The Logic of Christendom
Today, the principles of the “moderate” Enlightenment are what pass for a conservative inheritance to be opposed to the excesses of liberalism, an inheritance “We the People” were supposed to have “secured to ourselves and our posterity” following the American Revolution. These principles include:
• A hypothetical “social compact” or contract as the foundation of the State.
• The origin of political sovereignty in the “consent” of the governed (invariably presumed to have been given by those who happen to be wielding power).
• “Government by the people” according to the “sovereignty of the people,” meaning strict majority rule on all questions, including the most profound moral ones.
• Church-State separation and the non-“interference” of religion in politics.
• The confinement of religion, above all the revealed truths of Christianity, to the realm of “private” opinions and practices one is free to adopt (or to denounce) if it pleases him, but which are to have no controlling effect on law or public policy.
• The unlimited pursuit of gain, including the freedom to buy, sell and advertise anything whatsoever the majority deems permissible by law.
• Total liberty of thought and action, both private and public, within the limits of a merely external “public peace” essentially reduced to the protection of persons and property from invasion by others—in sum, a “free-market society.”
• The dissolubility of marriage, and thus the family, as a mere civil contract founded on a revocable consent.
We are witnessing the final outcome of the operation of these “moderate” principles in the life of the individual, the family and the State. That this “conservative” inheritance was actually a radically liberal and inevitably disastrous departure from the millennial Western theologico-political tradition is now considered a proposition bordering on madness even by the most “conservative” opponents of contemporary liberalism. And yet a radical departure it was—a departure that emerged a full-blown system of thought during the epoch of the “Enlightenment” (roughly 1650–1800), whose first practical triumph, as we shall see, was the American Revolution, “the program of enlightenment in practice”[note]Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996 [1969]), p. 558.[/note] and “the Enlightenment fulfilled.”[note]Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (NY: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 191.[/note] In order to appreciate “the radicalism of the American Revolution,” to borrow the title of Gordon Woods’s landmark Pulitzer Prize-winning study on the subject, it is necessary first to appreciate what has been dismantled and forgotten in the Age of Liberty whose official inauguration took place in America in 1776. Here the briefest of sketches must suffice.
The Greco-Catholic Synthesis
In his famous Gifford Lectures on the Enlightenment, published under the title The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker observes with the frankness of an honest and accomplished scholar that even before 1776 the philosopher of the Enlightenment had overturned in thought the “medieval world pattern, deriving from Greek logic and the Christian story.”[note]Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press [1932], 2003), 5–6. We do not accept Becker’s thesis of a veiled continuity between the “heavenly city” as conceived in the tradition of Christendom and the Enlightenment’s new notion of a “heavenly” city. As the renowned historian of the Enlightenment Peter Gay has maintained, the thesis is “charming” but simply not true. That the two “cities” perform similar functions does not establish continuity between the old and the new worldviews. Gay calls this the “fallacy of the spurious persistence.” Cf. Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, 535. Like Gay, who is not even writing from a Catholic perspective, we insist upon the patent discontinuity between traditional Christianity and the so-called Enlightenment.[/note] By this Becker means the synthesis of the two great elements of the Western theologic-political tradition that began in Athens after its fall in the 4th century bc, when Socrates, with “his summons to men to ‘care for their souls’ ... turned the mind of Greece toward a new way of life ... a newer and higher ideal of state and society” that “ended with the search for a new God.”[note]Werner Jaeger, Paidea: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. II (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971 [1943]), 8, 46.[/note]The “Greek logic” of the Platonic-Aristotelian system developed for the first time in Western history a philosophical realism, ethics and politics based on the view of man as a creature possessed of a rational and immortal soul who inhabits an orderly universe, a universe in which everything has a fixed and objectively knowable essence determined by nature, which “makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose.”