Christianity, a Dynamic Principle of Progress
By John J. Mulloy
Of the various reasons which exist for the importance of the study of
Christian culture, I should like to examine the one which sees
Christianity as having imparted a dynamic principle of change and
transformation to Western culture. This principle, while religious in
origin and expressing itself most fully in the religious developments
by which Christianity has striven to incorporate itself in the
different forms of each historical epoch, is not restricted in its
influence to the religious areas of culture. Instead, the historian
who examines the history of the West from the vantage point of
Christian culture will become aware of the way in which the leaven of
Christianity has communicated itself to movements which are secular
in character and indeed often enough anti-Christian in their
motivation. Thus, as Christopher Dawson has pointed out, the
development of science and technology, the rise of the Industrial
Revolution, and in the sphere of aesthetic culture, the Renaissance,
all owe a great deal to the influence upon them of Christianity, as
it imparts to them its own sense of purpose. Even an anti-Christian
movement like the French Enlightenment was heavily indebted to the
Christian worldview, although it secularized the ideas it had
borrowed in order to create a heavenly city here upon earth. And in
the case of so anti-Christian and atheistic an ideology as Marxism,
it would have lacked much of its appeal if it had not had behind it
the idea of the Hebrew prophets, carried forward by Christianity, of
the importance of the poor and the dispossessed. Even though
Communism enslaved the proletariat, its driving force comes from its
claim to rescue them from oppression. As Dawson has observed:
"For what was that social revolution in which Karl Marx put his hope
but a l9th-century version of the Day of the Lord, in which the rich
and the 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?" <Progress and Religion>, p 229.
In his statement of the difference in basic character between Western
Christian culture and the Oriental religion cultures, Dawson shows
how this difference derives from the influence of Christianity. He
writes, in the Introduction to the second volume of his Gifford
Lectures;
"Why is it that Europe alone among the civilizations of the world has
been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual
unrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging law of social
tradition which rules the oriental cultures? It is because its
religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless
perfection but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in
humanity and to change the world. In the West the spiritual power has
not been immobilized in a sacred social order like the Confucian
state in China and the Indian caste system. It has acquired social
freedom and autonomy and consequently its activity has not been
confined to the religious sphere but has had far-reaching effects on
every aspect of social and intellectual life.
"For, side by side with the natural aggressiveness and the lust for
power and wealth which are so evident in European history, there were
also new spiritual forces driving Western man towards a new destiny."
<Religion and the Rise of Western Culture>, pp 8; 10
The origins of Christian culture are to be found at the time when the
Church came out of Palestines in the first apostolic geneoration, to
spread the gospel to peoples possessed of the Hellenistic culture of
the Roman Empire. This involved a need to translate Jewish ideas and
prophecies, of which Christianity was the fulfillment, into the Greek
language and form. This was accomiplished so quickly that all the
four gospels, as we have them, are written in Greek, not Aramaic.
Nevertheless, many Greeks and Romans, especially those in positions
of authority, looked upon Christianity as something quite alien to
their own cherished traditions, an Oriental superstition intruding
itself upon the proprieties of civilized life. It was this attitude
which led to the two and a half centuries of persecution of
Christianity by the Romans, before the Faith finally gained
acceptance. Yet, as Christopher Dawson points out, Christianity and
its ideals of spiritual freedom were in accord with the best
tradition of earlier Greek and Roman society. And it was in
succcessfully resisting persecution and maintaining the principle of
freedom that Christianity showed the dynamic character that was to
characterize all of its later development. Of this confrontation of
the Christians with the might of the Roman Empire and the prestige of
Hellenic culture, Dawson writes:
"How this tradition of Western civilization survived the decline of
the city state and the loss of its political freedom has always been
the greatest of historical problems. The answer of the old school of
liberal historians was that it did not survive:--that the light of
classical civilization was extinguished in the night of the Dark Ages
and was reborn miraculously at the Renaissance which was the starting
point of the new period of progress and enlightenment. The other view
which I myself hold is that the ancient world saved its soul by its
conversion to Christianity and that the tradition of its culture
lived on in Western Christendom. The loss of political freedom in the
ancient world was in fact counterbalanced by the revelation of a new
spiritual freedom; so when the earthly city was enslaved men acquired
faith in the existence of a spiritual city `which is free and the
mother of us all.' And as the first epoch in the history of freedom
is marked by the rise of the free Greek cities and their struggle
with Persia, the second is marked by the rise of the Christian Church
and its struggle with the Roman Empire which had lost the ideals of
citizenship and political freedom and was rapidly becoming a vast
servile state like those of the ancient East. The battle was fought
out under the shadow of the executioners' rods and axes in praetoria
and amphitheaters and concentration camps from Germany to Africa and
from Spain to Armenia, and its heroes were the martyrs...
