Christopher Dawson: Part III.

The crisis of Christian culture

In part one of the Christopher Dawson articles (March, 2001, pp. 32-37,) Edward King introduced Dawson on the subject of the "secularization of Christian culture." There we find Dawson's key insight that "the political problems of the modern world are in the last resort religious." Dawson discusses this under the headings "The spiritual vacuum," the "Leviathan state," the "age of Frankenstein," and "state control of the mind."

In part II (April, pp. 34-36,) Mr. King set forth Dawson's personal itinerary and how his studies led him to dwell on society's all-important "need for spiritual vision." In this, the third and final installment, we look at Dawson's attempt to bring about a turnaround in the steady impoverishment and decline of religious culture through Catholic colleges and education.

Editor

Education: the study of Christian culture

At the end of the same year, 1944, Canon Vigo Demant of the Anglican Christendom group asked Dawson to contribute to a symposium dealing with "Our Culture: Its historical roots and present crisis." This was eventually published in book form in 1947, Dawson chose as his theme, "The Crisis of Christian Culture: Education." Perhaps Hitler wanted to underline in his own way the nature of the crisis, since Canon Demant remarked that the lecturers deserved a special word of gratitude over and above that due to them, for putting their knowledge and insight at the disposal of the lectureship:

"The lectures were delivered in the period of the flying-bomb attacks upon London in which Dulwich suffered very heavily. One or two lectures were interrupted by near-by explosions while speaker and audience took refuge under the seats. Before the course was completed the chaplain lost his house and the college was so seriously damaged that the later lectures had to be postponed for six months (v-vi)."

I don't know if Christopher Dawson was one of the speakers who took refuge under the seats, but this particular lecture is of great significance, since it inaugurated, one might say, Dawson's campaign for the renewal of Western culture through the study of Christian culture. This 'cause' as he called it, was to preoccupy him for the next 17 years, 1945-1962. After the Gifford Lectures in 1947-1948, there began a steady stream of lectures and articles devoted to the cause of Christian culture, the majority of them in American magazines and journals. This was due, I think, to the influence of his American disciple John J. Mulloy, a high-school history teacher, who visited Dawson in the summer of 1953 and became aware of how important this mission was for the cause of Christian culture.

Campaign for renewal

This campaign in the world of the university to save Western culture from committing suicide through the study of Christian culture, I believe, is Christopher Dawson's unique contribution to the Catholic Revival. If it is ultimately successful, it may well be the turning point in the conversion of modern culture. No doubt the modern popes emphasized the importance of Catholic education in sustaining the Catholic way of life in a secularized world, as did also such laymen as Maritain and Gilson. But their plans are not comparable, it seems to me, to Dawson's six periods of Christian culture in scope and depth, nor did they make it a 'cause' or mission to the same extent as did Christopher Dawson.

It is interesting that the 1944 lecture linking the crisis of Christian culture to the movement of education was also published two years later in a new journal launched by the Belgian Jesuits, Lumen Vitae. As the title suggests it was concerned with bringing the light of Catholic faith and culture into the darkness of modern life and modern education. Dawson's lecture, with its title turned to "Education and the Crisis of Christian culture" was chosen as the lead article in Vol. 1, No. 2, June 1946.

The present crisis in Western culture is due to the separation of modern culture from its religious basis, "a disastrous process." People in general are not sufficiently aware of how great the responsibility of education has been for this crisis, nor have educationalists really faced the disconcerting fact that the more education has advanced, the more secularized has modem civilization become:

"The time has come for us to retrace our steps, to see what we have lost in two centuries of economic progress and world conquest, and to consider how we can recover contact with the essential realities on which the existence of our civilization depends. If we admit (as I think we all do in principle) that Western culture was a Christian creation, that Europe is the daughter of Christendom, we ought to pay more attention to this truth in our educational theory and practice than we have done during the past. I don't think we can say that the average young man or woman leaves their school or university with any clear conception of this fact" (206).

Dawson defines education in the anthropological sense as the initiation of new members into the way of life and thought of a particular community. Thus, Christian education is the initiation into the Christian way of life and thought, and European peoples have been submitted to this influence for 1200 years more or less--from the 5th to the 17th century--a tradition which created the ethical values and vision of reality which inspired the most characteristic achievements of European culture:

"Today religious education is apt to be considered a kind of extra, insecurely tacked on to the general educational structure not unlike a Gothic church in a modern housing estate. But in the past it was the foundation on which the whole edifice of culture was based and which was deeply embedded below the surface of social consciousness" (207).

