"The recovery of the spiritual vision"

“IT is necessary that Christians should remember that it is not the business of the Church to do the same thing as the State—to build a Kingdom like other kingdoms of men, only better; nor to create a reign of earthly peace and justice. The Church exists to be the light of the world, and if it fulfills its function, the world is transformed in spite of all the obstacles that human powers place in the way. A secularist culture can only exist, so to speak, in the dark. It is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality. But as soon as the light comes, all the elaborate mechanism that has been constructed for living in the dark becomes useless. The recovery of the spiritual vision gives man back his spiritual freedom. And hence the freedom of the Church is in the faith of the Church and the freedom of man is in the knowledge of God.”

~Christopher H. Dawson: History and the Christian Revelation. (1935)

The Church as the Path to Salvation (east wall), by Andea da Firenze. 

Fresco, 1366-67; Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

"The American way of life was built on a threefold tradition..."

THE process of secularization which has accompanied the progress of technology threatens the foundation of American culture no less than the traditional culture of the Old World. The American ideology on which the Constitution was based involved two essential and related concepts—in the first place the philosophy of Natural Law and Natural Rights and secondly the limitation of the power of the state which left the individual citizen free to lead his own life and organize his economic and cultural activities.

According to the old American system, the state or states were concerned with the preservation of law and order and national independence. Everything else—religion, education and economic life—was the sphere of free individual action in which the state had no voice. All this, has been changed in the last hundred years by inevitable historical forces.

The State, that unitary authoritative bureaucratic power, against which the American Revolution was a protest, has returned armed with new powers of supervision and psychological control of which George III never dreamed, while technology has unified the economic life of the nation into a vast system of organization in which every individual has his allotted place.

In the new America the socialization and secularization of education has created an immense professionalized organ for the creation of moral and intellectual uniformity. In this way the constitutional principle of the separateness of Church and State which was intended to secure religious freedom has become the means of secularizing the American mind so that the churches have lost all control over the religious formation of the people. This was not so in the earlier phase of American history when the churches were the chief, and often the only, organs of education and culture.

The American way of life was built on a threefold tradition of freedom—political, economic and religious—and if the new secularist forces were to subjugate these freedoms to a monolithic technological order, it would destroy the foundations on which American culture was based. The American way of life can only maintain its character within the general framework of Western Christian culture. If this relation is lost, something essential to the life of the nation will be lost and American democracy itself will become subordinated to the technological order.

. . . I dealt with this subject in The Judgment of Nations, when in England Catholics and Liberals were forced to stand together against the menace of totalitarianism and when these two principles of Natural Law and the limited or constitutional state were the special object of totalitarian attack.

Today the attack comes from a different quarter, but it is the same principles that are threatened alike by the Communist ideology, which is totalitarian in the same sense as National Socialism, and by the technological secularism which is the enemy within the Western world and which is equally opposed to these fundamental principles. It is only from the standpoint of a living Christian culture that we can defend these principles that are the common foundation of the Western way of life.

~Christopher Dawson: from The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. XIV—American Culture and the Liberal Ideology.       

Economic imperialism and the modern state

“AS Comte had foreseen, the progressive civilization of the West, without any unifying spiritual force, and without any intellectual synthesis, tended to fall back into social anarchy. The abandonment of the old religious traditions did not bring humanity together in a natural and moral unity, as the eighteenth-century philosophers had hoped. On the contrary, it allowed the fundamental difference of race and nationality, of class and private interest, to appear in their naked antagonism. The progress in wealth and power did nothing to appease these rivalries; rather it added fuel to them, by accentuating the contrasts of wealth and poverty, and widening the field of international competition. The new economic imperialism, as it developed in the last generation of the nineteenth century, was as grasping, as unmoral, and as full of dangers of war, as any of the imperialisms of the old order. And, while under the old order the state had recognized its limits as against a spiritual power, and had only extended its claims over a part of human life, the modern state admitted no limitations, and embraced the whole life of the individual citizen in its economic and military organization.”

~Christopher Dawson: Religion and the Life of Civilization.