The High Achievement of Christopher Dawson

The High Achievement of Christopher Dawson
By Russell Kirk

“Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought the breath of life to this period for me when I was fed up with Stubbs and Oman and the rest of them. Unfortunately, the boredom that is generated in people’s minds by academic history leads to a positive anti-historicism which seems to be becoming characteristic of modern ‘left-wing’ thought.” So Christopher Dawson wrote to G. K. Chesterton in 1932, when Dawson’s The Making of Europe was published. A historian endowed with imagination, Christopher Dawson restored to historical writing both an understanding of religion as the basis of culture and a moving power of expression. Also, Dawson was a highly learned man and a most conscientious scholar. He and his friends of the “Order” group of Catholics, in the 1930s, were not uncritical of Chesterton and Belloc’s historical views. As Mrs. Scott puts it, the “Order” writers “were to make the point that Catholicism was not always a jolly tavern, nor were Catholics necessarily medievalists, and that Europe was not always the Faith.” Dawson admired Chesterton, but “Belloc he preferred as a poet rather than as a historian, for he considered his views one-sided and unreliable, nor did he feel at home with Belloc’s particular brand of “triumphant Catholicism.”

Dawson, indeed, was a historian so honest and temperate that he was spared most of the slings and arrows commonly directed at English Catholic writers by Protestant adversaries. Yet his being a Catholic convert had a good deal to do with his not obtaining any full-time university post until, at an advanced age, he was invited to Harvard as the first Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies.

Dawson’s writing was done in his own study, among his thousands of books. He was perhaps the last of the great historians so to labour.

Doubtless it was as well that Dawson was not enrolled in the roster of those “academic historians” who bored him. For Dawson’s writing was done in his own study, among his thousands of books. He was perhaps the last of the great historians so to labour. Dawson’s is the sort of history, marked by intellectual penetration and broad confident learning, that Francesco Guicciardini wrote in his splendid study in the Strozzi-Guicciardini palace. (Dawson’s study, though, is not preserved: Dawson and his wife, Valery, shifted somewhat eccentrically from residence to residence.) Like Guicciardini, Dawson had the mind of a statesman; though unlike Guicciardini, Dawson had no opportunity to practice statecraft. For besides being an eminent historian, Dawson was one of the principal social thinkers of this century, much influenced by Troeltsch and Le Play; and Dawson’s writings on the troubles of our time powerfully influenced T. S. Eliot.

For this reviewer, the liveliest parts of this admirable biography by Dawson’s daughter are the sketches of Dawson’s family, early surroundings, and domestic existence. Mrs. Scott shows us a Victorian and Edwardian England of which the vestiges now are being swept away. Dawson was born in 1889 at Hay Castle (today a huge bookshop), on the Welsh border; he inherited a landed property in Yorkshire, Hartlington Hall, though he disliked the duties of a landed proprietor. He accumulated a noble library—part of which he transported to Harvard during his Stillman Professorship, preferring his own books to those of the Harvard stacks. One is reminded of Robert Parkinson, “Rotter,” in Wyndham Lewis’s novel Self Condemned: “Parkinson was the last of a species. Here he was in a large room, which was a private, functional library. Such a literary workshop belonged to the ages of individualism. Its three or four thousand volumes were all book-plated Parkinson. It was really a fragment of paradise where one of our species lived embedded in his books, decently fed, moderately taxed, snug and unmolested.”

Dawson wrote many books, all of them important; this biography has sent me back to re-reading some that I turned to decades ago. In this perspective, it comes home to me that I have been saturated in Dawsonian historical studies, and that my own books reflect Dawson’s concepts. (We never happened to meet, although we had friends in common, among them Father Martin D’Arcy and T. S. Eliot.)

What was Dawson’s principal achievement? It was to show us that all civilizations arise out of religious belief: culture comes from the cult. This understanding, expressed somewhat differently by Arnold Toynbee and somewhat similarly by Eric Voegelin, now begins to dominate the history of ideas, and presently will be reflected in popular histories; Dawson’s studies are winning the day.

