where, for the first time in the history of the world, we see a great state, or rather a world empire, that officially rejects any species of religion and has adopted a social. and educational policy inspired by militant atheism. But this tendency is not confined to Russia or to the followers of communism. Both in Europe and America there is a strong anti- religious movement that includes many of our ablest modern writers and a few men of science. It seeks not only to destroy religion, but also to revolutionise morals and to discredit the ethical ideals which have hitherto inspired Western society.

This, I think, is one of the most significant features of the present situation. Critics of religion in the past have, as a rule, been anxious to dissociate the religious from the moral issue. They were often strict moralists, like the late John Morley, who managed to clothe atheism in the frock coat and top hat of Victorian respectability. But today the solidarity of religion and morals is admitted on both sides. If Europe abandons Christianity, it must also abandon its moral code. And conversely the modern tendency to break away from traditional morality strengthens the intellectual revolt against religious belief.

At first sight it seems as though the forces of change in the modern world were definitely hostile to religion, and that we are rapidly approaching a purely secular state of civilisation. But it is not so easy to get rid of religion as we might imagine. It is easy enough for the individual to adopt a negative attitude of critical scepticism. But if society as a whole abandons all positive beliefs, it is powerless to resist the disintegrating effects of selfishness and private interest. 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.

In the past, society found this unifying principle in its religious beliefs; in fact religion was the vital centre of the whole social organism. And if a state did not already possess a common religious basis, it attempted to create one artificially, like the official Caesar-worship that became the state religion of the Roman Empire. And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.

Here again Russia supplies the obvious illustration. The Communist rejection of religion and Christian morality has not led to the abandonment of social control and the unrestricted freedom of opinion in matters of belief. On the contrary, it has involved an intensification of social control over the beliefs and the spiritual life of the individual citizen. In fact, what the Communists have done is not to get rid of religion, but merely to substitute a new and stricter Communist religion for the old official orthodoxy. The Communist Party is a religious sect which exists to spread the true faith. It has its Inquisition for the detection and punishment of heresy. It employs the weapon of excommunication against disloyal or unorthodox members. It possesses in the writings of Marx its infallible scriptures, and it reveres in Lenin, if not a God, at least a saviour and a prophet.

It may be said that this is an abnormal development due to the excesses of the Russian temperament. But it is abnormal only in its exaggerations. The moment that a society claims the complete allegiance of its members, it assumes a quasi-religious authority. For since man is essentially spiritual, any power that claims to control the whole man is forced to transcend relative and particular aims and to enter the sphere of absolute values, which is the realm of religion. On the other hand, if the state consents to the limitation of its aims to the political sphere, it has to admit that its ideal is only a relative one and that it must accept the ultimate supremacy of spiritual ideals which lie outside its province.

This is the solution that Western society has hitherto chosen, but it implies the existence of an independent spiritual power, whether it be a religious faith or a common moral ideal. If these are absent, the state is forced to claim an absolute and almost religious authority, though not necessarily in the same way that the Communist state has done. We can easily conceive a different type of secularism that conforms to the needs of capitalist society: indeed, we are witnessing the emergence of something of the kind in the United States, though it is still somewhat coloured by survivals from the older Protestant tradition.

And so too in Western Europe the tendency seems all towards the development of a purely secular type of culture which subordinates the whole of life to practical and economic ends and leaves no room for any independent spiritual activity. Nevertheless a civilisation that fails to satisfy the needs of man's spiritual nature cannot be permanently successful. It produces a state of spiritual conflict and moral maladjustment which weakens the vitality of the whole social organism. This is why our modern machine-made civilisation, in spite of the material benefits that it has conferred, is marked by a feeling of moral unrest and social discontent which was absent from the old religious cultures, although the lot of the ordinary man in them was infinitely harder from the material point of view.

You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for.

Even if we regard man as an animal, we must admit that he is a peculiar sort of animal that will sacrifice his interests to his ideals—an animal that is capable of martyrdom. The statesman sees this when he appeals to the ordinary man to leave his home and his family and to go and die painfully in a ditch for the sake of his country; and the ordinary man does not refuse to go. The Communist recognises this, when he calls on the proletarian to work harder and to eat less for the sake of the Five-Year Plan and the cause of world revolution. But when the soldier comes back from the war, and the Communist has realised his Utopia, they are apt to feel a certain disproportion between their sacrifices and the fruits of their achievements.

