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Quotes from Christopher Dawson

[Many of the quotes below are from Dawson’s 1961 book, The Crisis of Western Education.]

Christianity should lie at the centre of a liberal arts education.

Culture is inseparable from education, since education in the widest sense of the word is what the anthropologists term “enculturation,” the process by which culture is handed on by the society and acquired by the individual.

Education cannot achieve much unless it has a culture behind it; and Christian 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.

The focus of medieval Christendom was to be found in the North, in the territories between the Rhine and the Loire, which was the source of almost all the characteristic achievements of the Middle Ages.

The Christian aspect of the Renaissance has been seriously underestimated by the nineteenth-century historians of Renaissance culture.

Martin Luther was the supreme example of the anti- humanist 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.

It was the influence of humanist education and clerical culture that saved Europe from permanent division into two completely separate cultures, the Protestant North and the Catholic South, divided by an iron curtain of persecution and repression.

German humanism never recovered from the shock of the Reformation.

It was the permeation of Renaissance art and literature by the religious spirit of the Catholic revival which gave birth 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.

Under the influence of humanism, Catholic and Protestant Europe shared a common type of culture. The educated classes studied the same languages in the same way, read the same books and accepted the same ideal pattern of “the scholar and the gentleman” which had been laid down in the standard courtesy books of the Italian Renaissance—above all in Castiglione’s book The Courtier (1528), which was translated into almost every Western European language.

The secularization of Western culture dates not from the Renaissance or the Reformation but from the Enlightenment.

Though Prussia remained the headquarters of the political reaction, it was relatively progressive in educational policy.

In Dewey’s view the purpose of education is not the communication of knowledge but the sharing of social experience, so that the child will become integrated into the democratic community. He believed that morals were essentially social and pragmatic and that any attempt to subordinate education to transcendent values or dogmas ought to be resisted.

In America the government does not yet claim an academic monopoly and the principle of academic freedom is still accepted in theory, though it may be limited in practice by the pressure of public opinion and by the desire to make the school an organ of national and democratic integration.

Catholics have not conformed to the American pattern in one important respect. While the Protestant churches have gradually abandoned the field of culture to the state and have confined their activity to the purely ecclesiastical sphere, Catholics have continued to assert their rights in the field of education.

Seen in relation to American culture, the achievement of economic success is such an important source of social prestige that it was difficult for Catholics to take their full share in American life without it.

The Catholic college has a definite and conscious commitment to Christian culture and Christian values.

The progress of universal education has coincided with the secularization of modern culture and has been very largely responsible for it.

Secularism and Christianity are inevitably and in every field irreconcilable with one another. On the one hand we have the secular view that the state is the universal community and the Church is a limited association of groups of individuals for limited ends. On the other there is the Christian view that the Church is the universal community and that the state is a limited association of groups of individuals for limited ends.

Under modern conditions the sectarian solution merely means that the religious minority abdicates its claim to influence the culture of the community.

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 on the fate of the majority, and so long as nothing is done to counteract the present trend of modern education the mind of the majority must become increasingly alienated from the whole tradition of Christian culture.

Modern man’s whole life is spent inside highly organized artificial units—factory, trade union, office, civil service, party—and his success or failure depends on his relations with these units. If the Church were one of these compulsory organizations modern man would be religious, but since it is voluntary, and makes demands on his spare time, it is felt to be superfluous and unnecessary.

The real threat to Christianity and also to the future of Western culture is not the rational hostility of a determined minority, but the existence of a great mass of opinion which is not anti-religious but sub-religious, so that it is no longer conscious of any spiritual need for Christianity to fulfil.

The problem of the conversion of the sub-religious is not unlike the problem of the education of the subnormal. The only real solution is to change the cultural environment which has made it possible for this unnatural state of things to develop. For the sub- religious is also in a certain sense the subhuman, and the fact that apparently healthy and normal individuals can become dehumanized in this way shows that there is something seriously wrong in the society and culture that have made them what they are.

