Can the Descent of Modern Society Reverse?

To act as though man made history by his own purposes and decisions is a kind of spiritual blindness which bears within it its own downfall.

[xxxix] And it is precisely this spiritual blindness which is characteristic of modern civilization, a kind of hubris which leads to the frustration of social idealism and society’s turning away from those principles it professes to be following, in order to promote their opposite. Has there ever been a society which set a higher store on the ideals of humanitarianism than our own, and has there ever been one which, at the same time, allowed for the killing off of such countless millions of unborn infants? And has there ever been a culture which so repeatedly emphasized its concerns for the rights of man, and at the same time meekly acquiesced in the obliteration of those rights by totalitarian regimes in all parts of the world?

Written thirty-five years ago, in the midst of World War II, the following judgment of Christopher Dawson has a direct relationship to the condition in which the whole of the modern world finds itself today:

But this is just the truth which the modern world has denied. It has put its trust in the “arm of flesh”; it has believed the word of man rather than the Word of God. It has reversed the whole hierarchy of spiritual values so that our civilization has been turned backwards and upside down, with its face toward darkness and nonentity and its back to the sun of truth and the source of being. For a short time—whether we reckon it in decades or centuries is of small importance—it remained precariously skating on the thin ice of rationalism and secular humanism. Now the ice has broken and we are being carried down the flood, though we may delude ourselves that the forces that have been released are of our own creation and serve our will to power. 

Is it possible to reverse this process? No human power can stop this progress to the abyss. It can only come about by a profound movement of change or conversion which brings the human spirit once more into vital relation with the spirit of God. (The Judgment of the Nations [London: Sheed and Ward, 1942], 157)

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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxviii–xxxix.

When Society Loses Its Higher Spiritual Ordering

Our own civilization, as Dawson points out, is one which has increasingly ignored the significance of the religious element, whether through prophecy or through the consecration of its social institutions to religious ends. The result is a widespread sense of spiritual dissatisfaction, which leads participants in the culture to look upon it with distrust and hostility. This not only withdraws from society the psychological support which it needs, but also, it leaves society vulnerable to movements of violence against its social structure and the values it embodies. “When the prophets are silent and society no longer possesses any channel of communication with the divine world, the way to the lower depths is still open and man’s frustrated spiritual powers will find their outlet in the unlimited will to power and destruction” (Religion and Culture [London: Sheed & Ward, 1948], 83).

[…] [xxxvii] But while society needs religion for its survival, it cannot return to religious belief simply by an act of the will, as a means of recovering its spiritual roots. This arises from the very nature of religion, from the fact that there is a basic difference between the motivations of religious feeling and those of political purpose. “It is useless to judge a religion from the point of view of the politician or the social reformer. We shall never create a living religion merely as a means to an end, a way out of our practical difficulties. For the religious view of life is opposite of the utilitarian. It regards the world and human life sub specie aeternitatis. It is only by accepting the religious point of view, by regarding religion as an end in itself and not as a means to something else, that we can discuss religious problems profitably” (Christianity and the New Age [London: Sheed & Ward, 1931], 172).

Now this conception of religion is so opposed to the modern attitude that it is difficult for modern man to accept it or appreciate its force. He is always asking whether religion serves this or that purpose, has this effect or that on the social order or on human behavior, as a way of deciding whether its existence is justified. It is man’s will rather than God’s which is taken as a standard, man’s conception of human welfare, not life seen in the light of eternity, which forms the basis for judgments concerning the significance of religion.

Yet this is discernment only on a superficial level; and even history itself testifies how limited and earthbound such ideas of human welfare and human destiny turn out to be. There is, as Dawson points out, an unpredictable character to events and outcomes in history which goes quite counter to rational calculations and makes the standards of a purely human judgment strikingly inadequate. “The real meaning of history is something entirely different from that which the human actors in the historical drama themselves believe or intend” (Religion and the Modern State [London: Sheed & Ward, 1935], 81). As an example of this, Dawson cites the contrast between the expectations of the Liberals concerning the purposes of the French Revolution and the harsh realities of the Revolution itself.

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Source: John J. Mulloy, “Preface to the 1978 Edition”, in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxxvi.

Prophets and Mystics Revitalize a Culture’s Religion

In every religion the religious aim of a culture is determined by the mission and the inspiration of its prophets and by the vision and spiritual experience of its mystics. Where these vital organs fail, religion becomes secularized and is absorbed in the cultural tradition to a point at which it becomes identified with it, until it finally becomes nothing more than a form of social activity….

