By JUDE DOUGHERTY
“During the last two centuries the human race has experienced the greatest change since the beginning of recorded history.” So wrote Christopher Dawson, the distinguished British historian, in 1948. This transformation, he tells the reader, had its source in a particular society in a particular civilization, i.e., Europe.
“The change was at once a political revolution, an economic revolution, and a scientific evolution.” But that is not all, as Dawson is able to show: “In order to understand Europe and European history, we must first understand,” wrote Dawson, “what Europe is not….Europe is not a mere geographical expression of a heterogeneous collection of independent nationalities, but a society of peoples possessing a common culture and religion. In the past this social organism was known as Christianity.”
Dawson was not the first to notice the transformation. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), an atheist and no friend of Christianity, as early as the nineteenth century observed, in his words: “Western society no longer possesses the spiritual resources that formerly animated its existence and without which it cannot survive.”
By his time, views entertained in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century drawing rooms, and in the academy of those days, had made their way into the marketplace. The spirit of the time was both reflected and promoted by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who produced a highly influential work known as the Encyclopedie. In the preface to the Encyclopedie he wrote, “Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.”
Voltaire, Rousseau, and d’Alembert were prominent contributors to the Encyclopedie. Voltaire, like Rousseau, urged the eradication of Christianity from the world of higher culture, but he was willing to have it remain in the stables and in the scullery as a moral force, lest a servant class emancipated from traditional moral norms might pilfer.
Dawson reports: “The origins of modern Democracy are so bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them, to distinguish their distinctive contributions to inherited political traditions to modern political culture.”
The English, French, and American Revolutions were liberal revolutions, and may be considered the logical expressions of the philosophy promoted by the French philosophes. The impact of the French Revolution continues to this day.
On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and social revolutions by a half century. The revolution of ideas was the work of a small minority, men of letters who looked to the princes and nobles of Europe rather than to the common people. The Church still maintained its influence over men’s minds and its festivals and pilgrimages played a great part in the life of the people. There remained deep currents of religious life even in the century which followed.
The historical origins of liberalism, in Dawson’s account, take us back to Rousseau and the empiricism of the eighteenth century which transformed our understanding of the natural order. The process of secularization was a historic moment, no less significant than that of the Reformation. It may have begun as a philosophical or an intellectual movement, but it was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it attained key positions of social and political influence through which it came to dominate European society. We know it as the Enlightenment.
A novel interpretation of liberalism in religious terms, Dawson attributes to the work of Rousseau who became the founder and prophet of the new faith — the religion of democracy. He pleaded the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, the people against the privileged class, the cause of love against convention, and of intuition against the (classical) philosophers.
Dawson credits Thomas Paine with bringing to America the confused ideas of Rousseau and the liberal Protestantism of eighteenth-century Geneva. Paine was the author of Common Sense, a pamphlet which came off the press on January 10, 1776 and sold more than 500,000 copies within a few months. It became the articulation of a kind of revolutionary creed. Paine had transformed a local quarrel (in Massachusetts) concerning taxation and colonial rights into a crusade for the rights of man and the cause of humanity, calling in messianic terms for “a new world order.”
In the victory of the American Revolution, European liberals saw the justification of their ideals and the realization of their hopes. In Dawson’s judgment, it gave an intellectual current a political direction and infused a revolutionary purpose into the democratic idealism of Rousseau. The agrarian democracy of the age of Jefferson which prevailed at the American founding was transformed, first by Andrew Jackson and later more fundamentally by the vast migration from Europe in the nineteenth century which prepared the way for the mass democracy we know today.
Dawson’s narrative continues. In his judgment, the defeat of National Socialism in the Second World War has left the modern world divided into two opposing ideologies and political systems, the Communist world and the Western world. The latter is essentially pluralistic and multiform in political power, in ideology, and in industrial and technological planning. What is obvious is that progress in science and technology demands a certain degree of international cooperation and internal social unity.
A free society requires a degree of spiritual unity more than a totalitarian one, says Dawson. He concludes that the power of the West to withstand Communist totalitarianism depends not so much on its military power as does on cultural leadership, and finally: “It is to Christianity that Western culture must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization.”
As a result of his many books and lectures, Dawson early on became recognized as one of the foremost cultural historians of his day. His career began with degrees earned at Trinity College, Oxford, and the University of Oxford. He subsequently taught at University College, Exeter, and at the University of Liverpool. He ended that career as the distinguished Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University.
Much of his life’s work can be found published or reproduced in collections by The Catholic University of America Press, including two volumes relevant to this brief essay, The Making of Europe (2002) and Religion and Culture (2013).
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