Christopher Dawson.

The secularization of Christian culture

Catholic Insight resumes its historical series of 20th century Catholicism in English Canada which we started in December 1999 with "Henry Carr and Catholic Education in Canada." Subsequent articles covered "Religion and philosophy in Canada" (Jan/Feb 2000); "Maritain's Legacy in Canada" (March 2000); and the Mitred Warrior-Bishop Michael Fallon (April 2000).

At the same time we have been adding building blocks for the history of the post-Vatican-II years such as the three-part series on Social Teaching (J. Campbell, No. 1,2,3, 2000), or the articles on 'Abortion and the Supreme Court' covering some 20 years (Dooley et al., Nos. 7,8,9, 2000), or earlier articles on Contraception in Canada (Foy et al.) The history of abortion articles will soon appear in a small book entitled The banality of evil.

We resume our history series with the great British Catholic sociologist and historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), whose writings were much read in Catholic college circles around the middle of the century and deserve to be reread--or read for the first time--today.

Editor

Secularizing culture

This is what Dawson wrote in the Catholic weekly The Tablet, Sept. 23, 1950:

"Yet throughout this period (1900-1950) the secularization of English culture has proceeded almost without a check, so that our position today is no longer that of a Catholic minority in a Protestant society, but that of a religious minority in a secular or neo-pagan civilization. We have become so accustomed to this change that we are apt to forget its tremendous implications.

"During the last hundred years English Catholicism has developed under the protection of the Victorian compromise. We have accepted the Victorian principles of individual freedom, religious toleration and the limited character of the State as elementary conditions of existence which hardly needed to be defended. But, in proportion as civilization becomes secularized, all these principles and rights lose their moral validity. Secular civilization breeds secular ideologies, and these secular ideologies find their political expression in totalitarian States."

One may compare this to Pope John Paul II, who 45 years later in his 1995 encyclical The Gospel of Life, wrote that relativism and the denial of truth will undermine democracy and lead to totalitarianism unless we overcome this denial with a new vision.

The secularization of Catholic culture in Canada during the last four decades has often been highlighted in the pages of Catholic Insight. The two editorials on secularism and hedonism (No. 2, No. 4, 1999), and the articles on the secularization of those Catholic institutions built up during the last two hundred years to preserve the Catholic faith and the Catholic way of life, come to mind. I'm thinking of those articles on the Catholic parishes, schools, hospitals, colleges and episcopal bureaucracies. All these institutions were founded to build up a Catholic culture or sub-culture in Canada which would protect and nourish the Catholic family in a largely Protestant world, itself undergoing a rapid process of secularization in the direction of a "hedonistic mass civilization," to use Christopher Dawson's expression.

No doubt the pressure on Canadian Catholics to conform to the potent mixture of materialism, hedonism and idealism of this mass civilization during the thirties, forties and fifties was tremendous and resulted in what sociologists call the problem of 'leakage'. What happened in the sixties to turn this leakage into a flood during the following decades?

The answer seems to be that a wave of social idealism swept over the Catholic Church after Vatican II and the Catholic community became divided between the idealists and the traditionalists, which eventually weakened its resistance to the pressure to conform to the secular way of life in its Canadian form. It is the old story of divide and conquer.

When Catholicism becomes identified with social idealism in its various forms--humanitarianism, nationalism, socialism, feminism--its vision of reality is transformed and original sin, or more accurately, the Fall, becomes identified with some guilty class, nation, race, gender or other social unit. If only we could get rid of capitalists, sexists, racists, etc., "everything in the garden would be lovely."

Bishop Alexander Carter 

We have a vivid record of this idealistic vision in the chapter on 'The Second Vatican Council' in Bishop Alex Carter's A Canadian Bishop's Memoirs (1994), where he describes his "traumatic experience":

I have aged, if not grown wise, in the service of the Church and I deeply believe that I only really learned the true and full nature of that Church during the dramatic, exciting and challenging years between 1962 and 1965. Those were the years--the time of Vatican II--during which I lived a traumatic experience. It involved joy, fear, wonderment, anxiety and Heaven knows how many other emotions that people experience when they are challenged by the Spirit to accept a conversion that radically changes their point of view on matters that substantially influence their whole life.

