"Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers"
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A historian of religion insisting on the limits of “revelation” is already playing a double game. Dawson isn’t cheering secular modernity so much as describing its signature temptation: the feeling that the world is finally legible without God, that existence can be managed as a self-contained human project. The phrasing is clinical and bracingly unromantic. “Can know” and “can live” land like statements of capability, not triumph, as if he’s sketching a new competence that comes with a hidden cost.
The subtext sits in that quietly loaded “without falling back.” Revelation becomes a kind of crutch modern people believe they’ve outgrown. Dawson’s real target is the psychology of autonomy: “utter dependence” reads less like theology than like a diagnosis of what modern consciousness refuses to feel. He’s pointing to a cultural mood in which transcendence isn’t argued against; it’s rendered unnecessary by the sheer availability of alternative explanations, institutions, and routines that simulate moral and existential self-sufficiency.
Context matters: Dawson wrote in a Europe shattered by mechanized war and in the shadow of totalizing ideologies that promised meaning without mystery. His worry isn’t that people will become ignorant; it’s that they’ll become competent in a way that flattens the human scale of awe, obligation, and limits. The line works because it avoids sermonizing. It names a possibility - life without supernatural dependence - and lets the reader feel the chill: not “is it true,” but “what kind of person, and what kind of society, does that possibility produce?”
The subtext sits in that quietly loaded “without falling back.” Revelation becomes a kind of crutch modern people believe they’ve outgrown. Dawson’s real target is the psychology of autonomy: “utter dependence” reads less like theology than like a diagnosis of what modern consciousness refuses to feel. He’s pointing to a cultural mood in which transcendence isn’t argued against; it’s rendered unnecessary by the sheer availability of alternative explanations, institutions, and routines that simulate moral and existential self-sufficiency.
Context matters: Dawson wrote in a Europe shattered by mechanized war and in the shadow of totalizing ideologies that promised meaning without mystery. His worry isn’t that people will become ignorant; it’s that they’ll become competent in a way that flattens the human scale of awe, obligation, and limits. The line works because it avoids sermonizing. It names a possibility - life without supernatural dependence - and lets the reader feel the chill: not “is it true,” but “what kind of person, and what kind of society, does that possibility produce?”
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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