Now it is the fundamental contradiction of materialism that it exalts the results of human achievement and at the same time denies the reality of the spiritual forces that have made this achievement possible. All the highest achievements of the human spirit, whether in the order of thought or action or moral being, rest on a spiritual absolute and become impossible in a world of purely economic or even purely human values. It is only in the light of religious experience and of absolute spiritual principles that human nature can recognise its own greatness and realise its higher potentialities.

There is a world of eternal spiritual realities in which and for which the world of man exists. That is the primary intuition that lies at the root of all religion, even of the most primitive kind. The other day I came upon a very good illustration of this, rather unexpectedly, in a passage in one of Edgar Wallace's novels in which he is describing a religious discussion between a white officer and a West African medicine-man. The former says "Where in the world are these gods of whom you are always talking?" and the savage answers, "O man, know that the Gods are not in the world; it is the world that is in the Gods."

In our modern civilised world this truth is no longer obvious; it has become dim and obscured. Nevertheless it cannot be disregarded with impunity. The civilisation that denies God denies its own foundation. For the glory of man is a dim reflection of the glory of God, and when the latter is denied the former fades.

Consequently the loss of the religious sense which is shown by the indifference or the hostility of the modern world to Christianity is one of the most serious weaknesses of our civilisation and involves a real danger to its spiritual vitality and its social stability. Man's spiritual needs are none the less strong for being unrecognised, and if they are denied their satisfaction through religion, they will find their compensation elsewhere, often in destructive and anti-social activities. The man who is a spiritual misfit becomes morally alienated from society, and whether that alienation takes the form of active hostility, as in the anarchist or the criminal, or merely of passive non-co-operation, as in the selfish individualist, it is bound to be a source of danger. The civilisation that finds no place for religion is a maimed culture that has lost its spiritual roots and is condemned to sterility and decadence. There can, I think, be little doubt that the present phase of intense secularisation is a temporary one, and that it will be followed by a far-reaching reaction. I would even go so far as to suggest that the return to religion promises to be one of the dominant characteristics of the coming age. We all know how history follows a course of alternate action and reaction, and how each century and each generation tends to contradict its predecessor. The Victorians reacted against the Georgians, and we in. turn have reacted against the Victorians. We reject their standards and their beliefs, just as they rejected the standards and beliefs of their predecessors.

But behind these lesser waves of change there is a deeper movement that marks the succession of the ages. There are times when the whole spirit of civilisation becomes transformed and the stream of history seems to change its course and flow in a new direction. One such movement occurred sixteen hundred years ago, when the ancient world became Christian. Another occurred in the sixteenth century with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which brought the mediaeval world to an end and inaugurated a new age. And the forces of transformation that are at work in the world today seem to betoken the coming of another such change in the character of civilisation, which is perhaps even more fundamental than that of the sixteenth century.

All the characteristic movements that marked the culture of the last four centuries are passing away and giving place to new tendencies. We see this not only in politics and the material organisation of life, but also in art and literature and science; for example, in the tendency of modern art to abandon the naturalistic principles that governed its development from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century in favour of new canons of style that have more in common with the art of Byzantium and of the ancient East.

We are not, indeed, going back to the Middle Ages, but we are going forward to a new age which is no less different from the last age than that was from the mediaeval period.

But if this is so, may it not be that religion is one of the outworn modes of thought that are being abandoned and that the new age will be an age of rationalism and secularism and materialism? This is, as we have seen, the current belief, but then the current beliefs are always out of date. It is difficult to realise how much of current thinking belongs to the past, because it is natural for men's minds to be soaked in the mental atmosphere of the last generation, and it needs a considerable effort to see things as they are and not as other people have seen them. The artist and the philosopher and the scientist, each in his own way, sees life direct, but the majority of men see it at second-hand through the accepted ideas of their society and culture. And consequently, the tendencies that we regard as characteristic of the age are often those that are characteristic of the age that is just passing away rather than of that which is beginning.