It was the liturgy that was the source from which the Christian tradition of education and culture arose, and it was accompanied by a development of religious poetry and music and art "which was the first fruits of Christian culture." At this point, Dawson makes a drastic criticism of modern education including religious education:

"Thus Christian education was not only an initiation into the Christian community, it was also an initiation into Another World; the unveiling of spiritual realities of which the natural man was unaware and which changed the meaning of existence. And I think it is here that our modern education--including our religious education--has proved defective. There is in it no sense of revelation. It is accepted as instruction, sometimes as useful knowledge, often as tiresome task work in preparation for some examination, but nowhere do we find that joyful sense of the discovery of a new and wonderful reality which inspired true Christian culture. All true religious education leads up to the contemplation of divine mysteries, and where this is lacking, the whole culture becomes weakened and divided" (207).

If this is so, then the Protestant Sunday School approach and the Catholic catechism approach are radically insufficient. Christians must go beyond the Reformation to the 5th century and the approach of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem and of Saint Augustine if they are to recover their tradition and convert the modern world.

How was this tradition of Christian education and culture lost? Dawson traces the beginning of this process to the Reformation in Northern Europe, which destroyed the liturgical character of popular culture and caused a great breach in the historical continuity of Christian tradition. There were now two traditions of Christian education--the liturgical Catholic and the Biblical Protestant--and in the latter he saw an important change in psychological approach: "It emphasized the literary element in education at the expense of the aesthetic and it increased the importance of the individual as against the community" (209).

Utilitarianism 

But the decisive step in the secularization of the Christian tradition of education and culture Dawson attributes to the combined influence of Renaissance and Reformation, which tended to increase the practical and utilitarian elements of culture:

"Both the Byzantine East and the medieval West had shared the same ideal of contemplation and spiritual vision as the supreme end and justification of all human culture: an ideal which finds classical expression in St. Thomas and Dante. But from the 15th century onwards, culture and education became increasingly concerned with the claims of active life. The humanist ideal of an allround cultivation of man's physical and intellectual abilities was brought into relation with the Protestant ideal of what Troeltsch has called Innerweltlicher asceticism--of the sanctification by diligent exercise of man's 'calling'--of doing his duty in the state of life in which it has pleased God to call him. And this in turn led to the cultivation of the economic virtues of thrift and industry and to the acquisition of 'useful knowledge' as the main end of education" (210).

He then proceeds to argue that Bentham's secular utilitarianism was the direct product and heir of the religious utilitarianism of Puritan culture and that he was but the rationalizer of the movement. This tradition--the tradition of Samuel Smiles in the 19th century--although it generated a great force of moral and practical energy, also created the "harsh and ugly sub-culture" of Victorian industrialism with its combination of unlimited acquisitiveness and narrow pietism.

"The latter (Matthew Arnold's Philistines), even though they themselves were men of genuine religious faith and moral earnestness, were the destroyers of the Christian tradition of culture, and their successors have filled the void with a materialist pseudo culture which is the real opium of the people, since it is at once a drug and an intoxicant and a poison" (213).

Thus we arrive at the same conclusion as the previous article, the need for the recovery of spiritual vision through a process of "radical conversion and spiritual transformation."

The catastrophes of recent years are the direct result of the "starvation and frustration" of man's spiritual nature. And as humanism and humanitarianism fade away they are replaced by the will to power and the road to cultural suicide.

"Therefore, it is only by the rediscovery of the spiritual world and the restoration of man's spiritual capacities that it is possible to save humanity from self-destruction. This is the immense task which Christian education has to undertake. It involves a great deal more than any Christian or any educationalist has yet realized" (214).

The unity of Western civilization 

The recovery of spiritual vision means the desecularization of modern education and culture, and in 1949 Dawson gave a lecture on "The Study of Christian Culture as a means of Education" which was published in the January 1950 issue of Lumen vitae. I think Dawson felt that the first step in this process was to recover the vision of the unity of Western civilization in the world of education, and what better method than through the study of Christian culture?

