“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.”
~Christopher H. Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Part III, Chap. XV—Western Man and the Technological Order.
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Sunday, July 9, 2017
"Modern secularized culture has become a closed world"
“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.”
~Christopher H. Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Part III, Chap. III—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. (1961)
~Christopher H. Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Part III, Chap. III—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. (1961)
Friday, December 11, 2015
"Education has meant the transmission of culture"
“EVERY form of education that mankind has known, from the savage tribes to the highest forms of culture, has always involved two elements—the element of technique and the element of tradition; and hitherto it has always been the second that has been most important. In the first place education teaches children how to do things—how to read and write and even on a much more primitive level how to hunt and cook, and plant and build. But besides all these things, education has always meant the initiation of the young into the social and spiritual inheritance of the community: in other words education has meant the transmission of culture.”
~Christopher Dawson: in Understanding Europe.
~Christopher Dawson: in Understanding Europe.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Renaissance Humanism, Reformation and Counter-Reformation
From The Crisis of Western Education
By Christopher Dawson
NORTH of the Alps also the influence of the Italian Renaissance was first felt in university circles, and the leaders of the movement in Germany, France and England, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Lefère d’Etables, Fisher and John Colet, still represented the medieval tradition of clerical learning and ecclesiastical society. Consequently it is not surprising that the Christian aspect of the Renaissance was even more strongly accentuated here that in the South, and the influence of Christian Platonism and of the Florentine Academy was stronger that that of the purely literary humanism of Poggio and Valla. But although this Northern humanism was overtly and consciously Christian, it aroused much sharper opposition from the representatives of the old order than was the case in Italy. The literary quarrels that were so numerous and bitter between the Italian scholars became transformed in the Gothic North into an ideological warfare between conservatives and the modernists in which the latter used the weapons of ridicule and vituperation against the monks and theologians, while the conservatives responded with accusations of heresy and ecclesiastical censures.
For these reasons the Northern humanists have been regarded as the forerunners and even the originators of the Reformation. And to a certain extent this is true. It was the humanists who began the public campaign against the corruptions and superstitions of the late medieval Church, and it was the greatest of them all, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who began the propaganda for a return to Christian antiquity and to the pure evangelical Christianity of the New Testament. Nevertheless the spirit of the German Reformation was entirely different from that of Erasmus, and when its character became plain, no one was more horrified than the humanists. It was a revolutionary movement of the most far-reaching kind which embodied all the elements in Northern Europe that were most alien from the ideals of the new humanists culture of the Mediterranean world. Its great leader, Martin Luther, was the supreme example of the antihumanist spirit, the enemy of moderation and human reason, an individualist who denied human freedom, a man of passion who condemned nature, a conservative who rejected tradition.
This inherent contradiction between Protestantism and Humanism became overt in the early years of the Reformation in the controversy between Luther and Erasmus on the Freedom of the Will, which led to a bitter antagonism between the two leaders and to the progressive estrangement of the German Reformation from the humanist culture. In this field, however, the success of Luther was far less complete than in the sphere of religion and politics. He destroyed the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom, the Roman order and the Catholic hierarchy together with the institutions and beliefs on which the medieval culture had been founded, above all the monastic orders, which had been for centuries the chief representatives of the higher culture and the teachers of the Christian people. And by so doing, there was generated, for the first time in Western history, a revolutionary attitude towards the past and to the inherited norms of culture. As Döllinger wrote, the new generations in the schools and universities “were taught to despise past generations and consequently their own ancestors as willingly plunged in error” and to believe “that the Popes and bishops, the theologians and the universities, the monasteries and all the teaching corporations had formed for centuries a vast conspiracy to deform and suppress the teaching of the Gospel.”*
This revolutionary change was even more serious than we can realize today, owing to its destructive effects on the mind of the masses and the education of the common people. In the Middle Ages that education has never been a matter of book learning. The main channels of Christian culture were, liturgical and artistic. The life of the community centered in the Church, in the performance of the liturgy and the cult of the Saints. The annual cycle of feasts and fasts was the background of social life, and every vital moment in the life of the community found in it an appropriate ritual and sacramental expression. Architecture and painting and sculpture, music and poetry were all enlisted in its service, and no one was too poor or too uneducated to share in its mysteries.