Thus in fact the tendencies that arc hostile to religion and make for secularism and materialism are not new tendencies. They have been at work in Europe for centuries. The whole modern period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century was a long process of revolt in which the traditional order of life and its religious foundations were being undermined by criticism and doubt. It was an age of spiritual disintegration in which Christendom was divided into a mass of warring sects, and the Churches that resisted this tendency did so only by a rigid discipline which led to religious persecution and the denial of individual freedom. And this again brought religion into conflict with the spirit of the age; for it was an age of individualism, dominated by the Renaissance ideal of liberty of thought, the Reformation ideal of liberty of conscience, the individualist ideal of economic liberty and the romantic ideal of liberty of feeling and conduct. It was an age of secularism in which the state substituted itself for the Church as the ultimate authority in men's lives and the supreme end of social activity. And finally it was an age which witnessed the triumphant development of scientific materialism, based on a mechanistic theory of the world that seemed to leave no room for human freedom or spiritual reality.

Today this process of revolution has worked itself out, so that there is hardly anything left to revolt against. After destroying the old order, we are beginning to turn round and look for some firm foundation on which we can build anew. Already in social life we are witnessing the passing of individualism and the recovery of a sense of community. In economics for example, the nineteenth-century ideal of unrestricted freedom and individual initiative has given place to an intense demand for social organisation and social control.

Looked at from this point of view, socialism and communism are not purely revolutionary and negative movements. They mark the turn of the tide. Karl Marx was among the first to feel the insufficiency of the liberal revolutionary tradition and the need for a new effort of social construction. And so he built on what seemed to his age to be an ultimate foundation—the bed-rock of scientific materialism. But today we realise that the materialistic theory of the nineteenth century was no more final than the scientific theories that it superseded. Science, which has explained so much, has ended by explaining away matter itself, and has left us with a skeleton universe of mathematical formulae. Consequently the naive materialism that regarded Matter with a capital M as the one reality is no longer acceptable, for we have come to see that the fundamental thing in the world is not Matter but Form. The universe is not just a mass of solid particles of matter governed by blind determinism and chance. It possesses an organic structure, and the further we penetrate into the nature of reality the more important does this principle of form become.

And so we can no longer dismiss mind and spiritual reality as unreal or less real than the material world, for it is just in mind and in the spiritual world that the element of form is most supreme. It is the mind that is the key of the universe, not matter. In the Beginning was the Word, and it is the creative and informing power of the Word that is the foundation of reality.

And if this is true of the world of nature, it is still more true of the world of society and culture. We must abandon the vain attempt to disregard spiritual unity and to look for a basis of social construction in material and external things. The acceptance of spiritual reality must be the basic element in the culture of the future, for it is spirit that is the principle of unity and matter that is the principle of division. And as soon as this truth is admitted, religion will no longer appear as an unessential and extraneous element in culture, but as its most vital element. For religion is the bond that unites man to spiritual reality, and it is only in religion that society can find the principle of spiritual union of which it stands in need. No secular ideal of social progress or economic efficiency can take the place of this. It is only the ideal of a spiritual order which transcends the relative value of the economic and political world that is capable of overcoming the forces of disintegration and destruction that exist in modern civilisation. The faith of the future cannot be economic or scientific or even moral; it must be religious.

This is just where the new artificial man made religions, like Positivism, fail. They lack the one thing that is necessary, namely, religious faith. It is a complete mistake to think that we can bring religion up-to-date by making it conform to our wishes and to the dominant prejudices of the moment. If we feel that modern society is out of touch with science, we do not call on the scientists to change their views and to give us something more popular. We realise that we have got to give more thought and more work to science. In the same way the great cause of the decline of religion is that we have lost touch with it, either by abandoning religion altogether, or by contenting ourselves with a nominal outward profession that does not affect our daily life and our real interests. And the only way to bring religion into touch with the modern world is to give it the first place in our own thought and in our own lives. If we wish to be scientific, we must submit to the authority of science and sacrifice our easy acceptance of things as they seem to the severe discipline of scientific method. And in the same way, if we wish to be religious we must submit to religious authority and accept the principles of the spiritual order. In the material world, man must conform himself to realities, otherwise he will perish. And the same is true in the spiritual world. God comes first, not man. He is more real than the whole external universe. Man passes away, empires and civilisations rise and fall, the stars grow old; God remains.