The last two hundred years has shown how little can be achieved by the non-intellectual emotionalism of the revivalist traditions which have been so strong even in a secular environment like that of nineteenth-century America. But a complete change of spiritual orientation cannot be effective unless it takes place on a deep psychological level. It cannot be had for the asking! It can only be reached by a long and painful journey through the wastelands. Meanwhile there is an essential preliminary step which can be taken at once wherever and whenever people can be found who recognize this need for spiritual change.

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.

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.

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 centres of higher education to take the first step; and if they did so, there is little doubt that they would find plenty of support elsewhere.

Every advance in education has been prepared by a preliminary period in which the pioneers work outside the recognized academic structures.

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 it corresponds to no objective reality.

The field of higher education offers the greatest opportunities for reversing the secularization of modern culture; 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.

Every turning point in European history has been associated with a change in education or a movement of educational reform. We are today in the presence of one of these turning points and consequently the time is ripe for a new movement of educational reform.

Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.

No culture in the world has devoted so much attention to the problem of political power and the moral principles of political action as has the West.

One of the greatest of the non-European world powers, the United States, is so profoundly impregnated with Western traditions and ideals that America cannot accept the complete disintegration of Europe without imperiling her own cultural existence.

It is hardly too much to say that modern civilization is Western civilization. There are very few forces living and moving in the modern world which have not been either developed or transformed by the influence of Western culture.

Having dominated the educational system—schools, colleges and universities—for so long one would have expected that the study of Christian culture would have formed the basis for the higher studies and that the foundations of an educational tradition would have been laid which would have dominated Christian education ever since. But what actually happened was that for centuries higher education had been so identified with the study of ancient Greece and Rome that there was no room left for anything else. Even the study of national European cultures did not obtain full recognition until the nineteenth century, while the concept of Christian culture as an object of study has never been recognized at all.

Christian culture is not the same thing as medieval culture. It existed before the Middle Ages began and it continued to exist after they had ended.

The old domination of classical humanism has passed away, and nothing has taken its place except the scientific specializations. These do not provide a complete intellectual education, and tend to disintegrate into technologies.

The combination of utilitarianism and specialization is fatal to the idea of a liberal education. It is also one of the main causes of the intellectual disintegration of modern Western culture.

For more than two centuries Western civilization has been losing contact with the religious traditions on which it was originally founded and devoting all its energies to the conquest and organization of the world by economic and scientific techniques.

The Western world has become increasingly detached from its spiritual roots in Christian culture, but has at the same time advanced in material and scientific power, so that it has extended its influence over the rest of the world until it has created a cosmopolitan technological world order. But this world order possesses no spiritual foundation and appears to the ancient civilizations of the East and the new peoples of the developing world as a vast organization of material power which has been created to serve the selfish greed of Western man.

Even today after the secularization of the modern state and modern culture our society remains in a certain sense Christian.

Western culture has become so deeply secularized that it no longer recognizes any common system of spiritual values, while its philosophers have tended to isolate the moral concept from its cultural context and have attempted to create an abstract subjective system of pure ethics. If this were all, we should be forced to conclude that modern Western society does not possess a civilization, but only a technological order resting on a moral vacuum. But it is still possible to restore moral order by a return to the spiritual principles on which our Christian civilization was based.

Modern society, like all societies, needs some higher spiritual principle of coordination to overcome the conflicts between power and morality, appetite and reason, technology and humanity, self- interest and the common good.

The technological order which today threatens spiritual freedom and even human existence by the unlimited powers which it puts at the service of individual self-interest and the mass cult of power loses all its terrors as soon as it is subordinated to a higher principle.

Spiritual individualism is incapable of standing out against the collectivism and standardisation of modern life.

