Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God

Appendix to Chapter 4: Chesterton, Dawson, and Bernanos on the Setting Sun of the West

227 s Concerning the crisis of the West, it is instructive to compare Chesterton with two other Catholic thinkers who dealt with the collapse of Christendom a generation later: Christopher Dawson (1889–1970) and Georges Bernanos (1888–1948). The first was a distinguished Catholic historian, the latter a distinguished Catholic novelist , and they both wrestled with the crisis of Western culture. Because they also shared many of Chesterton’s basic tenets, and because they often quoted him, the three are sometimes regarded as virtual trio of identical voices in their prophecies against the decline and fall of European civilization.1 On the contrary, there is a crucial division within their common Catholic house. Like both Chesterton and Bernanos, Dawson lamented the creeping terror of what Jacques Ellul called “the technological society.” “The whole tendency of modern life,” Dawson wrote, “is toward scientific planning and organization, central control and specialization.” The industrialism and commercialism that Chesterton so thoroughly contemned have found their horrible fulfillment in a moral no less than a political totalitarianism. Above all else, it remains the chief menace to human existence in our time. Remarkably, Dawson does not confine his critique of totalistic governments to the obvious cases of Germany and Russia and China. He excoriates democratic states as well: Chesterton, Dawson, and Bernanos on the Setting Sun of the West Appendix to Chapter 4 228 Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God s In fact all modern states are totalitarian in so far as they seek to embrace the spheres of economics and culture, as well as politics in the strict sense of the word. They are concerned not merely with the maintenance of public order and the defense of the people against its external enemies. They have taken on responsibility for all the different forms of communal activity which were formerly left to the individual or to independent social organizations such as the churches, and they watch over the welfare of their citizens from the cradle to the grave.2 Such omnicompetent governments exercise a moral guardianship over their citizens, Dawson argues, in ways that would have been unimaginable to “the absolute monarchies of the past.”3 More sinister still, these seemingly benign tyrannies work on the assumption that the nation-state exists prior to and thus defines such crucial institutions as the family. Most dreadful of all, they seek to manage the ethical lives of their subjects from a putatively “neutral” stance. In their refusal to order public life to any transcendent conception of truth and justice and goodness—nor to acknowledge the dignity and independence of nongovernmental institutions—our democratic regimes rule by means of a presumed impartiality and tolerance that have proven to be inhumane at best, nihilistic at worst. Reversing Chesterton’s celebrated claim that America is a nation “with the soul of a church,” Dawson declares that the bourgeois liberal state has become a Church without a soul: Religion gradually retreated into man’s inner life and left social and economic life to a civilization which grew steadily more secularized. A man’s debt to religion was paid by an hour or two in church on Sundays, and the rest of the week was devoted to the real business of life—above all, the making of money. Such a division of life into two compartments—and very unequal ones at that—was not the Christian solution, nor could it be permanently successful . If religion loses its hold on social life, it eventually loses its hold on life altogether. And this is what has happened in the case of modern Europe. The new secularized civilization is not content to dominate the outer world and to leave man’s inner life to religion; it claims the whole man. Once more Christianity is faced, as it was at the beginning, with the challenge of a world which will accept no appeal from its judgment and which recognizes no higher power than its own will.4 s Appendix to Chapter 4 229 There is much in these claims that Chesterton would affirm, especially Dawson’s protest against the privatizing of religion in the modern West. To confine religious life largely to the personal sphere of individual conduct, to reduce religious activity to a single day of the week rather than making it an entire way of life, to allow society and politics to go their own unchecked way—this is surely to produce the...