Christopher Dawson: is there a Christian culture?

Nineteen-ninety-five marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, author of such influential works as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1948) and Progress and Religion (1929). Sadly, the anniversary and Dawson's legacy were little noted.

Dawson was born in 1889 at Hay Castle, on the border between Wales and England. Most of his early life was spent at Hartlington in Yorksire, the location of the Dawson family home. Educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, he never received a doctorate, preferring instead to engage in an extended period of private study. In 1914, with his boyhood friend E.I. Watkin as sponsor, Dawson was received into the Catholic church.

In England, Dawson published in both sociological journals and popular newspapers, and he attracted the attention of such admirers as T.S. Eliot. His fame in America was enhanced by lectures he gave throughout the United States during the early 1960s while serving as the first Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair in Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University. The last of the amateur historians, Dawson wrote in crisp prose uncluttered with excessive footnotes or jargon, and he relied on his own private library to conduct his research.

This independent course of study allowed reflection across traditional disciplinary boundaries. His first book, The Age of the Gods (1928), written when Dawson was almost forty, dealt with European pre-history. Subsequent years saw books and essays on the Oxford movement, Saint Augustine, the Dark Ages, and the magisterial Progress and Religion, a penetrating work of intellectual history. Dawson was as comfortable with the history of Islamic Spain or the Byzantine Empire as he was with that of Europe. Indeed, his writing can serve as a model for honest engagement with the ideals of cultures not our own.

Culture begins with cult, Dawson maintained, and it is religious faith that transforms a collection of individuals and social forms into a living culture. Every one of the great world civilizations has been inspired by a religious impulse and shaped by religious practice. Religion is the key to cultural unity and therefore to true material and spiritual progress. Dawson's great work was to demonstrate that the West was no different from any other culture, despite its grand scientific achievements and belief in an a historical and secularized "Progress." The distinctive feature of the West has been its attempt to separate itself from the religious roots that had provided moral unity to the European peoples. This movement away from religion was unprecedented in the history of the world, Dawson thought, and represented a profound shift in the pattern of human existence.

This enforced separation between religion and culture Dawson saw as in ultimately fatal misjudgment. Echoing Eliot, Dawson believed that if Europe would not have classical learning or Christian faith, she would have Hitler or Stalin. Without an acknowledgment of the Christian roots of the Western world, the cultural achievements will wither away for lack of foundation. Rejection of Christianity as an animating principle has also, in a seeming paradox, made Westerners less tolerant and understanding of other cultures. "The more we underestimate the religious element in our own culture the less we shall appreciate the cultures of the non-European world," Dawson wrote.

Christian culture is at root a culture of hope, for the future and for all time, Dawson reminds us. Despite occasional gloominess--"it is the sign of the dollar rather than the cross that now marshals the forces of Western civilization," he wrote in 1960--Dawson on the whole saw the present century as one of possibility for Christianity. Dawson compared the modern age to early Christianity, a time when the new faith exploded onto an overcivilized and jaded pagan world and transformed it by bringing a new spiritual dimension to its existence. The secular world may react with scorn or rage, but the Christian must hold fast: what Dawson called the "royal road of Christian progress" ends at Golgotha and the empty tomb, not the corporate board room or state house.

The task for Christians today is to communicate hope to a world "in which man finds himself alone before the monstrous forces which have been created by man to serve his own ends but which have now escaped from his control and threaten to destroy him."

Education was the means by which Dawson sought to effect such a new evangelization. Secular control of the schools and mandatory education concerned him, if only because the modern state does not recognize spiritual values, and public education would always be in some manner deficient. There were disagreements with the Catholic educational authorities as well. Dawson's ideas about the role of education were received with some skepticism by the Catholic educational establishment. Catholic pedagogy at the college level was traditionally weighted heavily in favor of philosophy and theology, and did not allow history and the other social sciences as large a place as Dawson thought they deserved. Dawson wrote a handful of articles on education for Commonweal in the 1950s, elaborating his thesis in The Crisis of Western Education (1961). He advocated a comprehensive course of study in Christian culture, which would encompass the entirety of Christian life as it has been lived through the centuries: art and architecture, music, poetry and drama, philosophy and history. This new Christian curriculum would be for our time what the deep study of the ancient world was for past centuries.

In his own day, Dawson was active in ecumenical projects, decades before they were encouraged. He was not blind to the failings of Christian culture or the crimes committed in its name. Indeed, it may have been Dawson's readiness to place the entire historical record in full view that retarded his reception in some Catholic intellectual circles, both in his lifetime and after his death. Nevertheless, Dawson was convinced that the ideals that have driven the West for almost two millennia were worth preserving and represent a true source of hope for humanity.

RELATED ARTICLE: Dawson Up Close

Had it note ended earlier, one would like to be able to say that the death of Christopher Dawson, on May 25 [1970] in his eightieth year, marked the end of an era. But the long period of fascination with the idea of a Christian culture came to a close at least a decade ago. Christopher Dawson published little after his retirement from the Harvard in 1962, and when he stopped writing there were none to carry on. Perhaps it was all a dream anyway, the notion that Western culture could remain Christian, somewhow passing through the crisis pluralism and secularity. The present evidence suggests that Christianity long ago gave up hope, contenting itself instead with a so-far fruitless quest to find a way to live with the culture not of its making, its glories behind it. It is a log way from Chartres to T-groups.

Though I was Christopher Dawson's assistant for three years at Harvard, his work did not make an immediate impression on me. I appreciated the history be taught me, as did his students, and I came to a fresh understanding of the role of Christianity in forming Western culture. But for me--child of the times--the new theologies of secularity, conciliar renewal, "relevance," free-wheeling pluralism were far more attractive. While it was never fair to say that Dawson yearned for a return to the Middle Ages, he did dislike the twentieth century; it was alien to the life he new best, that of an English country scholar born and raised during the reign of Queen Victoria. He once told my wife, quite seriously, that "the world came to an end when the Queen died." All of this was too much for a liberated Irish-Catholic graduate student feasting on the riches of a Harvard as fashionably up-to-date as it was secular.

That was my mistake, or half a mistake at least. It was true that Dawson wanted to hold onto a Christian culture, and that still exerts little pull. But more fundamentally the whole point of his life's work was to show that in one form or another every culture needs a religious basis, some way in which it relates its civic and political life to powers and values which transcend its daily life. We have tried in the West to do away with that kind of a foundation for society. Every man has become his own culture, joined to his fellows by common tastes of passions, superintended by an increasingly desiccated lust for the "human" that great term supposedly able to supply us with all our values and undergird all our institutions. Dawson knew that would never be enough. I'm afraid we are finding out the hard way he was right. I hope some will take the trouble to read him again and see why.

Daniel Callahan is the president of the Hastings Center. This article appeared in Commonweal, June 6, 1970.