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Source; Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (London: Sheed & Ward, 1948), 81–82.

The Cultural Effects of Contrasting Visions of the World

The experience of Mohammed in the cave of Mount Hira, when he saw human life as transitory as the beat of a gnat’s wing in comparison with the splendor and power of the Divine Unity, has shaped the existence of a great part of the human race ever since. For a people which has heard thrice a day for a thousand years the voice of the muezzin proclaiming the unity of God cannot live the same life or see with the same eyes as the Hindu who worships the life of nature in its countless forms, and sees the external world as the manifestation of the interplay of cosmic sexual forces.

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Source: Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion (London: Sheed & Ward, 1929), 76–77.

The Vitality of a Society is Found in Its Spiritual Roots

The central conviction which has dominated my mind ever since I began to write is the conviction that the society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally. Consequently the problem of social survival is not only a political or economic one; it is above all things religious, since it is in religion that the ultimate spiritual roots both of society and the individual are to be found.

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Source: Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933), vi.

The Essence of History is Tradition

Hence the essence of history is not to be found in facts but in traditions. The pure fact is not as such historical. It only becomes [286] historical when it can be brought into relation with a social tradition so that it is seen as part of an organic whole. A visitor from another planet who witnessed the Battle of Hastings would possess far greater knowledge of the facts than any modern historian, yet this knowledge would not be historical for lack of any tradition to which it could be related; whereas the child who says “William the Conqueror 1066” has already made his atom of knowledge an historical fact by relating it to a national tradition and placing it in the time-series of Christian culture.

Wherever a social tradition exists, however small and unimportant may be the society which is its vehicle, the possibility of history exists. […] [287]

Yet even the religion that denies the significance of history is itself a part of history and it can only survive in so far as it embodies itself in a social tradition and thus “makes history.”

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Source: Christopher Dawson, “The Kingdom of God and History,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 285–287. Originally published in The Kingdom of God and History, ed. H. G. Woods et al., vol. 3 of Official Oxford Conference Books (New York: Willett, Clark & Company, 1938).

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The fact does not tell the story; the story, as it were, tells the fact. It is the latter that gives pattern and meaning; it is the former that lacks meaning of its own. Moreover to arrange such disordered material, to give it narrative shape, is not to diminish historical particularity but to acknowledge it. To see meaning beyond the local is to see it in the local. After all, we grasp our truths in the solid, the tactile, the here-and-now. We exercise a faculty of imagination without which historical insight is impossible. […] In the parochial we [xxvi] glimpse the perennial. In time we grasp Time’s end, its very purpose and meaning.

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Source: Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxv–xxvi.

Culture Is Incarnational

Rationalists, [Dawson] realized, misunderstood religion precisely because they misunderstood culture as well. Indeed they misunderstood both for the same reason: their thin and etiolated behaviorism denied the possibility of a grander vision of man. Allowing religion no other purpose than the [xxiii] sanctification of social or private compulsions, they closed off an entire realm of man’s being. This represented, of course, the collapse of the very empiricism they claimed to uphold. A conclusion was contrived, then evidence adduced to support it: hardly a triumph of the investigative arts. Yet the circularity should not surprise us. With their functionalist view of culture and religion no other conclusion was available to them.

Dawson’s recognition of culture as a bearer of truth was the insight of an anthropologist but also, in a more profound way, that of a Christian. His understanding of man in society was, in the deepest sense, incarnational. […] Man grasps the divine in diverse, sometimes prosaic, ways. His spiritual insights come mediated through the materiality of the everyday. He understands the blessedness of the ordinary: the common meal, the shared sorrow, the unburdened heart. Slowly, too, he begins to understand the truth beyond these smaller moments: that the God who enters human history reveals Himself in living cultures, authentic communities. His face shines in material and sacramental ways, evident to those with eyes to see. This is not to say that culture itself is religion. Nor is it to say that one culture is much the same as another. Least of all is it to propose that human culture contains the entirety of the divine revelation. It is, however, to acknowledge that culture matters more profoundly than even cultural historians realize.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxii–xxiii.

A Definition of Real Religion

Real religion, Dawson argued, must “embody itself in concrete forms appropriate to the national character and the cultural tradition” (Dynamics of World History, 88) of a people. […] A religion is real precisely to the extent that it integrates, and is integral to, the spiritual and physical lives of its adherents.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xxi.

