There is always a danger in speaking of so wide and deep a question as that of Christian culture that we may be speaking at cross-purposes. It is therefore just as well to start by defining our terms. When I speak of culture I am not thinking of the cultivation of the individual mind, which was the usual sense of the word in the past, but of a common social way of life—a way of life with a tradition behind it, which has embodied itself in institutions and which involves moral standards and principles. Every historic society has such...

The question which I have taken as the title for the present chapter is one of the vital questions of our times. It is very necessary that we should ask it, yet the fact that we are doing so is a symptom of the state of doubt and uncertainty in which modern man exists. For in the past it was no problem to the ordinary man. Everyone thought—however mistakenly—that he knew what Christian civilization was; no one doubted that it was possible; and most people would have said that it was the only form of civilization possible for...

In spite of the unity and continuity of the Christian tradition, each of the successive ages of the Church’s history possesses its own distinctive character, and in each of them we can study a different facet of Christian life and culture. I reckon that there are six of these ages, each lasting for three or four centuries and each following a somewhat similar course. Each of them begin, and end, in crisis; and all of them, except perhaps the first, pass through three phases of growth and decay. First there is a period of intense spiritual activity when the Church...

The science of culture—culture history, cultural morphology and the comparative study of cultures—is of very recent origin. It grew up in the nineteenth century with the development of the new social sciences, above all anthropology, and it had no place in the traditional curriculum of liberal education. But during the present century its development has been rapid, especially perhaps in Germany and in America, so that today it is no longer confined to scientific specialists but has been adopted, however superficially, by publicists and politicians and has a growing influence on modern social thought.

Nevertheless there still remains...

We cannot separate culture from religion any more than we can separate our life from our faith. As a living faith must change the life of the believer, so a living religion must influence and transform the social way of life—that is to say, the culture. It is impossible to be a Christian in church and a secularist or a pagan outside. Even a Christian minority, which lives a hidden and persecuted life, like the early Christians in the ages of the catacombs, possesses its own patterns of life and thought, which are the seeds of a new culture....

We have become accustomed to taking the secular character of modern civilization for granted. We have most of us never known anything else and consequently we are apt to think that this is a natural and normal state of things, so that whatever our own beliefs may be, we do not expect modern civilization to pay much attention to religion, still less to be based upon a religious conception of existence.

Actually, of course, this state of things is far from being normal; on the contrary, it is unusual and perhaps unique. If we look back and out over the...

The survival of a civilization depends on the continuity of its educational tradition. A common educational system creates a common world of thought with common intellectual values and a common inheritance of knowledge, which makes a society conscious of its identity and gives it a common memory of its past. Consequently any breach in the continuity of the educational tradition involves a corresponding breach in the continuity of the civilization; so that if the breach were a complete one, it would be far more revolutionary than any political or economic change, since it would mean the birth of a new...

During the last four or five centuries, the expansion of Christianity in the non-European world has been associated with the expansion of Western colonial power. The missionaries went hand in hand with the European explorers and traders and conquerors who sailed unknown seas and discovered new continents or found new contacts with ancient peoples; indeed to a great extent the missionaries were themselves the pioneers in the work of discovery. Consequently it was inevitable that the peoples of the Far East and Africa and the island world of the Pacific should have seen Christianity as something essentially Western, as the...

The following essays¹ cover so wide a field in space and time that it may be difficult for the reader at first sight to grasp their connection with one another. True, they all deal with some aspect of “medieval” culture, but the word medieval is in itself unsatisfactory or insignificant. It was coined by post-Renaissance scholars to cover the gap between two periods of positive achievement which were regarded as the only ones worthy of the attention of the educated man—the classical civilization of Greece and Rome and the civilization of modern Europe. But this conception is the very...

The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and everyone of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution. The one remaining problem that we have got to consider is where that religious solution is to be found. Must we look for some new religion to meet the new circumstances of the changing world, or does the Christian faith still supply the answer that we need?

In the first place, it is obvious that it is no light matter to throw over the Christian tradition. It means a good deal more...

The existence of europe is the basis of the historical development of the modern world, and it is only in relation to that fact that the development of each particular state can be understood. Nevertheless it is a submerged reality of which the majority of men are only half conscious. For the last century and more, the whole trend of education and politics and public opinion has tended to develop the consciousness of nationality and to stress the importance of the nation-state, while leaving Europe in the background as a vague abstraction or as nothing more than a geographical expression....

If europe owes its political existence to the Roman Empire and its spiritual unity to the Catholic Church, it is indebted for its intellectual culture to a third factor—the Classical Tradition—which is also one of the fundamental elements that have gone to the making of the European unity.

It is indeed difficult for us to realise the extent of our debt, for the classical tradition has become so much a part of Western culture that we are no longer fully conscious of its influence on our minds. Throughout European history this tradition has been the constant foundation of...

It is not possible to discuss the modern situation either from the point of view of religion or politics without using the word “culture.” But the word has been used in so many different senses and is capable of so many shades of meaning that it is necessary to say something at the outset as to the sense in which I am going to use it, in order to avoid unnecessary confusion.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives three senses—tillage, improvement by mental or physical training, and intellectual development. None of these however is precisely the sense in which the...

The conception of a planned society has had a revolutionary effect on social thought and political action during the last twenty years and its importance is still hardly realized by public opinion. Yet it is possible that it marks a change in human civilization greater than anything that has occurred since the end of the stone age and the rise of the archaic cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia and the valleys of the Indus and the Yellow River.

No doubt it is implicit in the idea of applied science, as was already perceived by the men of the Renaissance such...

The development of an historical sense—a distinct consciousness of the essential characteristics of different ages and civilizations—is a relatively recent achievement; in fact it hardly existed before the nineteenth century. It is above all the product of the Romantic movement which first taught men to respect the diversity of human life, and to regard culture not as an abstract ideal but as the vital product of an organic social tradition. No doubt, as Nietzsche pointed out, the acquisition of this sixth sense is not all pure gain, since it involves the loss of that noble self-sufficiency and maturity...

The problem of the relations of Christianity to History has been very much complicated and, I think, obscured by the influence of nineteenth-century philosophy. Almost all the great idealist philosophers of that century, like Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, constructed elaborate philosophies of history which had a very considerable influence on the historians, especially in Germany, and on the theologians also. All these systems were inspired or coloured by Christian ideas and they were consequently eagerly accepted by Christian theologians for apologetic purposes. And thus there arose an alliance between idealist philosophy and German theology which became characteristic of the...

No one can look at the history of Western civilization during the present century without feeling dismayed at the spectacle of what modern man has done with his immense resources of new knowledge and new wealth and new power. And if we go back to the nineteenth century and read the words of the scientists and the social reformers or the liberal idealists and realize the mood of unbounded hope and enthusiasm in which this movement of world change was launched, the contrast is even more painful. For not only have we failed to realize the ideals of the nineteenth...