[note]"Politics," in Aristotle: the Politics (NY: Penguin Books, 1992), 79. The Logic of Christendom 17.[/note] For Plato, these essences were the Forms, residing in a separate realm of perfection of which the sublunary world is but a replication. For Aristotle, with his “hylomorphism,” which became the Christian philosophical doctrine of matter and form, every being in the orderly universe is a “substance,” a subsisting unity of matter and the form that determines its nature; and the soul, as the Christian tradition would also teach, is the form of man. For Aristotle, as for the Christian philosophical tradition, the forms are to be found in the existing beings themselves which the mind really encounters through the senses in an “adequation” (equalization) of itself to the real world.In the Greek view of man, assimilated and adapted to the Christian view in light of revelation, the rational soul is ordered by nature to the practice of the virtues of which it alone is capable—above all prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice, the last being the sum of all virtues in social relations. Man’s happiness—man being the only creature even capable of rationally seeking and knowingly experiencing happiness—does not consist in mere pleasure or material gain for its own sake, the vice Aristotle called pleonexia. It consists, rather, of an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. And the highest state of virtue is communion with God (Plato) or the contemplation of God for those who are capable of it (Aristotle). This is the summum bonum the Greeks sought by unaided reason centuries before the revelation of the New Testament and the concept of the beatific vision.Why is happiness an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue? Aristotle’s answer is teleological: because man has a soul, which is clearly of a higher order than the body it rules, and because man is capable of exercising virtues, which are clearly of a higher order than the bodily instincts (the need for food, warmth, and so forth) he has in common with the lower animals. Since man is clearly designed for the practice of virtue, his true happiness must consist in virtue, as nature never endows anything without a purpose and “it would be an odd thing if man chose to live someone else’s life instead of his own”[note]Nicomachean Ethics, 1178a 4–5.[/note]—that is, the life of a lower animal. With good reason is the bad man called “an animal” in common parlance. Men who live as animals are unhappy and cause unhappiness in others.Given man’s very nature as an ensouled creature whose end is the life of virtue and the encounter with God, both Plato and Aristotle teach that man’s perfection requires life in the State, originating in the society of families with its organs of government. The state is “a creation of nature” and “man is by nature a political animal,”[note]Politics, 1253a 3–5.[/note] as Aristotle so famously observes. Hence for the Greeks, as for the Christian statesmen who will follow them centuries later, the good State is the one whose laws and institutions take care of the soul by promoting and protecting both virtue and religion over and above mere security in person and property. For the Greeks of 4th century Athens, as it would be for the Catholics of Christendom, religion was not merely a private affair but also involved “regular public honoring of the divine.”[note]Hans-Georg Gadder, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), 53.[/note]Accordingly, says Plato, the good citizen—who is the same as the good man—will “keep himself from all the legislator lists in his count of things base and bad, and exercise himself with all his might in all that is in the contrary table of all things good and lovely” in order to avoid “deformity on the finest thing he has, his soul.”[note]Laws, 728b in Plato: the Collected Dialogues, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989).[/note] The disjunction between “private” and “public” morality that is a dogma of Liberty did not exist for Plato and Aristotle in Athens any more than it would for the Christian in Christendom. “The same things are best for individuals and states,”[note]Politics, 1333b37 in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Bollinger Series, LXXI, Vol. II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).[/note] as Aristotle declares in the Politics.On this point several details of Plato’s hypothetical construction of the good State are pertinent, even if others, such as the abolition of the nuclear family and private property, represent pagan wisdom gone astray and are repugnant to the Christian worldview. The first is legislation providing for the religious festivals of the State in keeping with the tight integration of religion and public life in the Greek polity.[note]Laws, 828b.