This is the fundamental truth which runs through the whole of the Bible. There is, of course, a great deal more than this in Christianity. In fact, it is a truth that Christianity shares with practically all the religions of the world. Nevertheless it is just this truth that the modern world, like the ancient world before it, finds most difficult to accept. You even find people who reject it and still wish to call themselves Christians. They water down religion to a series of moral platitudes and then dignify this mixture of vague religiosity and well-meaning moral optimism with the respectable name of Christianity.

A CONCRETE REALITY

In reality Christianity is not merely a moral ideal or set of ideas. It is a concrete reality. It is the spiritual order incarnated in a historical person and in a historical society. The spiritual order is just as real as the material order. The reason we do not see it is because we do not look at it. Our interests and our thoughts are elsewhere. A few exceptional men, mystics or philosophers, may find it possible to live habitually on a spiritual plane, but for the ordinary man it is a difficult atmosphere to breathe in. But it is the function of Christianity to bring the spiritual order into contact and relation with the world of man. It is, as it were, a bridge between the two worlds; it brings religion down into human life and it opens the door of the spiritual world to man. Its ideal is not a static and unchanging order like that of the other world religions. It is a spiritual society or organism that has incorporated itself with humanity and that takes into itself as it proceeds all that is vital and permanent in human life and civilisation. It aims at nothing less than the spiritual integration of humanity, its deliverance from the tyranny of material force and the dominion of selfish aims, and its reconstitution in spiritual unity.

And thus there are two principles in Christianity which though they sometimes appear contradictory are equally essential as the two poles of the spiritual order. There is the principle of transcendence, represented by the apocalyptic, ascetic, world-denying element in religion, and there is the principle of catholicity, which finds expression in the historic, social, world-embracing activity of the Church. A one-sided emphasis on the former of these leads to sectarianism, as we see in the history of the early Christian sects that refused all compromise with secular civilisation and stood aside in an attitude of negative and sterile isolation. But the Catholic Church rejected this solution as a betrayal of its universal mission.

It converted the ancient world; it became the Church of the Empire; and it took up into itself the traditional heritage of culture that the Puritanism of the sectaries despised. In this way the Church overcame the conflict between religion and secular culture that had weakened the forces of Roman society, and laid the foundations of a new civilisation. For more than a thousand years society found its centre of unity and its principle of order in Christianity. But the mediaeval synthesis, both in its Byzantine and mediaeval form, while it gave a more complete expression to the social function of Christianity than any other age has done, ran the risk of compromising the other Christian principle of transcendence by the immersion of the spiritual in the temporal order—the identification of the Church and the World. The history of mediaeval Christendom shows a continuous series of efforts on the part of orthodox reformers and Catharist and "spiritual" heretics against the secularisation and worldliness of the Church. And, as the wealth and intellectual culture of Western Europe increased, the tension grew more acute.

It was the coming of the Renaissance and the whole-hearted acceptance by the Papacy of the new humanist culture that stretched the mediaeval synthesis to breaking-point and produced a new outburst of reforming sectarianism. It is true that Catholicism met the challenge of the Reformation by its own movement of spiritual reform. But it failed to recover the lost unity of Christendom and was forced to lose touch with the dominant movements in secular culture. Thus Christianity withdrew more and more into the sphere of the individual religious life and the world went its own way. European civilisation was rationalised and secularised until it ceased even nominally to be Christian. Nevertheless it continued to subsist unconsciously on the accumulated capital of its Christian past, from which it drew the moral and social idealism that inspired the humanitarian and liberal and democratic movements of the last two centuries. Today this spiritual capital is exhausted, and civilisation is faced with the choice between a return to the spiritual traditions of Christianity or the renunciation of them in favour of complete social materialism.