Henceforward wherever the Christian faith was preached not only in
Europe but from one end of the world to the other, from Japan and
Annam to Canada, the names of the men who bore witness with their
blood to truth and spiritual freedom have been held in honour.
"The dynamic force of this spiritual ideal put new life into the
dying civilization of the ancient world and gave Latin Christendom
the power to incorporate the northern barbarians in the new synthesis
of Western medieval civilization."
<The Judgment of Nations> (1942), pp 63-64
As we study the earlier history of Western Christian culture, we find
this same dynamic process at work, often contending against great
odds... The creation of Western culture itself in the lands conquered
by the Germanic barbarians was a kind of by-product of the spread of
Christianity to these previously pagan peoples. The conversion of
Ireland, of France, and of England were all missionary efforts that
at the same time extended the territory and influence of the culture
of the West. In fact, we may say that the conversion of these
countries actually created Western civilization. That is, if we
define that civilization as the union of Christianity and
Graeco-Roman culture with the societies and traditions of the
barbarian peoples. The later centuries of the early Middle Ages
witnessed a continuation of this process, for, after the almost fatal
disasters of the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean lands and,
later, the Viking invasions, it was through the unifying force given
by Christianity that Western culture again took up the task of
reconstruction of Western society and extended the area of its
influence.
Earlier it was the disastrous conditions of Germanic invasion of the
Empire, when society seemed almost on the verge of extinction, that
Christianity had had to exert its energizing power, so that a new
culture might spring up amidst the ruins of the old. No sooner,
however, had this age of Western Christian culture reached its
flowering in the monasteries of Ireland and England, and, through the
efforts of St. Boniface and his Anglo-Saxon monks, converted Western
Germany to the Christian Faith, than a new threat arose.
The work of St. Boniface, of whom Dawson speaks as one "who had a
deeper iufluence on the history of Europe than any Englishman who has
ever lived," (<The Making of Europe>, pp. 210-11), extended also to
the revitalization and reorganization of the Church in the Frankish
kingdom, and thus laid the foundations for the Carolingian age which
began a generation after the death of Boniface.
The base upon which St. Boniface relied for carrying on his work in
Germany and in the Frankish kingdom were the monasteries of England
from which he drew his missionaries, both men and women. However,
with the Vikina invasions, beginning around 800, these monastesies
were subjected to repeated raids, so that the flowers of learning and
art which they had produced were ruthlessly cut down and the plant
itself almost uprooted from which new growths of Christian culture
and Western civilization might spring.
Dawson gives a brief but graphic account of these invasions, and he
quotes from a contemporary chronicle to illustrate what was taking
place. Dawson notes:
"It is of these dark years that the chronicler of St. Vedast writes,
`The Northmen cease not to slay and carry into captivity the
Christian people, to destroy the churches and to burn the towns.
Everywhere there is nothing but dead bodies--clergy and laymen,
nobles and common people, women, and children. There is no road or
place where the ground is not covered with corpses. We live in
distress and anguish before this spectacle of the destruction of the
Christian people.'"
Dawson passes this judgment on the signifiance of these invasions:
"There has never been a war which so directly threatened the
existence of Western Christendom as a whole; indeed the Christian
resistance has more right to the name of a crusade than the Crusades
themselves." <Religion and the Rise of Western Culture>, pp. 100-101.
