DURING the last few years we have become familiar with the word "Security" in connection with the political world of Europe. The importance of the term goes beyond mere questions of the Rhine frontier, of the Polish corridor, or of disarmament; it expresses a very deep need of the whole of our society. Our political leaders, our philosophers, and men of letters, even the very masses themselves, are penetrated more and more with a sense of the instability of the institutions on which our civilisation is founded. The world, we are told, must be "organised," to avoid suicidal conflicts of races, of classes, of economic interests—and the methods by which it is proposed to achieve this object have been the subject of violent and interminable debate since the peace of 1919.
It is obvious, too, that matters can no longer be allowed to drift, even for a decade. While the affairs of the world remain in chaos, the sufferings and indignation of the workers rise higher, and the menace of revolution and war grows more urgent. Finally, the European culture, the European way of thought which triumphed all over the world in the last century, is no longer unchallenged. The military and economic power of Japan and Russia are daily the subject of discussion in the news, India seethes with revolt, and a whisper has gone out over all the East that the day of freedom is at hand; while on the Continent of Europe western culture already stands on the defensive, in fear of a coming siege.
Decay of Values.
The external menace, however, and the material disorganisation are not the sole or even principal causes of the trouble. The weakness of the programmes of reorganisation is not the sole or even the principal cause of the trouble. The weakness of the programmes of reorganisation is the neglect of a factor which is fundamental, in which lies the root of our whole disease: the decay of the values for which European civilisation stands, and the failure to recognise the true nature of the European Commonwealth. Until we are able to dig deep down into this foundation for our reconstruction, the work can be, at best, nothing but temporary and feeble.
We speak of the "Continent of Europe" and of European civilisation without closely attending to the meaning of these terms. Europe is not a geographical unity like Australia—nor is it a racial unity. The break-up of the Roman Empire destroyed the unitary State organisation which it once possessed; but European unity survived as a spiritual, an intellectual bond, strong enough to transcend all differences of race and language in the peoples belonging to it; and other continents were made partakers of this spirit with the opening up of the new world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The growing strength and consistency of Nationalism makes it easy for us to forget the common soil of the life of the Western nations; but to treat "Anglo-Saxon" or "German" culture as springing in a soil of its own, as spiritually independent of the life of its neighbours, is to misconstrue the whole meaning of our history and our civilisation. On the other hand, the "Cosmopolitan" notion expressed in the League of Nations, the last child of the Liberalism of the nineteenth century, is equally false. The world has no cultural unity which all civilised nations share, except such as Europe herself has imposed upon it. If she herself has lost her spiritual grip, her sense of values, how can she hope to exert authority over the spirit of Asia? The East, free from our hegemony, will possess the weapons, the science which we have given to her; but she will use them in her own way. This fact is already becoming apparent in the case of Japan, which, while making use of Western organisation, reacts against any kind of inner transformation by Christianity or Western idealism.
The defence of the West, then, is an urgent matter, and it is one which is the especial task of Catholics. The Western culture was—one may say almost by a miracle—preserved, at the fall of the Roman Empire, by the Catholic Church. The moral decay which had passed from the Hellenistic East to Rome, and which had sapped the whole life of the Imperial culture, was arrested by the universal acceptance of a strong spiritual discipline which re-knit the ties of social and family life, and slowly dissolved the cancerous growth of slavery which had dehumanised that world. The barbarian was tamed; his passion for war, though not destroyed, was disciplined, and even— as in the Crusades—turned to valuable ends. The world grew young again.
The Church had done more than preserve civilisation. The new culture of the Middle Ages, if less developed materially than that of the great classical ages, was capable of expressing in its life a view of human nature which was deeper and more subtle than anything to be found even in the greatest of the Greeks. The immense importance and mystery of every personal life, the full tragedy and splendour of human destiny, the spiritual importance of freedom, the elevation of human love, of human beauty by the sacramental view of life and the world—all these values have descended from the Christendom of those ages to our modern world, and their fragments still live in the thought, even, of the enemies of Christianity.