But if Christianity is to regain its influence, it must recover its unity and its social activity. The religious individualism of the last age, with its self-centred absorption in the question of personal salvation and private religious emotion, will not help us. The Christianity of the future must be a social Christianity that is embodied in a real society, not an imaginary or invisible one. And this society must not be merely a part of the existing social and political order, like the established churches of the past; it must be an independent and universal society, not a national or local one. The only society that fulfills these conditions is the Catholic Church, the most ancient yet, at the same time, the most adaptable of all existing institutions. It is true that Catholicism has suffered grievously from the sectarian division and strife of the last four hundred years, but it has succeeded in surmounting the long drawn-out crisis that followed the dissolution of the mediaeval synthesis, and it stands out today as the one remaining centre of unity and spiritual order in Europe. If Christianity is necessary to Europe, the Catholic Church is no less necessary to Christianity, for without it the latter would become no more than a mass of divergent opinions dissolving under the pressure of rationalist criticism and secularist culture. It was by virtue of the Catholic ideal of spiritual unity that the social unity of European culture emerged from the welter of barbarism, and the modern world stands no less in need of such an ideal if it is to realise in the future the wider unity of a world civilisation.

But though Christianity is necessary to civilisation, we must not forget the profound difference that there is between them. It is the great paradox of Christianity, as Newman so often insisted, that though Christianity is a principle of life to civilisation even in secular matters, it is continually at issue with the world and always seems on the verge of being destroyed by it. Thus the Church is necessary to Europe, and yet any acceptance of the Church because it is necessary to society is destructive of its real essence. Nothing could be more fatal to the spirit of Christianity than a return to Christianity for political reasons.

But, on the other hand, any attempt to create a purely political or social religion is equally destined to fail. Nothing is more remarkable than the collapse of all the efforts to create an artificial religion to meet "the needs of the age." Deism, Saint-Simonianism, Positivism and the rest have all ended in failure. It is only a religion that transcends political and economic categories and is indifferent to material results that has the power of satisfying the need of the world. As Newman wrote eighty years ago: "the Catholic Church has accompanied human society through one revolution of its great year; and it is now beginning a second. She has passed through the full cycle of changes in order to show that she is independent of them all. She has had trial of East and West, of monarchy and democracy, of peace and war, of times of darkness and times of philosophy, of old countries and young."

And today she still stands as she did under the Roman Empire, as the representative in a changing world of an unchanging spiritual order. That is why I believe the Church that made Europe may yet save Europe, and that, in the great words of the Easter liturgy.

"The whole world may experience and see what was fallen raised up, what had grown old made new, and all things returning to unity through Him from whom they took their beginning."

~Christopher H. Dawson
__________________________________________

From The Modern Dilemma (Sheed & Ward, 1932). Reprinted by "The Dawson Newsletter" Winter 1995, P.O. Box 332, Fayetteville, AR 72702.

The Left-Right Fallacy

I AM very glad to have an opportunity of explaining the reasons why I objected to the current terminology of Left and Right, most of all so far as Catholics are concerned.

It is obvious today that we are faced with the prospect of a return to barbarism. The ancient tradition of Western Christendom which was founded on three pillars of Faith and Freedom and Law is withering away before our eyes, and in its place there is a rising an enormously powerful but completely inhuman system of social organization, which is usually known as totalitarianism.

This system is destroying all the forms of civilized life and moral behavior which have been developed by a thousand years and more of continuous strenuous effort, and it is not only bringing back the old evils of barbarism – like slavery and massacre and torture – but also introducing new forms of organized evil and injustice which the old barbarisms could never have imagined or devised.

It is our duty at the present time to do all in our power to preserve every existing breakwater against this flood of barbarism.

If we can maintain islands of civilization, then there is a chance that the tide may turn and that the submerged forces of Christian culture will be able to reassert themselves.

This task far transcends politics; but it has its political side, and if we surrender our political judgment and allow ourselves to be hoodwinked and blinded by the political tactics of totalitarianism, we lessen our powers of resistance on still more important issues.

Now the traditional Western political order was founded on law and liberty. The common bond of loyalty to the state did not exclude all kinds of lesser loyalties and corporate rights through which the rich diversity of Western Culture was developed. And this two-fold tradition has been inherited by Western democracy, by which I understand not in abstract ideology, but simply be historic system of self–government by representing institutions and ministerial responsibility and free elections and free discussion, which has been worked out in this and other Western countries in modern times.