Christianity still exists as a living theological and spiritual tradition, but it has been gradually deprived of intellectual and social influence on modern culture. Yet it has something to offer of which modern technological society is in desperate need—namely, a principle of spiritual coordination and a principle of unity—and it is in the field of education that this need and its solution can be brought together.

Without a spiritual order the cosmopolitanism of modern culture does not make for peace; it merely increases the opportunities for strife. It destroys all this is best and most distinctive in local and national cultures, while leaving the instincts of national and racial hostility to develop unchecked.

It cannot be claimed that the Catholic university has solved the problem of modern higher education or that it stands out as a brilliant exception from the educational chaos of the rest of the world.

Educational institutions and curricula are very resistant to change.

Behind the existing unity of Western culture we have the older unity of Christian culture which is the historic basis of our civilization.

We should work for a real restoration of Christian culture rather than merely to fight a defensive action in a purely conservative spirit.

Modern culture is not pluralistic in character, as some social scientists have assumed; on the contrary, it is more unitary, more uniform and more highly centralized and organized than any culture that the world has ever known.

In the face of a uniform culture it is exceedingly difficult for any particular religion like Catholicism to stand out against the pervasive and overwhelming pressure of the “common way of life.” This is why the problem of Christian culture is of such paramount importance, for unless Christians are able to defend their cultural traditions they will not be able to survive.

The modern state 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.

The uneducated man accepts the culture in which he lives as culture in the absolute sense. It needs a considerable amount of study and imagination to understand the difference of cultures and the existence and value of other ways of life which diverge from the dominant pattern.

When I speak of culture I am not thinking of the cultivation of the individual mind, which was the usual sense of the word in the past, but of a common social way of life, a way of life with a tradition which has embodied itself in institutions, social standards, and moral principles.

It has been on the plane of ideas that the process of the secularization of culture began, and it is only by a change of ideas that this process can be reversed.

The higher the culture, the more important are its intellectual and spiritual elements, so that the two uses of the word culture become almost indistinguishable.

The definition of culture as essentially a moral order is one which should prove equally acceptable to the social anthropologist, the historian and the theologian.

The complaint of the secularist spirit has long been that religious people would not think, that they made religion a matter of strong emotion and moral earnestness so that it generated heat and not light.

The social and intellectual inertia of Christians is a great obstacle to a restoration of Christian culture.

Individual freedom, political democracy and economic progress are regarded as ends in themselves which will provide their own solutions to the problems that they create.

In the last resort every civilization depends not on its material resources and its methods of production but on the spiritual vision of its greatest minds and on the way in which this experience is transmitted to the community by faith and tradition and education. Where unifying spiritual vision is lost the civilization decays.

The survival of a civilization depends on the continuity of its educational tradition. A common educational system creates a common world of thought with common intellectual values and a common inheritance of knowledge, which makes a society conscious of its identity and gives it a common memory of its past.

There are many Christians 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.

The instinct of social conformity is stronger than the instinct of humanitarianism. When the state decides that inhuman measures are required for the good of the nation, the individual accepts its decisions without criticism, and in fact without recognizing what the state is doing.

There is no reason to suppose that the ends of the collective will of society or the state will be more rational or more moral than those of the individual. On the contrary, the moral standards of states and governments, especially in times of war and revolution, are usually very much lower than those of the individual. A state which deliberately suppresses moral criticism and makes the will to power its only end is capable of any iniquity.

Every civilization from the beginning of history down to modern times has accepted the existence of a transcendent spiritual order and has regarded it as the ultimate source of moral values and of moral law.

All the great religions of the world agree in confessing this truth — that there is an eternal reality beyond the flux of temporal and natural things which is at once the ground of being and the basis of rationality.

The only way out of the impasse in which modern civilization finds itself is to return to the old spiritual foundations and restore the old alliance between religion and culture.

There is no reason to suppose that religion and science are simply alternatives to one another, although they are obviously distinct in their nature, their methods, and their aims. They are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary. It is possible that the more science a culture has, the more religion it needs.

