Christopher Dawson--Christ in History
Gerald J. Russello
As one of the premier Catholic historians in this century,
Christopher Dawson sought to rehabilitate both the history of
salvation and religion in Europe. Strongly embraced by
conservatives today, Dawson was considered an innovative scholar
among his peers. Even after Dawson's conversion in 1919, his
interdisciplinary approach to history stirred controversy among
Catholic scholars. Dawson drew on the emerging disciplines of
anthropology and sociology to construct a fresh interpretation of
the Christian past and incorporated popular culture and art into
his historical analysis.
Dawson wrote with two different audiences in mind. He sought both
to displace the bankrupt Victorian and Edwardian liberalism of his
own day and to shake the complacency of his coreligionists who
preferred to bask in the quickly fading light of false
medievalism. His carefully crafted prose revealed a nuanced and
original understanding of Western history.
To combat "scientific" theories of progress, Dawson argued that
every civilization relies on those who most fully represent its
ideals and shape the culture through their actions. Dawson
maintained that "history is at once aristocratic and
revolutionary. It allows the whole world situation to be suddenly
transformed by the action of a single individual." It is this
dynamic historical process that is fatal to a secular
understanding of religious approaches to history. In the words of
Edmund Burke that Dawson quoted with approval, at times a "common
soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn have changed the
face of the future and almost of Nature." To the Christian, this
understanding of historical development permits interpretation of
past events in the light of divine will and spiritual forces that
may be unknown even to the actors themselves.
Dawson set out for himself the task of explaining the twofold
nature of Christian history: while the Christian faith embodies
eternal values and the teachings of God, it nevertheless
transforms utterly the cultures it contacts. When the Christian
faith enters into a culture, as when it first burst upon an over-
civilized and jaded Rome, it begins a spiritual regeneration that
affects not only the material, external culture, but the interior
constitution of its members. In an essay entitled "The Christian
View of History," Dawson wrote:
For the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is not simply a
theophany-a revelation of God to Man; it is a new creation-the
introduction of a new spiritual principle which gradually leavens
and transforms human nature into something new. The history of the
human race hinges on this unique divine event which gives meaning
to the whole historical process.
This new, world-transforming history overthrows its rivals,
whether the Greek idea of an endless series of repeating cycles or
the spiritless homogeneity of the "postmodern" era. The
Incarnation gives shape to history and supplies a beginning, a
middle, and an end: "the Christian view of history is a vision of
history <sub specie aeternitatis>, an interpretation of time in
terms of eternity and of human events in the light of divine
revelation." This concentration on the physical substance of the
Christian faith was a conscious counterweight to overly aesthetic
theories of Christianity, such as the "super-Christianity" of
Matthew Arnold, for example, which reduced the force of religious
belief to a set of humanistic nostrums.
The figures whom Dawson chose to study highlight his interest in
the transformative power of the Christian faith: St. Augustine,
who formed Christian thought out of the ruins of the old world
order; St. Thomas Aquinas, whose reception of the Greek-Arabic
body of scientific knowledge created a new movement in Western
thinking without compromising its integrity; and St. Ignatius
Loyola, who inaugurated a new spirituality to confront the
challenges of the Reformation. Dawson saw the present age as one
similar to that of Augustine or Ignatius, and in need of saints
who have the vision to lead the faithful into the next era. The
Western world, he thought, was facing another of its "cultural
discontinuities" that displace the old order and usher in a new
social reality. The question that remained, for Dawson as for
Eliot, was whether this new era was to be Christian or a "new
civilization which recognizes neither moral laws nor human
rights."
Dawson wished first to reassert the importance of a millennium of
Christian belief to modern history. It is not necessary to be a
Christian to recognize that Christianity has played a profound
role in shaping European culture and that "there is no aspect of
European life which has not been profoundly affected" by that
faith. Dawson sought to counter the skeptics of his day who saw in
Christianity at best a series of moral tales (and at worst mere
pretexts) that had no lasting influence on Western social practice
or political arrangements. This aspect of his writings won him
many admirers, including T. S. Eliot and Arnold Toynbee.
A more basic issue for Dawson was the nature of the history to be
taught once the importance of Christianity to Western history
became established. In 1960 Dawson noted the rise during the
previous decades of an extreme nationalism among the nations of
Europe, a development that led "every European people to insist on
what distinguished it from the rest, instead of what united it
with them." This undue stress on national differences has been
coupled with a denial of the spiritual foundations of European
unity. We do not need to look far to see that nationalist and
ethnic violence continue to threaten Europe and that the "wall of
separation" remains as high as ever in the nations of the West.
Dawson's commitment to recover the moral basis of Christian
society is an ambitious one. In a late work, <Understanding
Europe>, Dawson describes the task in this way:
If we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual unity
out of which all the separate activities of our civilization have
arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at western
civilization as a whole and to treat it with the same objective
appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted
to the civilization of antiquity.
In contrast to a nation centered view of European history, Dawson
advocated the study of Europe as a cultural whole, united by a
common faith and moral standards. He focuses on Europe, but
includes the other non-Western Christian societies, such as North
Africa and the Orthodox churches. His point, in essence, is a
simple one. One cannot understand the whole by studying only the
parts, and if the whole is forgotten or explained away as
unimportant, we condemn ourselves to ignorance. Dawson saw much of
Europe's difficulty arising either out of a loss of historical
memory, as in Dawson's own England, or from the Nazi and communist
attempts to make Christianity into a stage along the road of Aryan
domination or the classless society.