Now all this was swept away in the course of a single generation and a new Protestant culture had to be built up based almost exclusively on the study of the bible and the dogmatic theology of the new sects. There was a complete ideological separation between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Truth in one country was heresy in another; even the fundamental conceptions of the Christian life, or moral perfection, of sanctity and salvation were different.
If therefore the religious revolution of the Reformation had developed to its logical conclusion, there can be no doubt that Western Europe would have ceased to exist as a cultural unity. There would have been two completely separate cultures in the Protestant North and the Catholic South, divided by an iron curtain of persecution and repression which would, have made the two parts of Europe as alien and incomprehensible from one another as Christendom was from Islam.
For there were humanists in both camps from the first, and in spite of their theological opposition they remained in substantial agreement in their educational ideals and their concept of humane learning. It is true that the majority if the Northern humanists followed the example of Erasmus and soon lost whatever sympathies they had with the Protestant Reformers. But these were exceptions to the rule, especially in the younger generation, and the most important of these exceptions, Melanchthon, did all in his power to check the breakdown of culture and to establish a sound traditions of Protestant education. But his success was a very limited one, for German humanism never recovered from the shock of the Reformation. In the West, however, the situation was different. French Protestantism from the first found wide support in humanist circles. Calvin himself fully appreciated the importance of education and study. Wherever the Calvinists went, from Transylvania to Massachusetts, they brought with them not only the Bible and Calvin’s Institutes, but the Latin grammar and the study of the classics.
Meanwhile in Catholic Europe the influence of Christian humanism continued to develop. The leaders of Catholic culture in the age of the Reformation, like Cardinal Sadoleto’s treatise de liberis recte instituendis (1530) explains the ideals of humanism in their most mature form. After the Council of Trent the situation was changed by the Counter-Reformation and the drastic measures that were taken to repress Protestantism arid to reassert the control of the Church over literature and education. But there was no breach in the continuity of culture such as occurred in the North. The tradition of popular culture remained unchanged, and the Church used the new art and music and drama as the church of the Middle Ages had dome in the past. It was this permeation of Renaissance art and literature by the religious spirit of the Catholic revival which gave rise to the Baroque culture which in the seventeenth century spread over the whole of Catholic Europe and extended its influence into the North, in very much the same way as the Gothic art and culture had expanded four centuries earlier, in the opposite direction.
The carriers of this culture were the new religious orders, above all the Society of Jesus, which played a similar part in European culture in that later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to that which the Benedictines had played in the early Middle Ages or the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth century. Like them, the Jesuits owed their influence above all to their educational activities; and as the Benedictines had based their teaching on an adaption of the classical education of the later Roman Empire to Christian aims, so now the Jesuits adapted the new classical education of the humanists of the Renaissance to the religious ideals of the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum belongs to the same tradition as that of the humanist treatises on education of which I have spoken above. It was, however, more limited and more practical in its aims. Its originality lay in its technique and organization rather than in its subject matter. Nevertheless it did more than anything else to establish a common international standard of higher education, so that even in Protestant Europe the Jesuit schools met with the approval if such a revolutionary critic of education as Francis Bacon.**
_______________________
* Dollinger, The Reformation in Its Relations with the Schools and Universities and the Education of Youth in the Reformation, vol. I, p.397. (French trans.)
** “As for the Pedagogical part, she shortest rule would be ‘consult the schools of the Jesuits,’ for nothing better has been put in practice.” Bacon, de Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. VI, ch. iv.
Source: Christopher Dawson. The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. III, “The Age of Humanism,” pp. 26-30.
■ Amazon
By Christopher Dawson
NORTH of the Alps also the influence of the Italian Renaissance was first felt in university circles, and the leaders of the movement in Germany, France and England, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Lefère d’Etables, Fisher and John Colet, still represented the medieval tradition of clerical learning and ecclesiastical society. Consequently it is not surprising that the Christian aspect of the Renaissance was even more strongly accentuated here that in the South, and the influence of Christian Platonism and of the Florentine Academy was stronger that that of the purely literary humanism of Poggio and Valla. But although this Northern humanism was overtly and consciously Christian, it aroused much sharper opposition from the representatives of the old order than was the case in Italy. The literary quarrels that were so numerous and bitter between the Italian scholars became transformed in the Gothic North into an ideological warfare between conservatives and the modernists in which the latter used the weapons of ridicule and vituperation against the monks and theologians, while the conservatives responded with accusations of heresy and ecclesiastical censures.