This is the main theme of the lecture. Modern education and culture have failed to control the centrifugal movements that are destroying modern civilization. He focuses on the revolutionary movements of liberalism, nationalism and socialism and the movements created by the growth of the technological order, utilitarianism and specialization. All of these movements have their origins in Europe since the 18th century, and for Western civilization to recover its spiritual unity, it must go beyond the Enlightenment and beyond the Renaissance and Reformation and study "the old spiritual community of Western Christendom" as an objective historical reality:

"The existence of this spiritual community or psychological continuum is the ultimate basic reality which underlies all the separate activities of modern Western societies and which alone makes Western education possible" (178).

"I believe that the study and understanding of this cultural tradition ought to be given the same place in modem education as the study of the Graeco-Roman tradition received in the classical humanist education of the past" (177).

Indeed as he points out towards the end of the lecture, our own past is so deeply rooted in that culture that refusal to study it means 'a refusal of history itself' (185).

One of the most interesting sections is in the middle of the lecture where he focuses on the 'profound revolution' in the psychological basis of culture by which the new society of Western Christendom came into existence. The heroic ethos of the Northern barbarians-the cult of war and violence--was rejected as a manifestation of the power of evil which he describes in Freudian terms as an instinctive homage to the dark underworld of the Id:

"With the coming of Christianity, religion became a conscious and continual effort to conform human behaviour to the requirements of an objective moral law, and an act of faith in a new life and in sublimated patterns of spiritual perfection. The sense of guilt was transferred from the corporate responsibility of the blood feud to the sphere of the individual conscience and became the sense of sin and produced its correlative, the act of repentance" (180).

Dawson sees the movements of Nazism and Communism as a reversal of this spiritual revolution and a return to the psychological situation of the old pagan world, by the dethronement of the individual conscience from its dominant position at the heart of the cultural process:

"Consequently it means the sense of guilt loses its personal character and is reabsorbed in the consciousness of the community, reappearing not indeed in the old form of the blood feud, but in the parallel phenomena of racial hatred and class war, whereby the sense of guilt is extraverted and transferred to a guilty race or a guilty class which thus become psychological scape-goats. Now wherever this revolution has taken place there is no longer any room for the understanding of Christian culture" (183).

He concludes this section with the comment that this psychological breach with the 'old European Christian tradition' is a much more serious thing than any political or economic revolution, since it means the abdication of man's rational consciousness as well as the dethronement of the Western conscience; the two go hand in hand.

The alternative to this 'suicidal technique' is to accept the existence of Christian culture as an objective historical fact and try to understand Christian culture as a whole, which arose from the impact of Christianity on classical culture and Western barbarism, creating from these dissimilar elements 'a new spiritual world' which forms the background of modern history.

"For if we try to ignore or explain away this creative process in order to enhance the importance of our own cultural achievement or of some contemporary political ideology, we deprive ourselves of our own cultural inheritance and narrow the intelligibility of history.

Such mistakes are possible, they have taken place in the past, and in so far as they have occurred, they mark the great set-backs in the history of civilization. It is one of the greatest tasks of education to prevent this from happening, and to keep alive the common tradition of culture through the dark ages or the periods of sudden catastrophe, when mass opinion is under the influence of passion and fear and when the individual has become the slave of economic necessity" (186).

How Practical?

This 1949 lecture became chapter one in Understanding Europe (1952), "How to understand our past," and the one on the crisis of Christian culture became the last chapter with the ominous title "Total Secularization or a return to Christian culture", quite an ultimatum!

By 1953, he admitted that his program for the study of Christian culture in the world of the university was not "practical politics" in England or in Europe. This was the conclusion to the lecture he gave in May at University College, Dublin, "Education and the study of Christian culture." The vastness and highly organized nature of modern education limited the teacher's freedom "to choose his own path:"

"Nevertheless, we can at least hold it in mind as a goal for the future and attempt to direct and coordinate our studies in this direction."

In America the chances of his program being accepted seemed more hopeful, and his article in Commonweal, December 4, 1953, "Education and Christian culture," launched his campaign in American Catholic colleges. It eventually resulted in over 20 articles and letters to the editor advocating and defending the study of Christian culture.

Dawson was generous in his praise of the unique achievement of American Catholics in building a system of schools, colleges and universities without parallel in the modern world. Yet he also raised the awkward question: What is the point of a minority education unless the minority has something of value to communicate which is not to be found elsewhere? In actual fact only one women's college, Saint Mary's at Notre Dame, Indiana, adopted his program, due to the efforts of Bruno Schlesinger and Sister Madaleva.