This system, like the older system from which it is derived, cannot work unless there is a common bond of loyalty and the will to cooperate in essentials, in spite of all disagreements and divergencies of interest. This agreement is essential to the existence of a free society and consequently it is the key–point against which the totalitarian attack on Western Culture is directed.

The Totalitarian Tactic

The tactics of totalitarianism are to weld every difference of opinion and tradition and every conflict of economic interests into an absolute ideological opposition which disintegrates society into hostile factions bent on destroying one another.

In this campaign of disintegration the Right-Left mythology is a perfect god-send to the forces of destruction. It provides them with a crude and simple but highly effective instrument which can be applied to almost any situation and by which any number of different issues can be merged together in a mass of confusion and ideological clap-trap.

For example, there are Liberals and Conservatives, there are Republicans and Monarchists, there are anti-clericals and clericals, there are Communists and Fascists, there are Socialist and Individualists, there are Semites and anti-Semites. All of these are different oppositions, which have no necessary connection with one another, yet all of them are brought under the Left-Right headings and thus forced into ideological alliances which may be unnecessary and absurd. Moreover, when you have got your opponents all neatly ticketed you can then repeat the same process on any section of them – dividing the Socialists into Socialists of the Left Center in Socialists of the Extreme Left, or the Liberals into Moderates or Progressives, so as to submit them to the same process of confusion and disintegration.

Now the fault – or, if you like, the advantage, of the method of division is that it has no rational basis. It grades men and ideas according to their relation to a central point; which, as a rule, has no existence.

Yet in spite of this irrational character, Left and Right become the center of fierce ideological loyalties and enmities which overpower men’s reason and sense of judgment and drive them to acts of violence and inhumanity which would disgrace a tribe of cannibals.

The process of social disintegration by political faction has been spreading like an epidemic in modern society.

It is transforming Europe, the most highly civilized region in the world, the home of Christian culture, into an inferno of hatred and suspicions.

It can only be checked by a great moral effort on the part of all those who have not yet been dragged down into this whirlpool of destruction.

The obvious remedy for these evils is to be found in the old natural and political virtues which have been denied and discarded by the new barbarians: the virtues of justice and goodwill, the virtues of truth and patience, above all the virtue of prudence which Aristotle defines as the truly rational and practical state of mind in the field of human good and evil. It is only by the exercise of these virtues that it is possible to save society from the political disintegration that threatens it, and maintain an island of society amidst the rival barbarians of Left and Right.

For what we are faced with is not a false ideology which can be met with rational argument, but a kind of contagious social malady which may be deliberately encouraged by cold-blooded political schemes, but which is in itself a thoroughly irrational thing.

Source of the Left-Right Split

It is true that the Left-Right division existed long before the rise of modern totalitarianism, but from the beginning it was tainted with similar moral evils. For it originated in the French Revolution under the shadow of the guillotine in the reign of horror, at a time when politics were submerged in civil war and when the totalitarian techniques of purges and liquidations and single-party dictatorships were first evolved. Where such conditions exist, the irrational dualism of Left and Right is natural enough, since every man is forced to take one side or the other, and he stakes his neck on the victory of his party.

Today the whole thing has become infinitely more serious owing to the breakdown of Western civilization and the rapid spread of social disintegration in continental Europe. But this situation makes it all the more necessary that we should keep our heads and refuse to allow our own political vendetta of Left and Right. That way leads to destruction. The way of life is the way of justice which turns neither to the Right nor to the Left.

The political order of the Christian State was founded on the belief in the law of justice which did not depend on the right of the stronger or the will of the majority, but on the internal law to which kings and peoples alike were subject. In this belief in justice still survives today, though its spiritual foundations are often forgotten, so that “law and order” seem no more than a tiresome convenience that we take for granted.

Nevertheless it is the most precious thing we have, and there are countless thousands in Europe today who are perishing for lack of it. And so long as there are men who stand for justice and truth against the violence of party passion and the lies of party propaganda, there is still a hope for Europe and for Christian civilization.

~Christopher Dawson
(First published in The Catholic Mind, April 1946.)

Education and the State

Universal education

IT IS moreover a continually expanding force, for when once the State has accepted full responsibility for the education of the whole youth of the nation, it is obliged to extend its control and further and further into new fields: to the physical welfare of its pupils—to their feeding and medical care—to their amusements and the use of their spare time—and finally to their moral welfare and their psychological guidance. 

