A 20th century Augustine.

Christopher Dawson, The Dynamics of World History, edited by John J. Mulloy, Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Boks, 2002, 512 pages. Hard cover $29.95 U.S.

This is the third edition of The Dynamics of World History which first appeared on the scene in 1957. It is a large book with a new typesetting and new pagination, easier to read than the original.

The thirty-one essays selected by Mulloy comprise 416 pages. The long "after-word" by Mulloy together with the sources, notes and index increase the number of pages to 512. With the original introduction and the 1978 one by Mulloy, and a new one by Dr. Dermot Quinn, the total is 551 pages. The book has a lovely cover featuring a 16th-century map of the world with the Latin inscription--Orbis Terrarum typus de integro multis in locis emendatus. John Mulloy divided his selection of Dawson essays into two parts: "Towards a Sociology of History" and "Conception of World History." Part one is subdivided into three sections: "The Sociological Foundations of History," "The movement of world history," and "Urbanism and the organic nature of culture." Part two comprises two sections: "Christianity and the meaning of history," and "The vision of the historian." They cover a period of 34 years, the earliest being "Sociology and the theory of progress" (1921), and the last "Arnold Toynbee and the study of history" (1955) , but the majority are from the 20's and the 30's, thus focusing on the earlier Dawson.

Dawson was fortunate in having an editor such as John Mulloy. His original introduction gave the essential historical background on Daw son and his "after-word" is an excellent 55-page essay analyzing Dawson's views on the nature of culture, the types of culture change, and the conception of world history. It is unfortunate, however, that the present index omits many of the detailed analyses of topics which Mulloy did for the original edition. It covered 11 pages and constituted a most valuable guide to many of the cultures, civilizations, themes, and key figures in the book. Change is not always progress. On the plus side there are the Mulloy introduction to the 1978 edition and the one by Professor Quinn whose 22 pages sparkle with flashes of Irish wit, devastating criticism of some present trends in the world of academic historians, and lucid analysis of Dawson the historian of cultures and civilizations. A couple of quotations will give one the flavour.

"Consider the reaction of a recent historian, Norman Davies, who has claimed that Dawson's Catholic thesis does not illuminate the pluralism of recent centuries. Here is a judgement all too typical of the modern professorate--confident, impressive, and wrong."

"Dawson believed in direction and purpose in history, a Catholic 'thesis' of sorts. Yet, to imagine him a naive providentialist, a Bossuet de nosjours, is itself naive. Dawson was subtler than those who reduce his complex account of civilizations to a kind of Catholic cartoon."

This is a book for someone who has already read some of Dawson's historical books such as The Age of the Gods (1928), Progress and Religion (1929), and The Making of Europe (1932). It is rather heavy going as an initiation to the world of Christopher Dawson, the historian of culture. With regards to the essays in the three sections of part one and the first section in part two, I would read them in chronological order rather than that chosen by Mulloy, since this approach would give the reader a clear idea of the consistency of Dawson's approach to the study of cultures and civilizations over a 34 year period.

There is a passage in Dawson's Tradition and Inheritance (1949), in which he remarks "that it was as a young child that he began to view history not as a flat expanse of time measured off in dates, but as a series of different worlds, each with its own spirit and form and its own riches of poetic imagination." In Art and Society, section I, part one, he develops this point of view--for Art in the widest sense of the word is the great bridge which crosses the gulf of mutual incomprehension that separates cultures.

To understand the art of a society, he says, it is to understand the vital activity of that society in its most intimate and creative moments. "No amount of detailed and accurate external knowledge will compensate for the lack of that immediate vision which springs from the comprehension of a social tradition as a living unity, a vision which is the natural birth-right of those who share in the common experience of the society, but which members of other cultures can only obtain by an immense effort of sympathetic imagination.

Hence an appreciation of art is of the first importance to the historian and the sociologist, and it is only by viewing social life itself as an artistic activity that we can understand its full meaning."

Section II, Religion and the life of civilization, shows Dawson's remarkable ability to highlight the different religious views of Reality through the use of apt quotations. I will give two examples. Here is a passage from the Brihadaranyaka Unpanishad translated by L.D. Barnett, reflecting the ancient adage:

"He who, dwelling in the mind, is other than the mind, whom the mind knows not, whose body the mind is, who inwardly rules the mind, is the Self, the Inward Ruler, the deathless...All else is fraught with sorrow."

The second one expresses the revolutionary attitude of the 19th- century anarchists, socialists, and nihilists.

"It is the spirit which seeks not political reform, not the improvement of social conditions, but escape, liberation--Nirvana." In the words of a modern poet (Francis Adams), it is "To wreck the great guilty temple, and give us rest.

In section III, we have four essays on the essentially bourgeois character of the modern industrial city and modern civilization which lives for and by the world market. Dawson shows how revolutionary this movement is by comparing it with European culture and English culture that existed before the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. To my mind, the best essay is "Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind" in which he brings the Baroque culture, medieval culture, and even the world of the Gospel into the picture. He draws upon Weiner Sombart's study of the historical evolution of the bourgeois type and his depiction of the bourgeois soul.

"For the bourgeois was originally the middleman who stood between the producer and the consumer, as merchant or salesman or broker or banker... The bourgeois lives for money, not merely as the peasant or the soldier, or even the artists often does, but in a deeper sense, since money is to him what arms are to the soldier and land is to the peasant. In short, the bourgeois is essentially a moneymaker, at once its servant and its master, and the development of his social ascendancy shows the degree to which civilization and human life are dominated by the money power.

In Part II, there are four essays dealing with Christianity and the meaning of history, and in two of them Dawson wanders over the centuries from ancient Israel to modern Europe. For a Catholic like Dawson, the meaning of history centres on the Incarnation and the mystery of the Cross which he highlights especially in St. Paul, St. John, and St. Augustine. This results in the Christian view of history as being profoundly tragic, in comparison with the idealist current in many forms of modern Christianity, but also as conveying a profound message of hope centred in the kingdom of God and the theology of grace. One is struck by how often Dawson repeats that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not the gospel of J.J. Rousseau in its 20th- century forms. Joanna Manning and Michael Higgins take note!

When Our Lord spoke of the future, He gave His disciples no optimistic hopes, no visions of social progress. He described all the things we are afraid of today and more--wars, persecutions, disasters, and the distress of nations. But strange to say, He used this forecast of calamity as a motive for hope. "When you see these things," He said, "look up and lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand."

Finally, in section II, we have eight essays, six of which focus on either actual historians such as Gibbon, Wells, Spengler, and Toynbee, or figures whose vision of history influenced subsequent generations such as Augustine and Marx. To appreciate their distinctive qualities, one has only to compare them with other studies of these figures as I did as a graduate student in history many moons ago. Consider the following from St. Augustine and the City of God, and the spiritual law of gravity.

"Thus the sociology of St. Augustine is based on the same psychological principle which pervades his whole thought--the principle of the all-importance of the will and the sovereignty of love. The power of love has the same importance in the spiritual world as the force of gravity possesses in the physical world. As a man's love moves him, so must he go....

And though the desires of men appear to be infinite, they are in reality reducible to one. All men desire happiness, all seek after peace, and all their lusts and hates and hopes and fears are directed to that final end

The two tendencies of will produce two kinds of men and two types of society, and so we finally come back to the great generalization on which St. Augustine's work is founded. "Two loves built two cities"...The earthly, which is built up by the love of self to the contempt of God, and the heavenly, which is built up by the love of God to the contempt of self (324-325).

Edward King is a long-time student of Dawson's writings. He lives in Ottawa, ON.