And it is not historians only upon whom Dawson’s insights have worked. If one turns to Robert Graves’s novel Seven Days in New Crete (American edition’s title, Watch the North Wind Rise), published in 1948, one encounters an imaginary Brief History of the collapse of civilization in the “post-Christian era” and the eventual renewal of a high culture through cultivation of religious belief. Graves’s religion of the White Goddess is a far cry from Dawson’s Christianity; but the historical analysis of the causes of social decay and the means of social renewal in Graves’s romance are Dawsonian.

The wide range of Dawson’s thought is suggested in the titles of the essays that compose The Dynamic Character: “The Metahistorical Vision of Christopher Dawson” (Russell Hittinger); “The Theology of Recapitulation” (Paul Quay); “The Maturity of Christian Culture” (Glenn Olsen); “Christopher Dawson and Baroque Culture” (R. V. Young); “Christianity, Capitalism, Marxism” (John J. Mulloy); “A Flaw in the Bishops’ Pastoral” (Richard Roach): and recollections of Dawson by Chauncey Stillman. These were papers presented at conferences of The Society for Christian Culture, which organization concerns itself chiefly with Dawson’s work.

Dr. Young expresses succinctly the method of Dawson as a philosophical historian: “For Dawson himself the broad vision of the grand sweep of history is not a means of imposing an a priori, synthetic order on the particularity of human events; it is rather a means of understanding just those particular actions of the historical process by seeing them in a larger context. The crucial factor is that in Dawson’s work the immediate and the particular are not neglected in the interest of the abstract and general. Doubtless this characteristic is ultimately attributable to Dawson’s Christianity—to his belief that a single historical event, the Incarnation, is of absolute and unique importance.”

On Easter day, 1909, young Christopher Dawson sat where Edward Gibbon had sat, on the great steps leading to the church of Santa Maria Aracoeli, In Rome; there and then Dawson determined to write a history of culture; indeed, he vowed it. “However unfit I may be,” he wrote in his journal, “I believe it is God’s will I should attempt it.”

In the corpus of his writings, Dawson succeeded in fulfilling his vow. Gibbon had cast his contemptuous glance upon the monuments of superstition; Dawson saw in those monuments the power and the truth of Christian culture.

It is altogether possible to look “upon such monuments and to despair, as Henry Adams did at Chartres, safely leaving “the Virgin in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their own strength and in God’s providence as they were when Saint Louis was born. but looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, a dead faith.”

There is no doubt that the world is on the move again as never before and that the pace is faster and more furious than anything that man has known before. But there is nothing in this situation which should cause Christians to despair.

But also it is possible, with Christopher Dawson, to hope. As Dawson wrote near the end of his life, “We are living in a world that is far less stable than that of the early Roman Empire. There is no doubt that the world is on the move again as never before and that the pace is faster and more furious than anything that man has known before. But there is nothing in this situation which should cause Christians to despair. On the contrary, it is the kind of situation for which their faith has always prepared them and which provides the opportunity for the fulfilment of their mission.”

The serious study of history virtually has been proscribed in American schools; It is supplanted by “social stew,” or else survives for most young people only in the form of an alleged “world history” founded unconsciously upon Voltaire’s Universal History (in which work there occurs a single mention of Christianity, in connection with Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge). Yet a vigorous and imaginative living historian, John Lukacs (much influenced by Dawson) argues that history will be the chief literary form of the dawning age, and a renewed consciousness of the past may redeem us from many horrors of the present. If this renewal of the historical consciousness does come to pass, Christopher Dawson may yet be chief among its authors.

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Kirk's review was first published in The Chesterton Review, vol. 10 (1984).

Birzer: Christopher Dawson: The Historian of the Twentieth Century

"LOOKING BACK over the vast ruins and wastelands of the twentieth-century, one can find many exemplars of the human condition, many of them devout Roman Catholics who understood clearly that when man forgets God, the killing fields begin. One of the most important Roman Catholic converts of the past century, Christopher Dawson, may have been arguably THE historian of the twentieth century. While the claim may at first seem extreme, there is every reason to at least make him a viable contender.