In the two remaining chapters the bishop describes the way in which this vision inspired him to interpret and implement the "Spirit of Vatican II." In fact the last chapter is entitled "Living the Vision." To Bishop Carter and other bishops like him, the Council was not just another among the many ecumenical councils in the history of Christian culture. It was a new Sinai or a new Pentecost, somewhat like what the French Revolution was to the disciples of Rousseau in the first delirious years. And as the revolution meant the birth of a new humanity, so the Second Vatican Council meant the birth of a new Church, much more spiritual than the old "triumphalist", "patriarchal" one.

The two kingdoms

Unfortunately, the idealistic vision ignores the dualism of the two Kingdoms which is so important in the Catholic tradition. One would never suspect from reading Bishop Carter's Memoirs that there is a holocaust taking place in Canada and the Western world, no mention of the culture of death connected with the social acceptance of the promiscuous lifestyle, no awareness of the paranoia of the birth controllers and the population planners as one of the recurrent epidemics of ideological insanity which have plagued the secularized culture of the West in the 20th century.

This schism in the Canadian Catholic Church is analyzed to a greater or lesser degree in Father Alphonse de Valk's book Morality and Law in Canadian Politics (1974), chapters 8 and 10; in Anne Roche Muggeridge, The Desolate City: The Catholic Church in Ruins (1986); [1] in Michael W. Cuneo, Catholics Against the Church (1989); and in the writings of Msgr. Vincent Foy.

Prime Minister Trudeau, a master at speaking the language of idealism, had visions of the "Just Society" and brought in his ideological Charter of Rights and Freedoms to implement it, while at the same time warning Christians not to "impose" their morality on the rest of the population. In actual fact, he gave free rein to the sub-rational forces in Canadian culture and allowed the whole tribe of radical feminists, birth controllers, population planners, sex educators and sexologists, abortionists, euthanizers and pornographers--all the apostles of the culture of death--to "impose" their morality of hedonism on Christians and non-Christians alike. There is no mention of the culture of death connected with the promiscuous lifestyle, no mention of the ideological insanity surrounding the "Population Explosion." The sixties was a watershed in the secularization of Western culture, Canada included.

When we look back, Dawson's warnings to his fellow British Catholics about the vanishing protection of the "Victorian compromise" and the tremendous implications of a civilization going down the road toward total secularization seem prophetic. For in 1967, England was the second country in the Western world to dehumanize the unborn and launch the Silent Holocaust on them and the handicapped newly born. [2] Canada followed suit two years later. "Secular civilization breeds secular ideologies." These, in turn, breed secular absolutes and secular holocausts.

From the middle of the 19th century to the 1960s, Canadian and American Catholics, like their co-religionists in England, were able to build up their Catholic institutions under the protection of the "Victorian compromise"--the liberal humanitarian culture which emerged in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). But already by the 1930s Dawson saw it as only a 'halfway house', between the Christianity of the 19th century and the new secularized mass civilization of the 20th. In order to understand what Dawson meant by this, we have to examine his historical-sociological analysis of what he termed the Sixth Period of Christian Culture--"Secularized Christendom and the Age of Revolution."

Dawson's analysis of this sixth period, which he placed from the 18th century "Enlightenment" to the 1950s, comprised four general themes:

- The spiritual vacuum

- The Leviathan state

- The age of Frankenstein

- State control of the mind

The spiritual vacuum

The first is best labelled The spiritual vacuum and the search for a holy community. The roots of this vacuum and this search go back to the 18th century. Dawson devoted a number of essays to the secular prophets who tried to fill this vacuum with their visions of an ideal spiritual community.

Thus we have Jean Jacques Rousseau and the radical (Jacobin) version of the holy community as a solution to the spiritual vacuum among the aristocrats of 18th-century France. Then in Germany, Hegel presents the "State" as a holy community, "the Divine idea on Earth", for the aristocratic society of Prussia in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Then there is the atheist Thomas Paine, an English disciple of Rousseau, who agitates among the American elite of the 18th century, followed by John Dewey as the prophet of the religion of Democracy in the third and fourth periods of American culture (1865-1950). Finally, we have Marx and Lenin as prophets of the Messianic role of the proletariat in 19th century Europe and the 20th- century Soviet Union.

