UPDATED: Christopher Dawson's Profound Understanding Of Modernity

I turn once more to the ideological roots of the Current Crisis and, in an ultimate sense, even of what the Russia Hoax is largely about. Big Picture stuff.

When I was growing up I lived in a house that was full of books, and of great importance for me was my father's collection of books by Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), the great English historian. He's little known now, and sometimes sneeringly referred to as an "autodidact" and enthusiast of the Catholic nostalgia for the Middle Ages. But he was much more than that. Dawson was a philosopher of history--as you can learn from these Dawson references on this blog. In his day he was ranked with such as Toynbee and in the 60s was sought after for lectures at Harvard.

So I was delighted to discover a Twitter feed that preserves the memory of Dawson's profound understanding of the nature of Modernity. Dawson died in 1970, but already in the 1930's he had a clearly developed understanding of the coming tyranny of Modernity that we see emerging in fully developed form around us--Post Modernist, Gramscian Marxism. And the "Church of Vatican II" is among the most ardent converts to the message of the Neo-Gnostic prophet of modernity, Hegel. (See, for example, by the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei: The Roots and Historical Consequences of Modernism)

Of course, such movements of thought or of the human spirit of rebellion, have deep roots. Dawson traced those roots to the Reformation but, as I've tried to show on this blog, the roots go much deeper into the Platonic and Augustinian traditions that are the true Western tradition. Here is the tweet that first caught my attention yesterday, in which Dawson captures in his typically condensed and trenchant form (almost a paradoxical style for a shy, retiring man) the roots of Modernity in the "Reformation":


Christopher Dawson:‏

@cdawsonquotes

What Hegel valued in the Reformation was in fact that it had destroyed the Church as a substantial unity and had restored the unity of human consciousness in one universal objective moral organism — the State.

12:33 PM - 1 Mar 2019

​And this is precisely the agenda of Modernism and of the Church of Vatican II (V2). Rather than two kingdoms, one of which orients Man toward Christ the King who directs Man on earth--with all the limitations of human institutions that implies--toward his transcendent goal, the V2Church rushes to embrace the tragic results of the Protestant Revolt--the State ascendant in all human life, an Ecumenic State for a new Ecumenic Age (Eric Voegelin's term). And this is quite explicit in the V2Church's embrace of and idealization of the two State sects--Anglicanism and Lutheranism, one named for a country, the other for a man.

​This explains, if explanation is needed, the nature of Bergoglio's "ecumenism", which is intended to include all men in a universal earthly State without borders--one State to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. It also explains why the V2Church has no sympathy for persecuted Christians, e.g., in China or in Islamic realms.


First, these Christians are, from the V2Church's point of view, rebels who are resisting Hegel's true divine being, the State,

The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of this objectivity. For Law is the objectivity of Spirit; volition in its true form. Only that will which obeys law, is free; for it obeys itself – it is independent and so free.

Eric Voegelin certainly understood the kinship of these ideas to the self understanding of the world conquering Mongols, and also of Islam: for true believers of this sort, dissent is rebellion against divine law and order, not merely against a human institution. Now, however, the V2Church and Bergoglio, who speaks in its Spirit (as he rarely fails to claim), applies this understanding to persecuted Christians and embraces their persecutors (for one example). Second, the V2Church is all about Euro-Neo-gnosticism, not spreading the faith of what they regard as an obscure Jewish sect that is badly in need of "maturation."​

Here, too, in the V2Church we see the tactical bifurcation that is so typical of Gnostic movements. Just as in Marxist movements there are those who believe that the "right side of history" will evolve gradually to take over the world while other more energetic revolutionaries want Socialism Now, even at the cost of grotesque atrocities, so too with the V2Church. First we had Wojtyła with his decades long World Syncretism Tour (complete with bare breasted maiden lectors). Everyone looked the other way, just as they did with his episcopal appointments. He toed a certain idiosyncratic moral line, and that was good enough for the V2 Neocon crowd. Gradualism. Then we had Ratzinger with his "hermeneutic of continuity." Ratzinger, a key architect of Teilhardian V2ism, has never changed his ideological tune, but as a gentle--not to say effeminate--sort, he devised his hermeneutic so that the Gramscian "march through the institutional Church" would be conducted at more of a stroll than a march. Those with "attachments" to the past would be induced to "accompany" the main body of the V2Church--the end will be the same, but the movement will be more gradual.

Now we have the megalomaniacal and impatient Bergoglio, with his Peronist roots and Soros cronies. His idea of the long march appears to lead him to favor something like a forced march through the institution, with recalcitrants consigned to clerical gulags accompanied by imprecations of consorting with the Devil. We've seen it all before, so many times. From this Bergoglian perspective, the V2Church would prefer that Chinese Catholics simply be Chinese, and that Middle Eastern Catholics simply be Middle Easterners. For the Bergoglians, the obstinate differentness of these Catholic believers from the surrounding dominant State sponsored cultures hampers their efforts at instituting the new syncretist One World Religion to cheerlead for the One Global Order.

So too in America. The roots of Progressivism--which appears to have become the default civic theology of the church in America--are explicitly Hegelian. (For a highly accessible account of Progressivism in America, yet one which captures its spirit in a profound way, see Fred Siegel's The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.) Once again, the bifurcation of tactics can be seen in the "moderates" who advocate gradualism and the impatient, firebrand Socialists.

The American version of the V2Church, as all New Order versions, seeks to be no more than the handmaiden of the State, the State at prayer. Or, perhaps, the State in self affirmation of it's human self consciousness. That's precisely why a new "liturgy" was needed--a liturgy expressly modeled on a modern Protestant and Teilhardian Neo-Gnostic consciousness--to express this new understanding.

There is one God, the State, and Hegel (as interpreted through Teilhard) is its prophet. That's the meaning of V2 and is the kerygma of Bergoglio.

More quotes from Christopher Dawson:
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There is no more sense in asking "What is the use of history" than in asking what is the use of memory. An individual who has lost his memory is a lost individual, and a society that has no history and historical consciousness is a barbarous society. It is as simple as that.

If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what's happened in the case of Europe. The secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and leave man's inner life to religion; it claims the whole man. [Comment: Yes, that's the meaning of totalitarianism, and socialism embodies that ideal]

The victories of Feminism have not really been a victory for feminine ideals or for the feminine point of view. On the contrary, it has involved the progressive invasion of the feminine side of life by masculine ideals.

Behind the modern demagogue and dictator there stands the ghost of some forgotten metaphysician.

What we all tend to forget is the way in which even the most irrational phenomena in the modern world, such as nationalism, racialism and totalitarianism have been conditioned and in some cases created by the philosophies and ideologies of the past.