So long as the Catholic Church is free to lead its own life and to show in its life and teaching the truth for which it stands, it is bound to make an impression on society, however secularized the culture of the latter has become.

If the gap between the Church and secular culture becomes so wide that there is no longer any means of communication or possibility of mutual understanding between them, then there is a danger that the reaction to the Church may be one of repulsion rather than attraction. And so it is not enough for Catholics to maintain a high standard of religious practice within the Catholic community; it is also the business of every Catholic, and especially of every educated Catholic, to build a bridge of understanding out into secular culture and to act as interpreters of the Christian faith to the world outside the Church.

Even a ghetto culture is preferable to no religious culture at all, but under modern conditions the ghetto solution is no longer really practical. We must make an effort to achieve an open Christian culture which is sufficiently conscious of the value of its own tradition to be able to meet secularism on an equal footing.

Any Catholic who is intellectually alive and is at the same time obviously convinced of the truth of his religion administers a shock to the preconceived ideas of the secular minded. He is not likely to convert them, but he shakes their confidence in the inevitability of the secularist outlook and in the stupidity of the religious view of life.

Historic events are not the work of rational calculation or even of human will. Under the surface of history there are superhuman or subhuman forces at work which drive men and nations before them like leaves before a gale.

Nietzsche was the prophet of the anti-liberal reaction. He expressed the will to power that inspired it, while at the same time he mercilessly exposed its cultural nihilism and its loss of spiritual values.

Although Catholicism recognizes the distinction and the autonomy of the natural and the supernatural orders, it can never acquiesce in their segregation. The spiritual and the eternal insert themselves into the world of sensible and temporal things, and there is not the smallest event in human life and social history but possesses an eternal and spiritual significance.

Human life, like animal life, depends on a balance of forces, and if the balance is upset by the removal of restraining factors, the process of readjustment is full of danger and difficulty.

Catholicism cannot live in an atmosphere of moral pragmatism and subjective idealism.

The attempt of the nineteenth century to prescribe spiritual ideals in literature and ethics, while refusing to admit the objective existence of a spiritual order, has ended in failure, and today we have to choose between the complete expulsion of the spiritual element from human life or its recognition as the very foundation of reality.

The Renaissance has its beginning in the self- discovery, the self-realization and the self-exaltation of Man. The men of the Renaissance turned away from the eternal and the absolute to the world of nature and human experience. But they were gradually led by an internal process of logic to criticise the principles of their own knowledge and to lose confidence in their own freedom. The self- affirmation of man gradually led to the denial of the spiritual foundations of his freedom and knowledge.

The Renaissance had its origin not only in the recovery of classical antiquity, but in the mystical humanism of St. Francis and Dante.

Although both rationalism and romanticism were in a sense the heirs of the Renaissance tradition, neither of them was the true representative of the earlier humanism. Rationalism had lost its spiritual inspiration and romanticism lacked its intellectual order and its sense of form.

For centuries Western civilization has received its impetus from the humanist tradition, and the dying-away of that tradition naturally involves the temporary cessation of cultural creativeness.

What is man’s essential religious need, judging by the experience of the past? There is an extraordinary degree of unaminity in the response. One answer is God, the supernatural, the transcendent; the other answer is deliverance, salvation, eternal life. And both these two elements are represented in some form or other in any given religion.

The mystic is a man who has transcended, at least momentarily, the natural limits of human knowledge.

Each of the great religious-philosophic traditions—Brahmanism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Platonism—ultimately transcends philosophy and culminates in mysticism. They are not satisfied with the demonstration of the Absolute; they demand the experience of the Absolute also.

A religion that remains on the rational level and denies the possibility of any real relation with a higher order of spiritual reality, fails in its most essential function, and ultimately, like Deism, ceases to be a religion at all.

Religion is not an affair of the emotions, but of the intelligence. Religious knowledge is the highest kind of knowledge, the end and coronation of the whole process of man’s intellectual development.