"Reared in an upper middle-class Protestant family, Mr. Dawson first learned to respect the Roman Catholic church from his father, an open-minded and intellectually-oriented British army officer. Other important influences on Mr. Dawson’s eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism were St. Augustine, from whom Mr. Dawson derived many of his most original thoughts, John Henry Newman, the lives of the saints and mystics, his wife (a cradle Catholic), and his closest friend, E.I. Watkin. Perhaps equally important, on Easter 1909, Mr. Dawson had a profound religious experience while visiting, of all places, Rome."

Continue reading this essay by Bradley J. Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative

"The pathway to reality and the law of life"

“NOW it is not the business of Christianity to defend our secularized Western culture from the menace of social and political revolution. From the Christian point of view there is not much to choose between passive agnosticism or indifferentism and active materialism. In fact, both of them may be different symptoms or phases of the same spiritual disease. What is vital is to recover the moral and spiritual foundations on which the lives of both the individual and the culture depend: to bring home to the average man that religion is not a pious fiction which has nothing to do with the facts of life, but that it is concerned with realities, that it is in fact the pathway to reality and the law of life. This is no easy task, since a completely secularized culture is a world of make-believe in which the figures of the cinema and the cartoon-strip appear more real than the figures of the Gospel; in which the artificial cycle of wage earning and spending has divorced men from their direct contact with the life of the earth and its natural cycle of labor and harvest; and in which, even birth and death and sickness and poverty no longer bring men face to face with ultimate realities, but only bring them into closer dependence on the state and its bureaucracy so that every human need can be met by filling in the appropriate form.”

~Christopher Dawson: Excerpt from The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. XIII—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. (1961)

"The American way of life was built on a threefold tradition..."

THE process of secularization which has accompanied the progress of technology threatens the foundation of American culture no less than the traditional culture of the Old World. The American ideology on which the Constitution was based involved two essential and related concepts—in the first place the philosophy of Natural Law and Natural Rights and secondly the limitation of the power of the state which left the individual citizen free to lead his own life and organize his economic and cultural activities.

According to the old American system, the state or states were concerned with the preservation of law and order and national independence. Everything else—religion, education and economic life—was the sphere of free individual action in which the state had no voice. All this, has been changed in the last hundred years by inevitable historical forces.

The State, that unitary authoritative bureaucratic power, against which the American Revolution was a protest, has returned armed with new powers of supervision and psychological control of which George III never dreamed, while technology has unified the economic life of the nation into a vast system of organization in which every individual has his allotted place.

In the new America the socialization and secularization of education has created an immense professionalized organ for the creation of moral and intellectual uniformity. In this way the constitutional principle of the separateness of Church and State which was intended to secure religious freedom has become the means of secularizing the American mind so that the churches have lost all control over the religious formation of the people. This was not so in the earlier phase of American history when the churches were the chief, and often the only, organs of education and culture.

The American way of life was built on a threefold tradition of freedom—political, economic and religious—and if the new secularist forces were to subjugate these freedoms to a monolithic technological order, it would destroy the foundations on which American culture was based. The American way of life can only maintain its character within the general framework of Western Christian culture. If this relation is lost, something essential to the life of the nation will be lost and American democracy itself will become subordinated to the technological order.

. . . I dealt with this subject in The Judgment of Nations, when in England Catholics and Liberals were forced to stand together against the menace of totalitarianism and when these two principles of Natural Law and the limited or constitutional state were the special object of totalitarian attack.

Today the attack comes from a different quarter, but it is the same principles that are threatened alike by the Communist ideology, which is totalitarian in the same sense as National Socialism, and by the technological secularism which is the enemy within the Western world and which is equally opposed to these fundamental principles. It is only from the standpoint of a living Christian culture that we can defend these principles that are the common foundation of the Western way of life.

~Christopher Dawson: from The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. XIV—American Culture and the Liberal Ideology.       

"A scientific specialist or a technologist is not an educated person"

“THE old domination of classical humanism has passed away, and nothing has taken its place except the scientific specialisms which do not provide a complete intellectual education, and rather tend to disintegrate into technologies. Every educator recognizes that this is unsatisfactory. A scientific specialist or a technologist is not an educated person. He tends to become merely an instrument of the industrialist or the bureaucrat, a worker ant in an insect society, and the same is true of the literary specialist, though his social function is less obvious.”