For these reasons the Northern humanists have been regarded as the forerunners and even the originators of the Reformation. And to a certain extent this is true. It was the humanists who began the public campaign against the corruptions and superstitions of the late medieval Church, and it was the greatest of them all, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who began the propaganda for a return to Christian antiquity and to the pure evangelical Christianity of the New Testament. Nevertheless the spirit of the German Reformation was entirely different from that of Erasmus, and when its character became plain, no one was more horrified than the humanists. It was a revolutionary movement of the most far-reaching kind which embodied all the elements in Northern Europe that were most alien from the ideals of the new humanists culture of the Mediterranean world. Its great leader, Martin Luther, was the supreme example of the antihumanist spirit, the enemy of moderation and human reason, an individualist who denied human freedom, a man of passion who condemned nature, a conservative who rejected tradition.
This inherent contradiction between Protestantism and Humanism became overt in the early years of the Reformation in the controversy between Luther and Erasmus on the Freedom of the Will, which led to a bitter antagonism between the two leaders and to the progressive estrangement of the German Reformation from the humanist culture. In this field, however, the success of Luther was far less complete than in the sphere of religion and politics. He destroyed the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom, the Roman order and the Catholic hierarchy together with the institutions and beliefs on which the medieval culture had been founded, above all the monastic orders, which had been for centuries the chief representatives of the higher culture and the teachers of the Christian people. And by so doing, there was generated, for the first time in Western history, a revolutionary attitude towards the past and to the inherited norms of culture. As Döllinger wrote, the new generations in the schools and universities “were taught to despise past generations and consequently their own ancestors as willingly plunged in error” and to believe “that the Popes and bishops, the theologians and the universities, the monasteries and all the teaching corporations had formed for centuries a vast conspiracy to deform and suppress the teaching of the Gospel.”*
This revolutionary change was even more serious than we can realize today, owing to its destructive effects on the mind of the masses and the education of the common people. In the Middle Ages that education has never been a matter of book learning. The main channels of Christian culture were, liturgical and artistic. The life of the community centered in the Church, in the performance of the liturgy and the cult of the Saints. The annual cycle of feasts and fasts was the background of social life, and every vital moment in the life of the community found in it an appropriate ritual and sacramental expression. Architecture and painting and sculpture, music and poetry were all enlisted in its service, and no one was too poor or too uneducated to share in its mysteries.
Now all this was swept away in the course of a single generation and a new Protestant culture had to be built up based almost exclusively on the study of the bible and the dogmatic theology of the new sects. There was a complete ideological separation between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Truth in one country was heresy in another; even the fundamental conceptions of the Christian life, or moral perfection, of sanctity and salvation were different.
If therefore the religious revolution of the Reformation had developed to its logical conclusion, there can be no doubt that Western Europe would have ceased to exist as a cultural unity. There would have been two completely separate cultures in the Protestant North and the Catholic South, divided by an iron curtain of persecution and repression which would, have made the two parts of Europe as alien and incomprehensible from one another as Christendom was from Islam.
For there were humanists in both camps from the first, and in spite of their theological opposition they remained in substantial agreement in their educational ideals and their concept of humane learning. It is true that the majority if the Northern humanists followed the example of Erasmus and soon lost whatever sympathies they had with the Protestant Reformers. But these were exceptions to the rule, especially in the younger generation, and the most important of these exceptions, Melanchthon, did all in his power to check the breakdown of culture and to establish a sound traditions of Protestant education. But his success was a very limited one, for German humanism never recovered from the shock of the Reformation. In the West, however, the situation was different. French Protestantism from the first found wide support in humanist circles. Calvin himself fully appreciated the importance of education and study. Wherever the Calvinists went, from Transylvania to Massachusetts, they brought with them not only the Bible and Calvin’s Institutes, but the Latin grammar and the study of the classics.