Seen from this angle, Trudeau in Canada and others elsewhere resemble Lenin, but they replace the Dictatorship of the Proletariat with the "Dictatorship of the Feminists" and the sisterhood of women as "a holy community" in the secularized culture of Canada since the early sixties.

Dawson's earliest eloquent expression of this theme occurs in the conclusion to his 1924 article "Religion and the Life of Civilization":

"Hence the rise of a new type of social unrest. Political disturbances are as old as human nature; in every age misgovernment and oppression have been met by violence and disorder, but it is a new thing, and perhaps a phenomenon peculiar to our modern Western civilization, that men should work and think and agitate for the complete remodelling of society according to some ideal of social perfection. It belongs to the order of religion, rather than to that of politics, as politics were formerly understood. It finds its only parallel in the past in movements of the most extreme religious type, like the Anabaptists in 16th-century Germany, and the Levellers and Fifth-Monarchy Men of Puritan England.

"And when we study the lives of the founders of modern Socialism, the great Anarchists and even some of the apostles of nationalist Liberalism like Mazzini, we feel at once that we are in the presence of religious leaders, whether prophets or heresiarchs, saints or fanatics. Behind the hard rational surface of Karl Marx's materialist and socialist interpretation of history, there burns the flame of an apocalyptic vision. For what was the social revolution in which he puts his hope but a nineteenth-century version of the Day of the Lord, in which the rich and powerful of the earth should be consumed, and the princes of the Gentiles brought low, and the poor and disinherited should reign in a regenerated universe?"

This theme was to be repeated in the thirties, forties, and fifties. Perhaps the conclusion to chapter three in Religion and the Modern State (1935) summed it up best:

"In the past, Western society could dispense with an official state-philosophy such as we find in Russia today, because European civilization and the European state equally possessed a religious foundation and based their social and political life on religious sanctions. A state which possesses an established church obviously does not have to create its own religious ideals or its own moral standards, for these things are already given in the church. But the secularization of Western society brought with it not only a loss of religious unity and religious faith, but also the disappearance of the spiritual basis for social and political life. Hence, the growing sense of spiritual unrest and maladjustment that accompanied the progress of modern civilization."

The modern State is far richer and more powerful than any community of the past, but it is disturbed by an obscure sense of collective guilt which expresses itself in revolutionary moments and in the cravings of social idealism for some political or economic panacea which will automatically produce a perfect society.

"Thus the political problems of the modern world are in the last resort religious. The rise of the new State may be regarded as the culmination of the process of secularization in Western history and the unification of our culture on a purely materialistic basis. But on the other hand it may equally be regarded as the result of a spiritual reaction against the materialism of nineteenth century bourgeois society; as an attempt to find some substitute for the lost religious foundations of society and to replace the utilitarian individualism of the liberal-capitalist State by a new spiritual community (42-44).

"Thus the present secularized culture of liberal capitalism is essentially an unstable one and is at the end of a long line of unstable secularized cultures, as the history of these secular prophets and their search for an ideal spiritual community testifies. It is important to keep this in mind since this type of secularized culture has been presented as the normal way of life in Canada and the Western world, and idealized through a number of slogans such as the "free society", the "open society", the "democratic way of life," the "American way of life," and the "Just Society."

The Leviathan state

The second important theme can be described as The new Leviathan and the centralization of power in modern mass civilization.

Dawson was conscious of the centralization of power in modern civilization from the beginning of his writing career. In The Passing of Industrialism, written during the First World War and published in 1920, he writes of the last generation having witnessed the growth of bureaucracy and the extension of government control in all departments of life, and of the centralized state and centralized industry tending to absorb all local life into the "great urban conglomerations."

It is significant, I think, that the title of the essay of 1930 in which Dawson underlines the true nature of modern civilization is not "The Rise of Liberal Democracy", or "Great Britain and the Parliamentary Tradition", but "The New Leviathan." And it was a French historian whom he singled out for special praise:

"The great fact of the twentieth century is the definite emergence of a new type of civilization different from anything that the world has hitherto known. All through the nineteenth century the new forces which were to transform human life were already at work, but their real tendency was to a great extent veiled by current modes of thought and preconceived ideas which had their origin in political and philosophical doctrines. The mind of the nineteenth century was dominated by ideals of Liberalism and Nationalism, and the actual process of social and economic change was interpreted in terms of these doctrines. In reality, however, the forces that were at work were only partially amenable to such theories; in many respects they were actually moving in a contrary direction.