~Christopher Dawson: The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. X—The Case for the Study of Christian Culture. (1961)

Renaissance Humanism, Reformation and Counter-Reformation

From The Crisis of Western Education
By Christopher Dawson

NORTH of the Alps also the influence of the Italian Renaissance was first felt in university circles, and the leaders of the movement in Germany, France and England, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Lefère d’Etables, Fisher and John Colet, still represented the medieval tradition of clerical learning and ecclesiastical society. Consequently it is not surprising that the Christian aspect of the Renaissance was even more strongly accentuated here that in the South, and the influence of Christian Platonism and of the Florentine Academy was stronger that that of the purely literary humanism of Poggio and Valla. But although this Northern humanism was overtly and consciously Christian, it aroused much sharper opposition from the representatives of the old order than was the case in Italy. The literary quarrels that were so numerous and bitter between the Italian scholars became transformed in the Gothic North into an ideological warfare between conservatives and the modernists in which the latter used the weapons of ridicule and vituperation against the monks and theologians, while the conservatives responded with accusations of heresy and ecclesiastical censures.

For these reasons the Northern humanists have been regarded as the forerunners and even the originators of the Reformation. And to a certain extent this is true. It was the humanists who began the public campaign against the corruptions and superstitions of the late medieval Church, and it was the greatest of them all, Erasmus of Rotterdam, who began the propaganda for a return to Christian antiquity and to the pure evangelical Christianity of the New Testament. Nevertheless the spirit of the German Reformation was entirely different from that of Erasmus, and when its character became plain, no one was more horrified than the humanists. It was a revolutionary movement of the most far-reaching kind which embodied all the elements in Northern Europe that were most alien from the ideals of the new humanists culture of the Mediterranean world. Its great leader, Martin Luther, was the supreme example of the antihumanist spirit, the enemy of moderation and human reason, an individualist who denied human freedom, a man of passion who condemned nature, a conservative who rejected tradition.

This inherent contradiction between Protestantism and Humanism became overt in the early years of the Reformation in the controversy between Luther and Erasmus on the Freedom of the Will, which led to a bitter antagonism between the two leaders and to the progressive estrangement of the German Reformation from the humanist culture. In this field, however, the success of Luther was far less complete than in the sphere of religion and politics. He destroyed the spiritual unity of medieval Christendom, the Roman order and the Catholic hierarchy together with the institutions and beliefs on which the medieval culture had been founded, above all the monastic orders, which had been for centuries the chief representatives of the higher culture and the teachers of the Christian people. And by so doing, there was generated, for the first time in Western history, a revolutionary attitude towards the past and to the inherited norms of culture. As Döllinger wrote, the new generations in the schools and universities “were taught to despise past generations and consequently their own ancestors as willingly plunged in error” and to believe “that the Popes and bishops, the theologians and the universities, the monasteries and all the teaching corporations had formed for centuries a vast conspiracy to deform and suppress the teaching of the Gospel.”*

This revolutionary change was even more serious than we can realize today, owing to its destructive effects on the mind of the masses and the education of the common people. In the Middle Ages that education has never been a matter of book learning. The main channels of Christian culture were, liturgical and artistic. The life of the community centered in the Church, in the performance of the liturgy and the cult of the Saints. The annual cycle of feasts and fasts was the background of social life, and every vital moment in the life of the community found in it an appropriate ritual and sacramental expression. Architecture and painting and sculpture, music and poetry were all enlisted in its service, and no one was too poor or too uneducated to share in its mysteries.

Now all this was swept away in the course of a single generation and a new Protestant culture had to be built up based almost exclusively on the study of the bible and the dogmatic theology of the new sects. There was a complete ideological separation between Catholic and Protestant Europe. Truth in one country was heresy in another; even the fundamental conceptions of the Christian life, or moral perfection, of sanctity and salvation were different.

If therefore the religious revolution of the Reformation had developed to its logical conclusion, there can be no doubt that Western Europe would have ceased to exist as a cultural unity. There would have been two completely separate cultures in the Protestant North and the Catholic South, divided by an iron curtain of persecution and repression which would, have made the two parts of Europe as alien and incomprehensible from one another as Christendom was from Islam.