Meanwhile in Catholic Europe the influence of Christian humanism continued to develop. The leaders of Catholic culture in the age of the Reformation, like Cardinal Sadoleto’s treatise de liberis recte instituendis (1530) explains the ideals of humanism in their most mature form. After the Council of Trent the situation was changed by the Counter-Reformation and the drastic measures that were taken to repress Protestantism arid to reassert the control of the Church over literature and education. But there was no breach in the continuity of culture such as occurred in the North. The tradition of popular culture remained unchanged, and the Church used the new art and music and drama as the church of the Middle Ages had dome in the past. It was this permeation of Renaissance art and literature by the religious spirit of the Catholic revival which gave rise to the Baroque culture which in the seventeenth century spread over the whole of Catholic Europe and extended its influence into the North, in very much the same way as the Gothic art and culture had expanded four centuries earlier, in the opposite direction.
The carriers of this culture were the new religious orders, above all the Society of Jesus, which played a similar part in European culture in that later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to that which the Benedictines had played in the early Middle Ages or the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth century. Like them, the Jesuits owed their influence above all to their educational activities; and as the Benedictines had based their teaching on an adaption of the classical education of the later Roman Empire to Christian aims, so now the Jesuits adapted the new classical education of the humanists of the Renaissance to the religious ideals of the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum belongs to the same tradition as that of the humanist treatises on education of which I have spoken above. It was, however, more limited and more practical in its aims. Its originality lay in its technique and organization rather than in its subject matter. Nevertheless it did more than anything else to establish a common international standard of higher education, so that even in Protestant Europe the Jesuit schools met with the approval if such a revolutionary critic of education as Francis Bacon.**
_______________________
* Dollinger, The Reformation in Its Relations with the Schools and Universities and the Education of Youth in the Reformation, vol. I, p.397. (French trans.)
** “As for the Pedagogical part, she shortest rule would be ‘consult the schools of the Jesuits,’ for nothing better has been put in practice.” Bacon, de Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. VI, ch. iv.
Source: Christopher Dawson. The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. III, “The Age of Humanism,” pp. 26-30.
■ Amazon
Thursday, March 5, 2015
"Secular standards and values"
“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 if 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.”
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. 8. (1961)
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. 8. (1961)
"One of the chief defects of modern education"
“ONE OF THE CHIEF DEFECTS of modern education has been its failure to find an adequate method for the study of our own civilization. The old humanist education taught all that it knew about the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome, and taught little else. In the nineteenth century, this aristocratic and humanist ideal was gradually replaced by the democratic utilitarianism of compulsory state education, on the one hand, and by the ideal of scientific specialization, on the other.
“The result has been an intellectual anarchy imperfectly controlled by the crude methods if the examination system and of payment by results. The mind of the student is overwhelmed and dazed by the volume of new knowledge which is being accumulated by the labor of specialists, while the necessity for using education as a stepping-stone to a profitable career leaves little time to stop and think. And the same is true of the teacher, who has become a kind of civil servant tied to a routine over which he can have little control.
“Now the old humanist education, with all its limitations and faults, possessed something that modern education has lost. It possessed an intelligible form, owing to the fact that the classical culture which it studied was seen as a whole, not only in its literary manifestations but also in its social structure and its historical development. Modern education has lacked this formal unity, because it has never attempted to study modern civilization with the care and earnestness which humanist education devoted to classical culture. Consequently, the common background of humanist culture has been lost, and modern education finds its goal in competing specialisms.”
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Chap. IX. The Study of Western Culture.
“The result has been an intellectual anarchy imperfectly controlled by the crude methods if the examination system and of payment by results. The mind of the student is overwhelmed and dazed by the volume of new knowledge which is being accumulated by the labor of specialists, while the necessity for using education as a stepping-stone to a profitable career leaves little time to stop and think. And the same is true of the teacher, who has become a kind of civil servant tied to a routine over which he can have little control.
“Now the old humanist education, with all its limitations and faults, possessed something that modern education has lost. It possessed an intelligible form, owing to the fact that the classical culture which it studied was seen as a whole, not only in its literary manifestations but also in its social structure and its historical development. Modern education has lacked this formal unity, because it has never attempted to study modern civilization with the care and earnestness which humanist education devoted to classical culture. Consequently, the common background of humanist culture has been lost, and modern education finds its goal in competing specialisms.”