[/note] The religion of the State as a reflection of the religion of the people was, of course, a fundament of political society throughout European history until well into the 19th century. For it is obviously nonsense to say that the individual, but not the collective of individuals making up the State, has duties to God. If there is a true religion, and the great preponderance of people profess it, then the State will naturally and logically profess it as well. Catholic teaching was uncompromising in its defense of this perennial element of Western political organization. Writing more than 2200 years after Plato, Pope Leo XIII declared: “God it is who has made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature, and beyond his attainment if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless.... Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true....”[note]Libertas (1888), no .21.[/note] Leo’s successor, Pius X, insisted as recently as 1906 that the members of the State owe God “not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him.”[note]Vehement Nos (1906), no. 3.[/note] This dictate of practical reason, proceeding from the premise of Christ’s divinity and His foundation of a teaching Church, was recognized even by Jacques Maritain, the renowned but inconsistently progressivist and proponent of “integral humanism,” when writing in his traditionalist mode:
We must affirm as a truth above all the vicissitudes of time the supremacy of the Church over the world and over all terrestrial powers. On pain of radical disorder she must guide the peoples towards the last end of human life, which is also that of States, and, to do that, she must direct, in terms of the spiritual riches entrusted to her, both rulers and nations.[note]Jacques Maritain, Primate du spiritual (Plon, 1927), no. 23, in Michael Davies, Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre, Vol. II, Chapter 15.[/note]
The radical disorder of which Maritain wrote is the core of the crisis of Western civilization. Also important for our purposes is Plato’s advocacy of State censorship of immoral and indecent material in the arts and in literature.[note]See, e.g., Republic, 401b; 377b; 386 ff.; Laws, 801b; 817d.[/note] Plato defends this basic feature of all traditional Western legal codes with admirable common sense.In Book III of The Republic, Socrates prescribes laws forbidding indecent and immoral poetry so that the young elite “may not be bred among the symbols of evil, as if it were in a pasture of poisonous herbs, lest grazing freely and cropping from many such day by day they little by little and all unawares accumulate and build up a huge mass of evil in their own souls.”[note]Republic, 401b.[/note] Precisely the same rationale is found in Catholic teaching more than two millennia after Plato: “[L]ying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State.”[note]Leo XIII, Libertas (1888), no. 23. There are innumerable examples of this teaching in papal encyclicals and even in the recently promulgated Catechism of the Catholic Church, which calls for the prohibition and destruction of pornography by the State and the State regulation of mass media to protect public morality. CCC no. 2354 (“Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials”).[/note] The great historian of philosophy, Frederick Copleston, here notes an obvious truth that today is dismissed with howls of liberal outrage:
[T]he principle that animated him [Plato] must be admitted by all who seriously believe in a objective moral law, even if they quarrel with his particular applications of the principle. For, granted the existence of an immortal soul and of an absolute moral code, it is the duty of public authority to prevent the ruin of morality of the members of the State so far as they can... [note]Frederick Copleston, S.J., A History of Philosophy (NY: Doubleday, 1985), Vol. I, 227.[/note]
According to the same rationale, Plato defends penalties for public offenses against the religion of the State. Public atheists and heretics, or those who set up private temples for false worship, are subject to imprisonment, banishment and even death.[note]Laws, 907d ff.[/note] Contemporary liberals likewise denounce the idea that public offenses against religion ought to be punished, but this too was a basic feature of traditional Western legal codes, and for perfectly logical reasons. For if religion is the way to eternal happiness, and if the corruption of religious truth leads to eternal misery, the members of the State have a right to protect themselves from the effects of the public dissemination of religious error. Hence Catholic teaching constantly condemned the idea that the best condition of civil society is one in which “no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted liberty, the god that failed penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion....”[note]Pius IX, Quas Primas (1864). Despite all appearances to the contrary, this Catholic teaching, affirmed by numerous popes, remains intact in principle, even if the practical impossibility of its application today is conceded.[/note] There is no social truth more obvious than that the spread of religious and moral falsehoods has disastrous temporal as well as eternal consequences. The crisis of our civilization lies in the refusal of political modernity to recognize that the truths of revelation are ineradicably connected both to the integrity of the moral order in society and to human happiness and flourishing in this world and in the next.The foundational Greek view of the role of the State in the life of the whole man, which would be defended throughout the centuries of Christendom, is summarized in Aristotle’s Politics:
But a state exists for the sake of the good life; and not for the sake of life only.... It is clear then that the state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life ... by which we mean a happy and honorable life.... [P]olitical society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of living together.[note]Politics, 1280a 30–3; b29; 1281a3 (Bollinger Series).[/note]
Given this function of the State, Plato (like Aristotle) viewed pure democracy as a deadly absurdity, likening its action upon the State to the governance of a sailing ship by a mutinous and drunken crew, who celebrate “the man who is most cunning” among them and make him captain, while the true pilot, with his indispensable knowledge of navigation, is rejected as an impractical stargazer.[note]Republic, 488 c–d.[/note] Of the three basic political constitutions—monarchy, oligarchy and democracy—monarchy is best, provided the monarch is a philosopher-king who governs according to the truth derived from his knowledge of the Forms. In Book V of The Republic, however, Plato levels a criticism of kings that applies with equal force to any ruler who fails to govern according to truth and justice: “Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately ... there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucoma, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either.”[note]Ibid., 473d.[/note] This admonition, mutates mutants, applied to the Christian ruler whose source of truth included the Gospel revelation expounded by the Church as well as right reason.
The Politics of the Soul
If one phrase could describe the Greek view of Man and State it would be this: the politics of the soul. Indeed, Greek philosophy “led the way into the newfound land of the soul,” producing “a new order of values ... worked out in the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle,” which “paved the way for the universal religion, Christianity.”[note]Jaeger, Paidea, 11, 46.[/note] As Copleston observes in his monumental history of philosophy: "It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Plato in the intellectual preparation evangelical of the pagan world.”[note]Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. I, 503.[/note] Likewise, “the natural theology of Aristotle was a preparation for the acceptance of Christianity.”[note]Ibid., 504.[/note] Moreover, “the political theory of Plato and Aristotle has indeed formed the foundation for subsequent fruitful speculations on the nature and characteristics of the State.”[note]Ibid., 242.[/note] Thus the Catholic Church has never ceased to recognize her debt to the veteran sapient of the Greeks, which “served, surely, to herald the dawn of the Gospel which God’s Son, 'the judge and teacher of grace and truth, the light and guide of the human race,' proclaimed on earth.[note]Pope John XXIII, Veterum Sapientia (1962), no. 1.[/note]To the Greek foundations of natural theology, ethics and political philosophy the “Christian story” added its own theological and philosophical superstructure, producing “the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church,”[note]Benedict XVI, “Papal Address at Univ. of Regensburg,” 12 September 2006.[/note] which reached its fullest and most systematic expression in Thomistic philosophy. The Greco-Catholic synthesis:
• reveals the God for which the Greeks were seeking;
• explains man’s tendency to commit evil, and the fact of evil in the world, as consequences of the Fall of man on account of the original sin of our first parents;
• offers fallen man redemption through the grace won by the Redeemer, which repairs the defects of the rational soul clouded by Original Sin;
• completes (in the Aristotelian-Thomistic system of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval scholastics) the Greek picture of philosophical realism—a hierarchically ordered universe of divinely created and fixed natures or substances, with man and his rational soul at its visible summit and God as its highest good;
• adds the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) to the cardinal virtues explored by Plato and Aristotle (prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude), and the concept of punishable transgressions against divine law—sins—to offenses against the natural order, concerning which there had been no explicit divine “ought” or divine prohibition in Greek philosophy.