"Thus, while the peoples of Europe were consciously accentuating their national idiosyncrasies and their political independence, they were at the same time becoming more and more alike in their customs, their ideas, and their whole apparatus of material culture. At the same time, they were losing their economic self-sufficiency and being drawn into the meshes of the supernational industrial and commercial system, which transcends political frontiers and renders each people dependent on the rest for the very necessities of material existence.

"In the same way, while Liberalism was destroying the old restrictions which interfered with the liberty of the individual and was basing political life on free representative institutions, the individual was losing all control over the circumstances of his daily life and becoming, more than ever before, the servant of impersonal economic forces, which absorbed all his time and energies. Human life was becoming mechanized, and man was losing his spontaneity under the vast pressure of the new material organization.

"The new civilization is not the civilization which the nineteenth century believed that it was creating. It is a new social organism which cannot be understood unless we set aside all preconceived ideas and study it with strict scientific impartiality. This is what M. Lucien Romier has attempted to do in the series of works which he has devoted to The Explanation of our Times, and he has succeeded better perhaps than any of the multitude of writers on the subject, because he combines in such a remarkable way the actuality of the journalist and the man of affairs with the sympathetic imagination of a true historian" (The Dublin Review, July 1930, 88-89).

In the second and third paragraphs of the above quotation, Dawson neatly summarizes Romier's points about a mass civilization, which was certainly not the picture I had formed from reading Canadian historians such as Creighton and Lower and McInnis in the fifties. For what were their histories of Canada but an interpretation of the movement of social and economic change in terms of the doctrines of Liberalism and Nationalism? The only Canadian scholars who referred to this 'mass civilization' were Harold Innis and Frank Underhill, and neither of them wrote national histories of Canada, so that the average student taking a survey course was probably unaware of their discussion of this theme.

Dawson's point about the centralization of power and the totalitarian element in the mass civilization of the West from the sociological point of view is also one that he repeated in the four decades of his writing career. There were good reasons why he did this. In the thirties, the liberal democracies in the English-speaking world were so intent on denouncing Fascism and showing the contrast and opposition between democracy and dictatorship that they tended to idealize the former and ignore the totalitarian tendencies in their own civilization. In a passage often quoted by reviewers of Religion and the Modern State (1935), Dawson underlined the fact that

"It is easy for us to denounce the unchristian behaviour of the Nazis, because we have no temptation to behave as they do. Nobody supposes that the Y.M.C.A. or Toc H are likely to start hunting down pacifists or trying to beat up Lord Melchett or Mr. Lansbury. Our temptations are more subtle, but no less real. It may be harder to resist a Totalitarian State which relies on free milk and birth control clinics than one which relies on castor oil and concentration camps. The latter offends all our humanitarian instincts and traditions, the former appeals to those very instincts and allies itself with the movement for social reform which is so intimately connected with modern English religion" (108).

After World War II, when the Allies were again preparing to make the post-war world "safe for democracy," Dawson wrote an article for the British Jesuit periodical The Month, (Jan. 1947), in which one can detect an almost apocalyptic impatience with the spiritual blindness of the Western democracies with regard to the centralization of power.

"The nightmares of the hive--the insect society--or Leviathan--the monstrous social organism--nightmares which have so long haunted the imagination of men of letters--seem to be passing from the sphere of fantasy to the world of everyday experience. Thanks to science, there is no longer any limit to the amount of power which the state can exercise. A technocratic system which operates through scientific planning, economic control and psychological conditioning is no longer a political absolutism of the traditional kind: it is a unitary mass organism in which the individual personality is absorbed and obliterated or transformed.