What were the reasons explaining the lack of enthusiasm for Dawson's campaign in America? I think they are the ones mentioned by Dawson in The Crisis of Western Education (1961), the ones I referred to in the conclusion of my previous article. These are secularism and sectarianism which, together, result in Catholics acquiescing in the secularization not only of modern education and culture but ultimately of Catholic education and culture.

This tendency was recognized by the British Catholic historian Edward Everrett Hales in a letter he wrote to The Tablet, March 1963, after an extended visit to America during the early 60s. In reply to a previous article critical of American universities and their theology courses, he raised the question: What are they for?

"Mr. Christopher Dawson, from his chair at Harvard, has supplied one answer in his Crisis of Western Education (Sheed & Ward, 1961). They are to teach Catholic culture, thus reviving our understanding of the fountain-source of Western civilization. To 'preserve the tradition of Christian culture in an age of secularism' he tells us (p. 145), 'is the end for which they were created.'

This sounds splendid. But the universities in question are not interested in it. I have just returned after eighteen months in America, where I was assured that there was only one college (that exceptional one, St. Mary's, South Bend, Indiana) at which they try to teach Christian culture, and in a fairly extensive tour I certainly found no other.

Well, you may say, perhaps they don't teach Christian culture, in Mr. Dawson's sense of the word, but at least they teach history, and it must be history from a Christian angle.

Not at all. History is one of the least conspicuous subjects on their curriculum, and those who take it are given the same fare as is provided elsewhere. It is in fact, precisely the humane studies which are admitted to be the weakest at these places. The Catholic universities exist not to provide great schools of theology, nor to teach Christian culture, but to prepare Catholics for careers: the graduate schools which flourish are those that do that job best" (308- 309).

Catholic schools which are secular

I think this is an apt description of what Dawson called "an alternative system of secular education under a denominational label." An "absurd solution," he remarked, but apparently not to the presidents of the Catholic colleges and universities. It is indeed far removed from Dawson's vision of the desecularization and conversion of modern civilization.

Sectarianism and secularization are not new phenomena in the history of Christian culture. Indeed, in Dawson's studies of the six periods of Christian culture they are recurring movements in each period. His heroes are neither the sectarians nor the secularizers, but the 'Master Builders of Christian culture' through the ages--Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, Saint Leo and Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Benedict and Saint Boniface, Saint Bernard and Pope Gregory VII, Saint Francis and Saint Dominic--the list could go on.

For Christians to desecularize modern culture Dawson is absolutely right. They must recover the tradition of Christian culture and see for themselves how these "master builders" converted the urban and barbarian cultures of the past, and how in recent times "divided Christendom" became "secularized Christendom."

Perhaps home-schooling families are in the best position to recover this tradition since they are quite aware of the secularizing forces within the different churches and educational systems, and can make the study of Christian culture a vital part of their curriculum. These families might be the seed of future Christian culture centres or Institutes or Academies in every region of North America. But even families which do not home school and are aware of the present cultural crisis can retrieve this tradition. After all, we are still free to choose what books we read and thus build up our own Christian culture library.

I think that Dawson best summed up the spiritual situation we face today in a talk he gave to what was, I believe, a group of Protestant ministers in America circa 1960, dealing with the theme "What is a Christian civilization?"

"And Christianity is still a live option. The scattered elements of Christian tradition and Christian culture still exist in the modern world, though they may be temporarily forgotten or neglected. Thus the revival of Christian civilization does not involve the creation of a totally new civilization, but rather the cultural reawakening or re-activization of the Christian minority.

Our civilization has become secularized largely because the Christian element has adopted a passive attitude and allowed the leadership of culture to pass to the non-Christian minority. And this cultural passivity has not been due to any profound existentialist concern with the human predicament and divine judgement, but on the contrary to a tendency toward social conformity and too ready an acceptance of the values of a secularized society. It is the intellectual and social inertia of Christians that is the real obstacle to a restoration of Christian culture. For if it is true that more than half the population of this country are church members, Christians can hardly say that they are powerless to influence society. It is the will, not the power, that is lacking."

Edward King is a retired history teacher. He publishes a Newsletter from the Christopher Dawson Centre, 27 Spearman Lane, Kanata, ON, K2L 1Y6., Tel: [phone].