With the Greco-Catholic synthesis comes an understanding of human freedom as involving, not only the practice of virtue, but liberation of the soul from the effects of sin. However obscured by sin, the divine ought is written onto our hearts in the form of the natural law, whose first precept is that “Good is to be done and pursued and evil to be avoided.”[note]St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter ST), I–II, 94, 2.[/note] What is good, of course, is specified in the Decalogue—summed up by the love of God and neighbor—revelation as a whole, preeminently the Gospel, and the dictates of right reason, aided by revelation and perfected by grace, which enlightens the darkened soul. In the New Testament “sin” is a translation of the Greek word hamartia, which means to “miss the mark.” By hitting the mark according to the divine plan, man achieves the end for which the Greeks were seeking in their obscure understanding that arête, human fulfillment in the excellence of virtue, and with it the good life in the good State, would seem to require what Plato called the moira—a divine dispensation.[note]Cf. Republic, 492e (“And you may be sure that, if anything is saved and turns out well in the present condition of society and government, in saying that the Providence of God preserves it you will not be speaking ill”).[/note] That dispensation is sanctifying grace: “Being then freed from sin, we have been made servants of justice.”[note]Romans 6:18.[/note]In the realm of philosophy, the Greco-Catholic synthesis baptized and confirmed the philosophical realism of Aristotle with his simple insistence that the world is just as we see it: an ordered hierarchy of beings with fixed natures and purposes; a vast ensemble of substances composed of matter and the form that makes each of them, above all man, forever one thing and not another. Aristotle, writes G.K. Chesterton, “took things as he found them, just as Aquinas accepted things as God created them.” The philosophy of St. Thomas “stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs,” just as God made them to be. The Thomist, with Aristotle, thus “stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.”[note]G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (NY: Random House, 1974), 121.[/note] It was Western man’s very certitude about the real that the Enlightenment divines, pouring through the opening created by Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, would attack with unrelenting ferocity.
The Christian Commonwealth
Finally, the Christian story solved the dilemma Plato confronted in The Republic and The Laws: that the good State requires good men, but good men cannot be formed without the assistance of a good State. Taking the road “along which God himself is so plainly guiding us,”[note]Laws, 968c.[/note] to quote Clinias in The Laws, the Christian story arrived at a destination neither Plato nor Aristotle could foresee: Christendom. If one phrase could describe the perennial Greco-Catholic synthesis on Man, God and State, it would be this: the politics of the soul in the commonwealths of Christendom.“Where there is no justice, there is no state,” declared Augustine, the first Catholic political philosopher. “But true justice,” he argued in City of God, “is not to be found save in that commonwealth, if we may so call it, whose Founder and Ruler is Jesus Christ.” Hence even in its greatest days the Roman Republic presented “merely a colored painting of justice, as Cicero himself suggests, while meaning to praise it.”[note]Demetrius B. Zema, S.J. and Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., trans., The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine, the City of God, Books 1–7 and 17–22 (Catholic University of America Press, 1950).[/note] Justice, Augustine concluded, “cannot be predicated of pagan states, as they do not render justice to God.” The just state, therefore, is the Christian state, and an organic relation between the temporal and the spiritual power whose polestar is the Gospel of Christ will insure the justice of its laws.In all its forms, and with all its human imperfections, the Christian commonwealth perennially exhibited the “Gelatin dyarchy”[note]From the historic declaration of Pope Gelasius I in his letter to the Emperor Anastasius (494) on the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power in cases of conflict: “There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these that of the priests is the more weighty....”[/note] of two distinct but organically united powers, the temporal subject to the spiritual in matters of morality and justice, where the jurisdictions of the two powers overlap. In all the centuries of its existence the dyarchy never admitted of any divorce between religion and politics, or the secular and the religious. In the universal fellowship of Christendom the Church was the conscience of the State and the soul of the body politic, just as religion (albeit pagan religion) was tightly integrated into the life of the Greek state.In sum, ancient Greek thought sustains the logic of Christendom. Given the acceptance of the theological premise that Christ is God Incarnate, and thus the very summum bonum for which the Greeks were seeking, Christendom can be justified not only by an appeal to faith but also to rational principles on the nature of God, Man and State uncovered by the Philosophers in the explorations of unaided reason. Thus, some twenty-two centuries after Plato and Aristotle lived and taught, Pope Leo XIII was able to declare that “the Christian organization of civil society [was] not rashly or fancifully shaped out, but educed from the highest and truest principles, confirmed by natural reason itself.”