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Chap. IX. The Study of Western Culture.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2014
“The question of Christian education”
THE attempt to use religious education in order to enforce a rigid standard of religious practice in the midst of a secular culture only results in increasing the problem of “leakage.” And thus we get a situation in which the Catholics who both practise and understand their religion are the minority of a minority, and the majority of the population are neither fully Christian nor consciously atheist, but non-practising Catholics, half-Christians and well-meaning people who are devoid of any positive religious knowledge at all.
Hence it is not enough for Catholics to confine their efforts to the education of the Catholic minority. If they want to preserve Catholic education in a secularized society, they have got to do something about non-Catholic education also. The future of civilization depends of the fate of the majority, and so long as nothing is done to counteract the present trend of modern education the mind of the masses must become increasingly alienated from the whole tradition of Christian culture.
But this is not inevitable. It need never have happened if Christians had not been so absorbed in their internal conflicts that they adopted a negative defensive attitude towards the problem of national education as a whole. In England, at any rate, there has never been a time when public policy in education has been actively or consciously anti-Christian. Indeed some of the leading representatives of the Board of Education, like Matthew Arnold, were more fully aware of the dangers of secularization and the cultural importance of religious education than were the religious leaders themselves.
The situation has, of course, deteriorated considerably since Arnold’s day, especially in the higher studies. Theology, which once dominated the university, has now been pushed from the center to the circumference and has become a specialism among an increasing number of specialisms, while the study of divinity as an integral part of the general curriculum of studies, which still survived in a vestigial form before World War I, has disappeared entirely. I do not suggest that it is possible, or perhaps even desirable, to restore it. What I do believe very strongly is that the time has come to consider the possibility of introducing the study of Christian culture as an objective historical reality into the curriculum of university studies.
Until a man acquires some knowledge of another culture, he cannot be said to be educated, since his whole outlook is so conditioned by his own social environment that he does not realize its limitations. He is a provincial in time, if not in place, and he almost inevitably tends to accept the standards and values of his own society as absolute. The widening of the intellectual horizon by initiation into a different world of culture was indeed the most valuable part of the old classical education.
The study of Christian culture would, I believe, provide a really effective substitute. It would initiate the student into a world that was unknown or at best half known, and at the same time it would deepen his knowledge of modern culture by showing its genetic relation to the culture of the past. No one denies the existence of a Christian literature, a Christian philosophy and a Christian institutional order, but at present these are never studied as an organic whole. Yet without this integrated study it is impossible to understand even the development of the modern vernacular literature.
But how does this affect the question of Christian education? Obviously the academic study of Christian culture as an historical phenomenon is no substitute for religious education in the ordinary sense. What it might do, however, is to help remove the preliminary prejudice against the Christian view of things which plays so large a part in the secularization of culture. The fact is that the average educated person is not only ignorant of Christian theology, he is no less ignorant of Christian philosophy, Christian history and Christian literature, and in short of Christian culture in general. And he is not ashamed of his ignorance, because Christianity has come to be one of the things that educated people don’t talk about. This is quite a recent prejudice which arose among the half-educated and gradually spread upwards and downwards. It did not exist among civilized people in the nineteenth century, whatever their personal beliefs were. Men like Lord Melbourne and Macaulay could talk as intelligently about religious subjects as Gladstone and Acton. It was only at the very end of the century that Christianity ceased to be intellectually respectable and it was due not only to the secularization of culture but also to the general lowering of cultural standards that characterized the age.
Today there are signs of improvement in this respect. Religion has come back into poetry and fiction, and there is once more a civilized interest in religious discussion. But this cannot go far unless religion is brought back into higher education, and this can only be achieved by giving the systematic study of Christian culture a recognized place in university studies.
A reform of this kind on the level of higher studies would inevitably penetrate the lower levels of secondary and primary teaching and by degrees affect the whole tone of public education. It is obviously difficult to improve the situation in the schools if the teachers have no knowledge of Christian culture and if the standard set by the university is a secular one. However, it is for the universities and the other centers of higher education to take the first step; and if they do, there is little doubt that they would find plenty of support elsewhere, and that their initiation of the study of Christian culture would be most fruitful in results.
