According to Christopher Dawson civilisation should not exist for its own sake but “ought to be a sacred order which rests not on the will of man but on the Law of God. When a civilisation has entirely abandoned this belief, when it makes itself its own law and its own end and cuts itself off from its roots in the spiritual order, its days are numbered … That is the fate that threatens Western culture to-day”:
Religion and the Modern State (1935).
“If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what has happened in the case of modern Europe. The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and to leave man’s inner life to religion; it claims the whole person. Once more Christianity is faced, as it was at the beginning, with the challenge of a world which will accept no appeal from its judgment, and which recognizes no higher power than its own will”:
Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State (1935).
“the secularization of Western society brought with it not only a loss of religious unity and religious faith, but also the disappearance of those objective and moral standards which provided a spiritual basis for social and political life. Hence the growing unease of spiritual unrest and maladjustment that accompanied the progress of modern civilization”:
Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Modern State (1935).
“The forces that appear to make human civilization so irresistible – its wealth, its economic organization, and its military power – are essentially hollow, and crumble to dust as soon as the human purpose that animates them loses its strength. The real forces that rule the world are spiritual ones, and every empire and civilization waits for the hour when the sentence of the watchers goes forth and its kingdom is numbered and finished. The spirit of life goes out of its social traditions and institutions and a new age is begun. Thus from age to age the divine purpose towards the human race is carried on, and even the civilization which appears to resist that purpose is the unwilling servant of a power that it does not recognize.
Today the world is ripe for renewal… The process of secularization has worked itself out to its logical conclusions… and it can go no further”.
[Christopher Dawson, historian of religion and culture, 1935]
Paul is finalising the proofs for his forthcoming book Intellectuals and the Decline of Religion: Essays and Reviews, to be published by Boolarong Press. It will discuss thinkers such as Newman, Maude Petre, Chesterton, Lionel Curtis, Middleton Murry, Priestley, Toynbee, Tawney, Muggeridge, Vidler, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Joseph Needham.
Maude Petre Click here
Maude Petre explains why she stayed within the Catholic Church despite her continuing difficulties caused by her “Modernist heresies” (now regarded as legitimate calls for reform and implemented in Vatican II). See the final section of Paul’s revised essay on “Maude Petre: A Modernist Martyr” in his website dpcrook.wordpress.com.
Maude Petre and George Tyrrell had one of the great love affairs of the time, even though it was non-sexual. He was a dissident Jesuit and she was high up in a Catholic order. For the story of their love see my essay on Maude, A Modernist Martyr (from p.8) in my website dpcrook.wordpress.com. Click maude-petre Maude Petre
“If the world were not full of sorrow and sin; if it were a terrestrial paradise… how could people’s hearts and minds have ever been knit together into one? Compassion, the divine thing about us, would have lain dormant in the depths of our heart like a pearl buried in the ocean; whereas now it shines even in the darkest and most seemingly God-forsaken souls”
(George Tyrrell, Nova et Vetera [The New and the Old]: Informal Meditations for Times of Spiritual Dryness, 1897).
“Religious truth is mysterious but it is no abyss of darkness on the borders of which we dwell in terror; it is as the starlit ocean which washes our shore and invites us to embark on its bosom. And if it be through life that we find the meaning of religious truth, it is also through religious truth that we find the meaning of life…”
[Laberthonniere, Essays ]
“Tyrrell continued to see in a reinterpreted Catholicism the ideal of a universal Christian society which could gather together the fragments of a shattered Christendom. While Christianity would see itself as the highest expression of the religious instinct of humanity, it would also recognize the right of other religions to exist. Absolute truth belongs to the future and lies outside history. The ideal of one universal religion must be as ‘the thought of a land to which we ever journey, without hope of reaching it’. The spirit of Christ is not limited to Christianity, nor to a visible Church. As the true light that enlightens every one of us who comes into the world, the spirit of Christ speaks to each person ‘in the mysterious whisperings of conscience’ ” [Ellen Leonard, George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition, p.90].
Paul Crook 