"All this may seem a nightmare, but it is no more a nightmare than the atomic bomb, which is the arch-achievement of a technocratic civilization. And it is a nightmare which is just around the corner--there is no need to read Koestler's novel (Darkness at Noon) to see that; we can read it in the daily papers of the world. "Unfortunately the trend in this direction comes not only from the Fascists and the Communists who have inherited the traditions of the autocratic police state and are going into it with their eyes open. It also comes from the mass civilization of the Western democracies which are going into it with their eyes shut.

"As Professor Karl Mannheim pointed out years ago in Man and Society, there is a growing similarity between the liberal democracies and the totalitarian states. And this is not only due to economic and social planning. It is due even more to the mechanization of social and economic life which has developed furthest in the United States where private capitalism and free enterprise still maintain themselves.

"For in the US no less than in the USSR, we are conscious of the victory of the mass over the individual. Moreover, we see in America how material prosperity and technical efficiency produce social conformity, so that without any intervention on the part of the state, men of their own accord tend to think the same and look the same and behave in the same way. None of this is peculiar to the United States. It is only that in America the standard of material prosperity is higher and the counter-balancing forces of authority and tradition are weaker. And consequently the US has become the pioneer of a popular hedonistic mass civilization of communism" (44-45).

The age of Frankenstein

The third theme might be aptly called "The Age of and the epidemics of ideological insanity." Those who have read Dawson's The Crisis of Western Education (1961) might remember the opening paragraph of the last chapter, "Western Man and the Technological Order'", in which Dawson asserts that ours is the Age of Frankenstein.

Frankenstein represents this age even more truly than Faust represented the age of Goethe and the Romantics:

"Western man has created the technological order, but he has not discovered how to control it. It is beginning to control him, and if it does, there seems no way of preventing it from destroying him" (p.189).

Actually this was not the first time that Dawson used this metaphor. In the series of talks he delivered on the BBC, later published as The modern dilemma (1932), it occurs in the second talk, "The Forces of Change," where he traces its roots to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

"And in our case there is a real danger that the forces of change may be too much for us, and that our civilization may fail to adapt itself to the new conditions....And so we get the hideous and unhealthy towns of the industrial era, the wholesale destruction of natural resources and the defacement of the countryside. Modern man suddenly gained power and wealth such as his predecessor hardly dreamed of, and instead of using it to create Utopia, he built a slum and a factory and a cinema and a giant hotel.

"The consequence of this state of things is that the machinery of modern civilization has got out of control and threatens to destroy its makers. It is like Mrs. Shelley's story of the inventor who devoted his life to making an artificial man, and the result was a monster who pursued its creator with unrelenting hatred until it had killed him, because he had made it ugly, unhappy and without a soul. In the same way our mechanical civilization is a danger to us because it lacks a soul" (37-8)

Now a civilization that lacks a soul is one in which the consciousness of transcendence has become weakened and obscured--it has lost the power of spiritual vision. One of the most forceful expressions of this truth is in Dawson's review of Arthur Koestler's book The Yogi and the Commissar just after the Second World War had ended.

"The denial of God by the intelligentsia was the turning point in Western civilization. From that point the road has led to the concentration camps and slaughter houses of the totalitarian state. For it is obvious that any atheistic socialism, whether of the left or the right, can only think in terms of the whole and not of the individual, and it will seem as reasonable and just for it to liquidate a class or exterminate a few million of social or racial undesirables as it is for a surgeon to conduct a major operation for the health of the organism as a whole. The revolutionary realist has an unanswerable case against the revolutionary idealist when he accuses the latter of willing the end and refusing the means on sentimental grounds, and it is as difficult for the Christian to judge between them as it was for Alice to make up her mind between the attitude of the Walrus and that of the Carpenter towards the oysters" (Blackfriars, October, 1945, 368-369).

In his review of Koestler, Dawson admits that the humanitarianism of the modern intelligentsia cannot be written off as a "mere matter of sentiment." It was based on deep and sincere convictions, close to the nature of a religious faith, "and there are few moments in history that have had so great an effect on human life." Nevertheless, he argues it belongs to an age of transition between Christian and secular culture, and he points out that its chief successes were the result of a working coalition with the forces of nature and of organized Christianity, such as in the case of the abolition of slavery, or the factory acts, or the movements against the exploitation of uncivilized people:

"Where humanitarianism is left to its own resources in a purely secular environment it tends to wither away like political idealism."