Yet here also the vital and vigorous power of Christianity reasserted
itself and became the source of life for a new outburst of creative
activity. This extended the area of Western culture into Scandinavia
with the conversion of the Northmen themselves, and into Central and
Eastern Europe with the conversion of the Magyars and the Poles. It
also produced an intensive cultivation of the internal resources of
the Christian cultural tradition, which led to the great achievements
of the High Middle Ages from the 11th to the 13th centuries. In the
following passage from an unpublished article Dawson remarks on this
new flowering of Christian culture in the Gothic age:
"This revival was not confined to the intellectual world, for this
central period of the Middle Ages from 1060 to 1260, witnessed an
extraordinary outpouring of social energy in every field. In spite of
all the oppression and lawlessness of feudalism, it was an age of
freedom and enterprise, when men were everywhere combining for common
ends, in religious orders and universities, in communes and gilds, in
pilgrimages and crusades. Above all, the rise of the medieval city
with its intense communal and religious activity, marks the emergence
of the West from barbarism to a new civilization which differed alike
from those of classical antiquity and the contemporary Oriental
world....
"It was the age of St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure and St. Louis, of
the builders of the great Gothic cathedrals, of Robert Grosseteste
and Simon de Montfort."
In his Gifford Lectures Dawson speaks of the religious principle
which provided the inspiration for the great achievements of medieval
culture and gave the medieval period that dynamic character which
historians have so often overlooked. The Middle Ages were not an age
of stability and security, when everything was fixed and guaranteed
by the unity of religious faith, as is so often supposed by the
defenders of the Middle Ages as much as by those who attack them.
This period existed, rather, in a state of uncertain equilibrium, in
which a balance between the forces making for disunity and the
unifying power of a supernatural faith, was precariously maintained.
Dawson has remarked on this characteristic of medieval culture, which
indeed distinguishes Christian culture from the other great world
civilizations. He states:
"Medieval Christendom, at least in this its greatest period, was not
a static unchanging hierarchial order, like the civilizations of the
ancient East, it was a dynamic movement that was continually changing
and hardly achieved completion before it began to pass away. Modern
writers have frequently been so impressed by the logical completeness
of the medieval synthesist as revealed in the works of St. Thomas and
Dante that they have failed to realize its dynamic character. But in
reality medieval man lived precariously between two abysses, with
hell beneath his feet and the heavens filled with the mysteries of a
succession of spiritual worlds above his head. And in the same way
medieval civilization itself! was a precarious achievement, like a
great arch thrown over the abyss of barbarism.
"If we want an image of the medieval world, it is [that of] a a
Gothic cathedral, as Henry Adams described it in the last pages of
<Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres>, with their emphasis on the
sustaining arch and flying butress by which the divergent elements in
the structure are held in unity."
Dawson then gives us this conclusion as to the causes for the ending
of the great age of medieval culture: "Now in the 14th century the
strain became too great to be borne. The centrifugal thrust of royal
power and national ambition became too strong to be mastered by the
centripetal aspiration of Western culture towards the center of
Christian unity. The arch was broken and the vault collapsed. Out of
the ruins men began to build again, with lower aims and more divided
purposes. Yet the inheritance of the great age of medieval culture
was never completely lost. All the new elements which that age had
created were taken over and incorporated into the new national
cultures..." <The Formation of Christendom> (1967), pp. 272-273.
It is sometimes said that the study of Christian culture in the
medieval period is a retreat into the past and an abandonment of the
issues which face the contemporary world. Whereas, in fact, if we
understand the medieval achievement in its true dimensions, as a
constant creative struggle against the forces which threatened to
tear society apart, we shall more readily appreciate its relevance
for the problems of cultural crisis which we must confront today. For
we also have the same opportunity and the same obligation to extend
the Christian faith and Christian culture to the new peoples with
whom our present world society has brought us into contact. And we
are confronted with the same need to impose unity and order on the
diverse intellectual and cultural elements which have grown up
outside the Christian community proper, but which need reconciliation
with the truths of the Christian tradition if they are to reach their
proper term of fulfillment.
Thus the inspiration and guidance which we can gain from a study of
Christian culture in the past, and especially its classical moments
or periods, can give us a deeper understanding of our own time in
world history. And it can show us what use may be made of these
lessons of the past for the creation of a vital Christian culture
that may be achieved for the future.
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