The whole tendency of Western thought since the Renaissance, and still more since the Enlightenment, has been to deny the existence of any real knowledge except that of rational demonstration founded upon sensible experience. Intuition, whether metaphysical or mystical, is regarded as an irrational emotional conviction, and religion is reduced to subjective feeling and moral activity.

Man cannot live by reason alone. His spiritual life, and even his physical instincts, are starved in the narrow and arid territory of purely rational consciousness. He is driven to take refuge in the non-rational, whether it be the irrational blend of spirituality and emotionalism that is termed romanticism, or, as is increasingly the case today, in the frankly sub-rational sphere of pure sensationalism and sexual impulse.

Mr. J. Middleton Murry is an adherent of the dogma of “emergence,” a worshipper of the God that we create as we go along. God is a useful fiction, a creature of the human mind, not the ultimate ground of reality.

Man cannot worship himself, nor can he adore a Time God that is the creation of his own mind. As soon as he recognizes its fictitious character such an idea loses all its religious power. And for the same reason every attempt to create a new religion on purely rational and human foundations is inevitably doomed to failure.

In the East human life is an object of compassion to the wise man, but it is also an object of scorn, “As the hog to the trough, goes the fool to the womb,” says the Buddhist verse; and the Hindu attitude, if less harsh, is not essentially different.

The sacred order that is the basis of Indian culture is no true spiritualisation of human life; it is merely the natural order seen through a veil of metaphysical idealism. It can incorporate the most barbaric and non-ethical elements equally with the most profound metaphysical truths; since in the presence of the absolute and the unconditioned all distinctions and degrees of value lose their validity.

The experience of India is sufficient to show that it is impossible to construct a dynamic religion on metaphysical principles alone, since pure intuition affords no real basis for social action.

The divorce of dogma from intelligence that was inaugurated by the Reformers consummates itself in the dissolution of dogma itself in the interest of that moral pragmatism which is the essence of modern Protestantism. Christianity, it is said, is not a creed but a life; its sole criterion is the moral and social activity that it generates. And thus religion loses all contact with absolute truth and becomes merely an emotional justification for a certain standard of behaviour.

Judaism is the least mystical and the least metaphysical of religions. It revealed God as the Creator, the Lawgiver and the Judge, and it was by obedience to His Law and by the ritual observances of sacrifice and ceremonial purity that man entered into relations with Him.

St. Augustine said that the Fourth Gospel is essentially the Gospel of contemplation, the gospel that declares the mysteries of the Divine Nature.

The historical and social elements form an integral part of the Christian tradition, and apart from them the mystical or metaphysical side of religion becomes sterile or distorted. The tendency of the Byzantine mind to concentrate itself on this aspect of Christianity did actually lead to a decline in moral energy and in the spiritual freedom and initiative of the Church, and Eastern Christianity has tended to become an absolute static religion of the Oriental type.

The conception of the Incarnation as the bridge between God and Man, the marriage of Heaven and Earth, the channel through which the material world is spiritualized and brought back to unity, distinguishes Christianity from all the other Oriental religions, and involves a completely new attitude to life.

The Industrial Revolution, which appears at first sight one of the most materialistic aspects of Western civilization, would have been impossible without the moral earnestness and sense of duty that were generated by the Puritan ideal—an ideal far removed from that of Catholic Christianity, but one that owed its existence to a one-sided and sectarian interpretation of the Christian tradition.

The enemies of the Church—the movements that rend and crucify her—are in a sense her own offspring and derive their dynamic force from her. Islam, the Protestant Reformation, liberalism, none of them would have existed apart from Christianity—they are abortive or partial manifestations of the spiritual power which Christianity has brought into history.

In history it is often the incredible that happens.

Sooner or later it is inevitable that humanity should turn once more in search of spiritual reality, and when once the tide begins to flow all the sand castles that we have built during the ebb will disappear.

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