Anyone who has seen the videos or read the literature on the "Silent Holocaust"--especially Professor William Brennan's book The Abortion Holocaust, today's final solution (1983)--must admit that the humanitarian tradition has indeed 'withered away'. Dawson in his own lifetime witnessed that in the war of ideologies it was the crudest and most simplified that won:

"...we have seen spectacular examples of this. We have seen great and highly civilized countries becoming infected with epidemics of ideological insanity, and whole populations being destroyed for the sake of some irrational slogan" (The Revolt of Asia, 1957, 6).

As I have pointed out, we are not immune in Canada to these epidemics of ideological insanity; in fact, we were one of the first countries to become infected by the latest fashionable one. And we also have institutionalized the systematic, bureaucratic destruction of whole populations for the sake of some irrational slogan--the slogan of "choice". How often among our spiritual leaders do we hear a prophetic voice speaking out about the Canadian Holocaust?

State control of the mind

The fourth and final element in Dawson's analysis of the period of secularized Christendom can be summed up as The age of universal education and the state control of the human mind and soul.

Now as we have seen, Dawson was aware that the power to control the whole person was also happening through other channels of modern civilization. There is a striking passage in Beyond Politics (1939) with its description of our

"hedonistic mass civilization of the cinema, the picture paper, and the dance hall, where the individual, the family and the nation dissolve into a human herd without personality, or traditions or beliefs" (pp. 78- 79).

Nevertheless, as a historian he was aware that the secularization of Western culture since the 18th century went hand in hand with the secularization of modem education, and this trend continued into the 20th century with the immense growth of universal education and the secular absolutes that went with it. It is true that Catholics were allowed to build their own systems of education from the grade school to college, but Dawson perceived that they were not immune from the pervasive influence of secularism in education, which shows itself in two opposite ways:

"Insofar as Catholics preserve their own schools and universities by great efforts and sacrifices, they are forced to devote so much energy to the mere material or technical work of keeping the system going, that the quality of their teaching suffers. They become more concerned with the utilitarian need for practical results, as measured by the competitive standards set by the state or the secular educational system, than with the essential problem of the transmission of Catholic culture. The Crisis of Western Education (1961, pp. 110-111).

In another chapter he referred to this as an "alternative system of secular education under a denominational label:

"The strength and pervasiveness of secular culture forces Christians, Catholic as well as Protestant, to accept the sectarian solution, which acquiesces in the secularization of culture and social life and strives in compensation to maintain a strict standard of religious observance inside the closed doors of the conventicle and the home" (p. 111).

But as we have seen there is no longer any room for a ghetto in the modern secular state. Both its "tolerance and its intolerance" are hostile to the existence of any such closed worlds:

"Under modern conditions, the sectarian solution merely means that the religious minority abdicates its claim to influence the culture of the community. And 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" (111- 112).

Next article

I will discuss Dawson's solution to this dire situation in my next article. I would like to conclude on the ominous note that the above four themes point to the tremendous need for a great spiritual change in modern secular culture. Either it must desecularize itself or perish. It is as simple and shocking as that. And for this to happen, Catholics must resist the temptation to acquiesce in the secularization of modern culture, and do all that is in their power to convert it.

Footnotes:

(1.) See the index under: (i) Baum, G.; Carter, A. & G.E.; De Roo, R.; Leger, P.E.; (ii) Canadian Conference of Bishops; Quebec, Catholic Church in; St. Augustine's Seminary; St. Michael's College; Toronto School of Theology; Winnipeg Statement; (iii) Appendix: Twelve Resolutions of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Role of Women.

(2.) Sweden was the first country in the West to legalize abortion in 1935. The Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union began the assault in 1921.

Note: All quotations from Christopher Dawson are with the permission of Christina Scott, literary executor of the estate of Christopher Dawson.

Edward King is a retired history teacher. He publishes a Newsletter from The Christopher Dawson Centre of Christian Culture, 27 Spearman Lane, Kanata, ON, K2L 1Y6. Tel: [phone].

Note: On Saturday, March 10, 2001, Professor David Williams, holder of the new Chair of Catholic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, will speak at the University of Ottawa on "The future of Catholic culture."