For there were humanists in both camps from the first, and in spite of their theological opposition they remained in substantial agreement in their educational ideals and their concept of humane learning. It is true that the majority if the Northern humanists followed the example of Erasmus and soon lost whatever sympathies they had with the Protestant Reformers. But these were exceptions to the rule, especially in the younger generation, and the most important of these exceptions, Melanchthon, did all in his power to check the breakdown of culture and to establish a sound traditions of Protestant education. But his success was a very limited one, for German humanism never recovered from the shock of the Reformation. In the West, however, the situation was different. French Protestantism from the first found wide support in humanist circles. Calvin himself fully appreciated the importance of education and study. Wherever the Calvinists went, from Transylvania to Massachusetts, they brought with them not only the Bible and Calvin’s Institutes, but the Latin grammar and the study of the classics.

Meanwhile in Catholic Europe the influence of Christian humanism continued to develop. The leaders of Catholic culture in the age of the Reformation, like Cardinal Sadoleto’s treatise de liberis recte instituendis (1530) explains the ideals of humanism in their most mature form. After the Council of Trent the situation was changed by the Counter-Reformation and the drastic measures that were taken to repress Protestantism arid to reassert the control of the Church over literature and education. But there was no breach in the continuity of culture such as occurred in the North. The tradition of popular culture remained unchanged, and the Church used the new art and music and drama as the church of the Middle Ages had dome in the past. It was this permeation of Renaissance art and literature by the religious spirit of the Catholic revival which gave rise to the Baroque culture which in the seventeenth century spread over the whole of Catholic Europe and extended its influence into the North, in very much the same way as the Gothic art and culture had expanded four centuries earlier, in the opposite direction.

The carriers of this culture were the new religious orders, above all the Society of Jesus, which played a similar part in European culture in that later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to that which the Benedictines had played in the early Middle Ages or the Franciscans and Dominicans in the thirteenth century. Like them, the Jesuits owed their influence above all to their educational activities; and as the Benedictines had based their teaching on an adaption of the classical education of the later Roman Empire to Christian aims, so now the Jesuits adapted the new classical education of the humanists of the Renaissance to the religious ideals of the Counter-Reformation. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum belongs to the same tradition as that of the humanist treatises on education of which I have spoken above. It was, however, more limited and more practical in its aims. Its originality lay in its technique and organization rather than in its subject matter. Nevertheless it did more than anything else to establish a common international standard of higher education, so that even in Protestant Europe the Jesuit schools met with the approval if such a revolutionary critic of education as Francis Bacon.**
_______________________

* Dollinger, The Reformation in Its Relations with the Schools and Universities and the Education of Youth in the Reformation, vol. I, p.397. (French trans.)

** “As for the Pedagogical part, she shortest rule would be ‘consult the schools of the Jesuits,’ for nothing better has been put in practice.” Bacon, de Augmentis Scientiarum, Bk. VI, ch. iv.

Source: Christopher Dawson. The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. III, “The Age of Humanism,” pp. 26-30.

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“The Christian interpretation of history is inseparable from the Christian faith"

“THE Christian interpretation of history is inseparable from the Christian faith. It is not a philosophic theory which has been elaborated by the intellectual effort of Christian scholars. It is an integral part of the Christian revelation; indeed that revelation is essentially an historic one, so that the most metaphysical of its dogmas are based upon historical facts and form part of that great dispensation of grace in which the whole temporal process of the life of humanity finds its end and meaning. In this respect Catholicism and Communism agree, in spite of the absolute contradiction that characterizes their several interpretations of history. For Communism is also an historic faith and the materialist interpretation of history is no less fundamental to Communism than is the spiritual interpretation of history to Christianity. The economic doctrines of Marxism are based on history to an almost greater extent than the theological doctrines of Catholicism; and a Socialism which professes Communism and Materialism without the doctrine of Marx has no more right to be called Marxism than a religion which accepts the ethical and theological teachings of Christianity while rejecting the historic elements of the faith has a right to the name of Catholicism.”

~Christopher Dawson: from History and the Christian Revelation. (1935)