The Religion of Enlightenment Utopianism

Late-eighteenth [xxi] and nineteenth-century utopianism was more absurd than most. But wherein lay the absurdity? Not so much in the ignorance of human history as in its faux religiosity. The great abstractions—Liberity, Equality, Fraternity; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—always came in threes. They were secular trinities amply supplied with creeds, priests, keepers of orthodoxy, heresy-hunters, the fervent faithful. All they lacked was self-knowledge, awareness of themselves as profane theologies. Indeed, nowhere was this more apparent than in their understanding of religion itself. Philosophes fashioned a “purely rational philosophy of religion based on the abstract generalities . . . common to all forms of religion. For deism is nothing but the ghost of religion which haunts the grave of dead faith and lost hope” (Dynamics of World History, 88). It never occurred to the builders of the new society hat the religion they concocted—of society itself—was not enough. Such things cannot be concocted anyway, put together as from some recipe book of socially useful devotion. Real religion, Dawson argued, must “embody itself in concrete forms appropriate to the national character and the cultural tradition” (88) of a people. The late-eighteenth-century version was manifestly ersatz.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xx–xxi.

When Idea Becomes Ideology

But patterns of thought, and patterns within thought, are also organic. If civilizations grow and decay, the same might be said of philosophical systems. They become rigid, hard and unyielding, forgetful of their first impulses. A theory becomes a Truth; an idea becomes an Ideology. […] Consider Dawson’s account (in “Progress and Decay in Ancient and Modern Civilization”) of the revolutionaries and reformers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All of them believed in “the coming reign of the great abstractions—Humanity, Liberty, and Progress” (57). The phrase is pure Dawson, capturing at once the naïveté and dogmatism of the revolutionary generation. Promoters of enlightenment never understood that worship of rationality was itself irrational; that systematic and compulsory optimism was a guarantee of pessimism and gloom. They never understood that their contempt for history was itself historically rooted, the product of a particular time and place. The slow, vegetable growth of human communities meant nothing to them. All that mattered was mechanics. A new society, precise as a piece of clockwork, promised the happiness to which all men were entitled.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xx.

Secularism Destroys True Individuality

It would be hard to offer a better description of secularism than “religious emotion divorced from religious belief.” Nor are we likely to find a more accurate account of the spiritual vanity characteristic of the contemporary world. There is, perhaps, only one serious difference between Dawson’s day and our own. When he wrote, half a century ago, he complained of a secularism that was essentially collective. Democracy, nationalism and socialism are movements larger than the individual. This is their point. Nowadays, the secular mind fixates on the purely personal, shrinking from the social. Its preoccupations are curiously private: the cult of the body, authenticity, sexual license, the New Age in all its mystic vapidity. Secularism has become the numinosity of the narcissist. Postmodern man elevates a monstrance and sees at its center a mirror.

There is an obvious irony here. This self-worship is ignorant of the sources of the self. It prizes a rootless individualism, undifferentiated from place to place. In the name of local truths—my right, my body, my opinion—it banishes localism, replacing it with compulsory cosmopolitanism, the standard self-absorptions of Everyman. In the name of distinctive identity it produces identical “individuals.” Yet it is in the local and regional where a person is formed and made. Dawson, the most urbane of thinkers, was unsettled by this derogation of the provincial and the parochial. He knew that cosmopolitanism—the same citified culture the world over—produced homogenous [sic] [xx] cities, homogenous citizens. Urban man, deracinated and despiritualized, forgot the sources of his moral vitality: family, region, local clay. As with early civilizations, so with late: the closer to the land the better.

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Dermot Quinn, “Introduction,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), xix–xx.

The Scientism Within Sociology

From the beginning sociology has been haunted by the dream of explaining social phenomena by the mathematical and quantitative methods of the physical sciences and thus creating a science of society which will be completely mechanistic and determinist. The path of sociology is strewn with the corpses of defunct systems of “social physics,” “social energetics” and “social mechanics,” and their failure does little to discourage fresh adventures. Such systems have little use for history or for social reality; they content themselves with generalizations that have no significance and with “laws” which are nothing but false analogies.

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Christopher Dawson, “Sociology as a Science,” in Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Washington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 22. Originally published in Science for a New World, ed. Arthur Thomson and J. G. Crowther (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1934).