The Renaissance.
The Renaissance, which tried to return to the thought and art of the classical ages, was unable to do so; the light of the ancients, permeating the prism of the Christian mediaeval mind, produced not the old but new and unexpected beauties of colour and expression. But if the world had profited from its contact with the spiritual force represented by Christianity, that force had been weakened by its very triumph. The vast wealth of the Church absorbed its leaders in material interests, and made them reluctant to face the need of reform or change in their world; spiritual deadness and corruption, a growing rigidity in intellectual and social life, began to threaten the system after the Black Death; and the slowly growing power of the princes, the changed situation produced by the opening up of the New World and the revival of ancient learning, found the old bottles incapable of containing the new wine. Europe was torn asunder; and the systematic web of thought into which the Christian values had been woven was unravelled, as the result of the erection of individual human judgment at the centre of all knowledge.
Luther separated Religion from Reason and Church Authority; Descartes made a gap between Thought and Reality; Kant divided the Intellect from the Will, and European thought became a chaos. The Church was first subjected to the State, after being robbed of almost all her property— finally, she was excluded entirely from public life. Religion became a "private sphere" apart from the practical world, and so it has remained.
The result has been a gradual transformation of European life, which is now complete. The decay of Christian doctrine under the dissolvent of private judgment led to efforts to find a basis for moral values in the social instinct of man, or the dictates of a "moral sense"—but these were mere quicksands, and, for the more penetrating and daring thinkers, Christian moralism, by the nineteenth century, was already questionable, and a "transvaluation of values" was called for by Nietzsche—not alone.
New social theories, new views of marriage and sexual relations threaten to destroy family life; the dehumanisation of the industrial relations of men—the result of the separation of "Economic law" from Christian ethics —diminishes a sense of moral responsibility as between hostile "classes", while the National State has usurped the place of God and Church in its claims over the minds of men.
Art and Life.
In art, it is noticeable that the rejection of the "Sacramental" view of life, as veiling a greater reality beyond, has led to a complete distortion of the reality even of purely human beauty. Art and life are artificially separated, so that the modern city is a meaningless chaos of "pure practicality" or sheer bad taste, and its people neither care nor understand.
Meanwhile, the poets and artists seek refuge in a dead past, or in fairyland, or throw themselves into the worship of the nation, or the machine. Others, again, express the new "transvaluation of values," breaking through all laws of form and expression, and pursuing ugliness with a passion which finds in the Congo more vital standards than in Athens.
Communism.
Finally, in Communism all the ideas which have tended to the subversion of European values have found their fullest and most systematic expression; and through the crusading fervour of its apostles these ideas are spreading among a mass unconscious of the European tradition, and deprived of all but a vague remnant of Christian knowledge and social instinct.
This is the situation which we are called upon to face. It is no longer possible to hope that the Church will be able to live in a world which tolerates, while not accepting, her system. As the new social doctrines and standards dethrone the old, Europe as we know it will no longer be able to exist. The artificial isolation of "private patches" of individual freedom is already breaking down before the urgency of life. A religion, like ours, which imposes a rigid code of moral values backed by sanctions, which insists upon certain great truths as the most important facts in life, overflows at every point the boundaries allowed to it by the modern political and social organisation. We cannot fit into the new Empire of the machine and the massman; we cannot accept the rigid exterior control which has resulted from an interior chaos which makes freedom impossible.
What does this mean? It means that Catholicism, with the forces allied to it, which stand for the traditional culture of Europe, must regain their control of the world of thought, upon which that of action depends. If we fail to do this, we perish—not entirely, for Christ's promise holds—but so far as our power with the Western nations is concerned. "Antiquam exquirite matrem." It is useless to say "You can't put back the clock." In detail, it is no doubt impossible to restore the past; but, for the reconstruction of the world the revival of sane traditional thought and values is indispensable. This we can do—and we must.
Advocate (Melbourne, Vic. : 1868 - 1954), Thursday 10 August 1933, page 18
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