[note]Immortale Dei, no. 16.[/note]The Christian commonwealth is the good State for which Plato sought with his utopian method, the State that would be called “Magnesia—or whatever name God will have it called after,” which “is not to be equaled in future ages.” It is the “dream on which we touched” that would someday “have found its fulfillment in real and working fact....”[note]Laws, 969b.[/note] As the great Harvard classicist Werner Jaeger observes in his monumental work Paideia:
Neither the ancient city-state nor the national ideal of the fourth century, but the universal fellowship of Christendom laid the foundations for the fulfillment of Plato’s hope. That religious foundation was something far broader than the Greek nation which Plato had addressed. But it was similar to the Platonic scheme in this: it was not an abstract universal brotherhood of man; instead it was identical with the concrete Christian ... brotherhood, whose component nations continued to belong to it even in time of war.[note]Jaeger, Paidea, Vol. II: In Search of the Divine Center (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 258.40. Mark R. Levin, Ameritopia (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2012), Kindle Edition, 440.[/note]
In their superficial reading of The Republic and The Laws contemporary conservatives and libertarians see a “statist” and “totalitarian” conception of social order harboring “the germs of Marxism, National Socialism, Islamism, and other forms of utopianism.” Read with discernment, however, Plato’s utopian speculations represent a search for the kind of ecclesiocentric polity that would emerge after the Incarnation, one in which the leavening effect of the Gospel would preclude both totalitarian and majoritarian tyranny. “The perfect design for living given in The Laws,” writes Jaeger, “is like nothing so much as the year as conceived by the Catholic Church, with its holy rites and liturgies laid down for every day.” Plato was seeking no mere State, as the superficial reading would suggest, but rather a great educational system for the formation of souls in which the State would merely play a part. And, notes Jaeger, “if we think of the greatest educational institution of the post-classical world, the Roman Catholic Church, it looks like a prophetic anticipation of many of the essential features of Catholicism.” Plato’s search thus presupposes precisely what the modern State has denied institutionally: that “[i]n reality only God is worth taking seriously, and what is divine in man,” meaning “the logos, the cord by which God moves man.... If humanity is not seen in that divine perspective, it loses its own independent value.”[note]Jaeger, Paideia, Vol. III: The Conflict of Cultural Ideas in the Age of Plato (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), Kindle Edition, 252–253.[/note] And so it has in political modernity.In the correspondence of Alcuin of York to Charles the Great (Charlemagne) during the Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th century we find the connection between the hope of Athens and the rise of Christendom being drawn explicitly. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, wrote Alcuin, “it may be that a new Athens will arise in France.... The old Athens had only the teachings of Plato to instruct it, yet even so it flourished by the seven liberal arts. But our Athens will be enriched by the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit[note]The virtues infused by the operation of the Holy Ghost in addition to faith, hope and charity: “wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord,” which “complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1831.[/note] and will, therefore, surpass all the dignity of earthly wisdom.”[note]In Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (NY: Image Books, 1991 [1950]), 65.[/note] This was no pious exultation from a religious zealot blinded by fideism, but the recognition by a great intellect of an historical, intellectual and spiritual reality then unfolding, one that would create the very basis of Western culture: the New Athens that was Christendom.The “component nations” of Christendom would endure in all or parts of the Western world for some sixteen hundred years—from the edict of Milan in 313 until the fall of the House of Habsburg and the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. Their residua endure even today in certain predominantly Catholic countries of the Western world, such as Ireland and Malta, although the last remnants of their Christian legal codes and customs are under relentless attack by the European Union, the United Nations and other contemporary agencies of Liberty. It will be the burden of this study to show that the crisis of our civilization lies precisely in its all-butcomplete repudiation, in the name of Liberty, of the things that made it Christian.