Thus universal education involves the creation of an immense machinery of organization and control which must go on growing in power and influence until it covers the whole field of culture and embraces every form of educational institution from the nursery school to the university.

Hence the modern movement towards universal education tends to become the rival or the alternative to the Church, which is also a universal institution and is also concerned directly with the human mind and with the formation of character. And in fact there is no doubt that the progress of universal education has coincided with the secularization of modern culture and has been largely responsible for it.

In the philosophy of the Enlightenment which inspired the educational policy of the French Revolution and of Continental Liberalism, the Church and the influence of religion were regarded as powers of darkness that were responsible for the backward condition of the masses, and consequently the movement for universal education was a crusade of enlightenment which was inevitably anti-clerical in spirit. Even in England, as recently as 1870, Joseph Chamberlain could declare that “the object of the Liberal party in England, throughout the continent of Europe and in America has been to wrest the education of the young out of the hands of the priest, to whatever denomination they might belong.”

In practice no doubt, universal education in England as in Germany and many other countries was the result either of a process of co-operation between Church and State or at least of some kind of modus vivendi between them. Nevertheless at best it was an unequal partnership: the fact that secular education is universal and compulsory, while religious education is partial and voluntary, inevitably favors the former and places the Church at a very great disadvantage in educational matters. This is not merely due to the disproportion in wealth and power of a religious minority as compared with the modern state. Even more important is the all-pervading influence of the secular standards and values which affects the whole educational system and makes the idea of an integrated religious culture seem antiquated and absurd to the politicians and the publicists and the technical experts who are the makers of public opinion.

Moreover we must remember that modern secularism, in education as in politics, is not a purely negative force. Today, as in the days of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, it has its ideals and its dogmas—we may almost say that it has its own religion. One of the outstanding exponents of this secular idealism in recent times was the late Professor Dewey, whose ideas have has a profound influence on modern American education, as I have described in the last chapter.

Now Dewey, in spite of his secularism, had a conception of education which was almost purely religion. Education is not concerned with intellectual values, its end is not to communicate knowledge or to trains scholars in the liberal arts. It exists simply to serve democracy; and democracy is not a form of government, it is a spiritual community, based on “the participation of every human being in the formation of social values.” Thus every child is a potential member of the democratic church, and it is the function of education to actualize his membership and to widen his powers of participation. No doubt knowledge is indispensable, but knowledge is always secondary to activity, and activity is secondary to participation. The ultimate end of the whole process is a state of spiritual communion in which every individual shares in the experience of the whole and contributes according to the formation of “the final pooled intelligence,” to use Dewey’s expression, which is the democratic mind.

Now it seems to me obvious that this concept of education is a religious one in spite of its secularism. It is inspired by a faith in democracy and a democratic “mystique” which is religious rather than political in spirit. Words like “community,” “progress,” “life,” and “youth,” etc., but above all “democracy” itself, have acquired a kind of numinous character which give them an emotional or evocative power and puts them above rational criticism. But when it comes to the question of the real significance and content of education we cannot help asking what these sacred abstractions really amount to. Do not most primitive and barbarous peoples known to us achieve these great ends of social participation and communal experience no less completely by their initiation ceremonies and tribal dances than any modern educationalist with his elaborate programs for the integration of school and life and the sharing of common experience?

The forefather of modern education, who was more consistent than his descendants, Jean Jacques Rousseau, would perhaps have approved of this, since he believed that civilization was on the whole a mistake and that man would be better without it. But the modern democrat usually has rather a naïve faith in modern civilization, and he wishes to accept the inheritance of culture, while rejecting the painful process of social and intellectual discipline by which that inheritance of culture has been acquired and transmitted.”

~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Chap. 8.

• Amazon

How sacred things were turned to sacrilegious account

“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…are each of them based on one of these fundamental errors. Democracy bases its 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 transcendent in religious values or sanctions. It is a religious emotion divorced from religious belief. Social activities are…as it were consecrated to themselves and elevated into substitutes for the ends to which they were formerly subjected.”

~Christopher Dawson: Prevision in Religion.