“EVERYWHERE man’s way of life is capable of being guided and informed by the spirit of religious faith. But, however completely a culture may seem to be dominated by religion, there remains a fundamental dualism between the order of culture which is a part of the order of nature and the principle of faith which transcends the natural order and finds its centre outside the world of man.
“It is this conception of the intervention of a transcendent divine principle in the life of man which none the less retains its roots in the earth and in the order of nature that renders the history of Christian culture so difficult to investigate and the ideal of Christian culture so hard to realize. But it is a problem that we cannot afford to ignore. In the past the problem was simplified by the existence of a common religious tradition and a common standard of literary culture which were generally accepted by Christians and educationalists. Today these common traditions have been abandoned by the rulers of the modern State and the planners of modern society, while at the same time the latter have come to exercise a more complete control over the thought and life of the whole population than the most autocratic and authoritarian powers of the past ever possessed. In this situation the work of men like Mr. T. S. Eliot who are able to meet the planners and sociologists on their own ground without losing sight of the real spiritual issues may be of decisive importance for the future of our culture.”
~Christopher Dawson: from “T. S. Eliot on the Meaning of Culture.” (1949)
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
God seen as hostile by Martin Luther
IT is true that Luther’s own religious experience was both genuine and profound, but it was not the positive intuition of the contemplative; it was a dark and tormented sense of man’s utter helplessness and of the otherness of the Divine Power. For his discarding of the intellectual element in religion had brought his mind back, as it were, to the religious attitude of primitive man who sees the Divine as an unknown and hostile power from which it recoils in terror, “Yea,” he writes,
“God is more terrible and frightful than the Devil, for he dealeth with us and bringeth to ruin with power, smiteth and hammereth us and payeth no heed to us. ‘In His majesty He is a consuming fire,’ For therefrom can no man refrain; if he thinketh on God aright his heart in his body is stricken with terror. . . . Yea, as soon as he heareth God named he is filled with trepidation and fear.
“For He assaileth a man and has such a delight therein that He is of His Jealousy and Wrath impelled to consume the wicked.”
But Luther’s personal attitude is decidedly abnormal and nonrepresentative; the normal Protestant religious experience is of the milder and more emotional type represented by pietism and revivalism. Here faith is no longer conceived as a super-rational knowledge founded on the Divine Reason, but as a subjective conviction of one’s own conversion and justification, and in place of the personal ecstasy of the mystic, who realizes his own nothingness, we have the self-conscious attitude of the pietist, who is intensely preoccupied with his own feelings and with the moral state of his neighbor. And this substitution if the ideal of pietism for those of asceticism and mysticism eventually led to the weakening and discrediting of the ethical ideals of Christianity, just as sectarianism undermined its social authority. however unjust may be the popular caricature of the pietist as a snuffling hypocrite of the type of Tribulation Wholesome or Zeal-of-the Land Busy or Mr. Chadband, there can be no doubt that Puritan and Evangelical pietism succeeded in making religion supremely unattractive in a way that medieval asceticism had never done.
~Christopher Dawson: Christianity and the New Age, Chap. III.
“God is more terrible and frightful than the Devil, for he dealeth with us and bringeth to ruin with power, smiteth and hammereth us and payeth no heed to us. ‘In His majesty He is a consuming fire,’ For therefrom can no man refrain; if he thinketh on God aright his heart in his body is stricken with terror. . . . Yea, as soon as he heareth God named he is filled with trepidation and fear.
“For He assaileth a man and has such a delight therein that He is of His Jealousy and Wrath impelled to consume the wicked.”
But Luther’s personal attitude is decidedly abnormal and nonrepresentative; the normal Protestant religious experience is of the milder and more emotional type represented by pietism and revivalism. Here faith is no longer conceived as a super-rational knowledge founded on the Divine Reason, but as a subjective conviction of one’s own conversion and justification, and in place of the personal ecstasy of the mystic, who realizes his own nothingness, we have the self-conscious attitude of the pietist, who is intensely preoccupied with his own feelings and with the moral state of his neighbor. And this substitution if the ideal of pietism for those of asceticism and mysticism eventually led to the weakening and discrediting of the ethical ideals of Christianity, just as sectarianism undermined its social authority. however unjust may be the popular caricature of the pietist as a snuffling hypocrite of the type of Tribulation Wholesome or Zeal-of-the Land Busy or Mr. Chadband, there can be no doubt that Puritan and Evangelical pietism succeeded in making religion supremely unattractive in a way that medieval asceticism had never done.
~Christopher Dawson: Christianity and the New Age, Chap. III.
Portrait of Martin Luther, by Lucas the Elder Cranach.
1543, panel; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
Friday, June 12, 2015
"The recovery of the spiritual vision"
“IT is necessary that Christians should remember that it is not the business of the Church to do the same thing as the State—to build a Kingdom like other kingdoms of men, only better; nor to create a reign of earthly peace and justice. The Church exists to be the light of the world, and if it fulfills its function, the world is transformed in spite of all the obstacles that human powers place in the way. A secularist culture can only exist, so to speak, in the dark. It is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality. But as soon as the light comes, all the elaborate mechanism that has been constructed for living in the dark becomes useless. The recovery of the spiritual vision gives man back his spiritual freedom. And hence the freedom of the Church is in the faith of the Church and the freedom of man is in the knowledge of God.”
~Christopher H. Dawson: History and the Christian Revelation. (1935)
~Christopher H. Dawson: History and the Christian Revelation. (1935)
The Church as the Path to Salvation (east wall), by Andea da Firenze.
Fresco, 1366-67; Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
"Rome that killed Rome"
“FOR it was literally Rome that killed Rome. The great cosmopolitan city of gold and marble, the successor of Alexandria and Antioch, had nothing in common with the old capital of the rural Latin state. It served no social function, it was an end in itself, and its population drawn from every nation under heaven existed mainly to draw their Government doles, and to attend the free spectacles with which the Government provided them. It was a vast useless burden on the back of the empire which broke at last under the increasing strain.”
~Christopher Dawson: Progress and Decay. (1924)
~Christopher Dawson: Progress and Decay. (1924)
Capriccio with the Colosseum, by Bernardo Bellotto.
Oil on canvas, 1743-44; Galleria Nazionale, Parma.
Oil on canvas, 1743-44; Galleria Nazionale, Parma.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
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.
+ + +
Kirk's review was first published in The Chesterton Review, vol. 10 (1984).
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.
+ + +
Kirk's review was first published in The Chesterton Review, vol. 10 (1984).
Friday, May 8, 2015
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
"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)
~Christopher Dawson: Excerpt from The Crisis of Western Education, Ch. XIII—The Religious Vacuum in Modern Culture. (1961)
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