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education. Excerpt from Chap. 8: "Education and the State." (1961)
Hence it is not enough for Catholics to confine their efforts to the education of the Catholic minority. If they want to preserve Catholic education in a secularized society, they have got to do something about non-Catholic education also. The future of civilization depends of the fate of the majority, and so long as nothing is done to counteract the present trend of modern education the mind of the masses must become increasingly alienated from the whole tradition of Christian culture.
But this is not inevitable. It need never have happened if Christians had not been so absorbed in their internal conflicts that they adopted a negative defensive attitude towards the problem of national education as a whole. In England, at any rate, there has never been a time when public policy in education has been actively or consciously anti-Christian. Indeed some of the leading representatives of the Board of Education, like Matthew Arnold, were more fully aware of the dangers of secularization and the cultural importance of religious education than were the religious leaders themselves.
The situation has, of course, deteriorated considerably since Arnold’s day, especially in the higher studies. Theology, which once dominated the university, has now been pushed from the center to the circumference and has become a specialism among an increasing number of specialisms, while the study of divinity as an integral part of the general curriculum of studies, which still survived in a vestigial form before World War I, has disappeared entirely. I do not suggest that it is possible, or perhaps even desirable, to restore it. What I do believe very strongly is that the time has come to consider the possibility of introducing the study of Christian culture as an objective historical reality into the curriculum of university studies.
Until a man acquires some knowledge of another culture, he cannot be said to be educated, since his whole outlook is so conditioned by his own social environment that he does not realize its limitations. He is a provincial in time, if not in place, and he almost inevitably tends to accept the standards and values of his own society as absolute. The widening of the intellectual horizon by initiation into a different world of culture was indeed the most valuable part of the old classical education.
The study of Christian culture would, I believe, provide a really effective substitute. It would initiate the student into a world that was unknown or at best half known, and at the same time it would deepen his knowledge of modern culture by showing its genetic relation to the culture of the past. No one denies the existence of a Christian literature, a Christian philosophy and a Christian institutional order, but at present these are never studied as an organic whole. Yet without this integrated study it is impossible to understand even the development of the modern vernacular literature.
But how does this affect the question of Christian education? Obviously the academic study of Christian culture as an historical phenomenon is no substitute for religious education in the ordinary sense. What it might do, however, is to help remove the preliminary prejudice against the Christian view of things which plays so large a part in the secularization of culture. The fact is that the average educated person is not only ignorant of Christian theology, he is no less ignorant of Christian philosophy, Christian history and Christian literature, and in short of Christian culture in general. And he is not ashamed of his ignorance, because Christianity has come to be one of the things that educated people don’t talk about. This is quite a recent prejudice which arose among the half-educated and gradually spread upwards and downwards. It did not exist among civilized people in the nineteenth century, whatever their personal beliefs were. Men like Lord Melbourne and Macaulay could talk as intelligently about religious subjects as Gladstone and Acton. It was only at the very end of the century that Christianity ceased to be intellectually respectable and it was due not only to the secularization of culture but also to the general lowering of cultural standards that characterized the age.
Today there are signs of improvement in this respect. Religion has come back into poetry and fiction, and there is once more a civilized interest in religious discussion. But this cannot go far unless religion is brought back into higher education, and this can only be achieved by giving the systematic study of Christian culture a recognized place in university studies.
A reform of this kind on the level of higher studies would inevitably penetrate the lower levels of secondary and primary teaching and by degrees affect the whole tone of public education. It is obviously difficult to improve the situation in the schools if the teachers have no knowledge of Christian culture and if the standard set by the university is a secular one. However, it is for the universities and the other centers of higher education to take the first step; and if they do, there is little doubt that they would find plenty of support elsewhere, and that their initiation of the study of Christian culture would be most fruitful in results.
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education. Excerpt from Chap. 8: "Education and the State." (1961)
Wednesday, September 10, 2014
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.
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.
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"The forgotten world of spiritual reality"
“SO long as the Christian tradition of higher education still exists, the victory of secularism even in a modern technological society is not complete. There is still a voice to bear witness to the existence of the forgotten world of spiritual reality in which man has his true being.”
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education.
~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
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).
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).
Saturday, May 31, 2014
The Challenge of Secularism
"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."
Read the rest of this essay: The Challenge of Secularism
~Christopher Dawson
"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."
Read the rest of this essay: The Challenge of Secularism
~Christopher Dawson
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