Dawson contended that it was precisely the gap between Christian
principles and their realization that provides the drama of
European history, a position that caused some tensions with more
traditional Catholic historians. Drawing on St. Augustine, Dawson
saw the conflict between the City of God and the City of Man in
every age, from the simple dualism between Christian civilization
and barbarism in the pages of Bede to the sharp inner tensions
seen in the writings of Pascal. Although recognizing its
divisiveness, Dawson had kind words for the reformers' zeal for
the Gospel, as it provided an impetus for a reinterpretation of
the Catholic faith that gave rise to the Baroque era and the great
works of the counterreformation.
In a passage evocative of contemporary problems, Dawson described
the fundamental challenge to Christian culture as "the revolt
against the moral process of Western culture and the dethronement
of the individual conscience from its dominant position at the
heart of the cultural process." The medieval insight concerning
the central importance of the rationality and freedom of the
individual personality, an insight that is a hallmark of Western
thought, is in danger of being overwhelmed by a reabsorption of
the individual person to a collective identity, whether it be
based upon nationality, ethnicity, or gender.
When Western society no longer emphasizes moral effort and
personal responsibility, Dawson questions the very survival of
civilization as Christendom has known it for a thousand years.
Modernity is not merely a return to a pre-Christian paradise, as
some New Age adherents would claim; rather, it is a sudden
wrenching of the course of history. Instead of a slow reversal of
the past millennium, Dawson says, "Neo-paganism jumps out of the
top-story window, and whether one jumps out of the right-hand
window or the left makes very little difference by the time one
reaches the pavement."
It was the Christian synthesis of freedom and community that made
modern democracy and political liberty possible, a relation that
was not well understood by the dominant Whig school of history in
his day nor by the various critical theories of our own. Glenn
Olsen has pointed out that Dawson's position implies that some
components of Catholic thought came to fruition only after the
Middle Ages, which was a sure departure from his contemporary
Catholic history.
Dawson's understanding of the achievement of Christianity in
creating a stable social structure based upon free membership in a
spiritual supranational community is crucial. The extensive
treatment of other cultures and their relationship with
Christianity provided by Dawson is a model of a proper
"multicultural" approach. As James Hitchcock has noted, it is
ironic that the Catholic intellectuals who showed a deep respect
for and sensitivity toward other cultures have been largely
forgotten in this post-Vatican II age.
Dawson wrote a number of important essays and studies of these
non-Western and non-Christian cultures and their relationship with
the West. Dispensing with the simplistic notion of Western
superiority that he thought marred the work of other historians,
Dawson chose to dwell instead on the historical record. Put
simply, it was the process of European exploration and discovery
that shattered the relative isolation of the other world cultures
and that brought every people into an international community of
nations. This is a reflection of Europe's missionary character, a
character that arises out of a sense of itself as the bearer of a
universal and timeless message. Dawson does not dispute the baser
reasons for Europe's expansion, but states that critics of
colonialism and economic exploitation cannot "deny the existence
of the Western missionary movement as a real factor in colonial
expansion, nor even [can they] identify the two elements and
regard the missionary as an agent of capitalism."
In his statements on colonialism and the relations of the West to
the world, we see again Dawson's dual strategy. To other Europeans
who seek to diminish the force of the Christian faith in the West,
he presents the full historical record to give Christianity its
due. To his fellow Catholics, Dawson supplies the reminder that
there has been no perfect "Christian" society, only societies more
or less devoted to the principles of the Gospel.
The contemporary value of Dawson's work lay in this recognition
and explication of the continuing mission of the Church to use the
present world situation of increased communication and ease of
travel to bring about a new evangelization and to fill the great
spiritual need that exists alongside of great wealth and
technological advances. As Dawson wrote in <The Movement of World
Revolution> (1959), they must fulfill the Church's "universal
mission to bring the Gospel of Christ to all nations." He would be
in full agreement with Pope John Paul II's call to build a
"Civilization of Love" and would perhaps recognize in the pope a
present-day Augustine or Aquinas attempting to develop a new
synthesis between the immense growth in human knowledge in the
past century and Christianity.
During his own lifetime, Dawson supported the social teaching of
the Church, which altered the traditional European tension between
Church and state to the more important relationship between
religion and culture. As Father Joseph Koterski, S.J., has
written, the efforts of the papacy, as represented in a document
like <Dignitatis Humanae>, are "an effort to ready the Church for
the struggles of the next century and the new millennium, with a
better vision than any current political regime or national
culture shows." As early as 1942, Dawson discerned this shift in
papal emphasis and himself announced a commitment to religious
freedom as an essential step to the restoration of all things
under the universal kingship of Christ.
The Church, by pressing ahead of secular regimes-even those of the
West-in its defense of human rights and the inherent dignity of
the human person, is preparing for a new stage of Christian
culture, with new forms of Christian life. The body of work
produced by Christopher Dawson gives us a glimpse of the
possibilities.
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON--A SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
<The Age of Gods>, 1928
<Progress and Religion>, 1929
<Christianity and the New Age>, 1931
<The Making of Europe>, 1932
<The Spirit of the Oxford Movement>, 1933
<Medieval Religion and Other Essays>, 1934
<Religion and the Modern State>, 1936
<Beyond Politics>, 1939
<The Judgment of the Nations>, 1942
<Religion and Culture>, 1948
<Religion and the Rise of Western Culture>, 1950
<Understanding Europe>, 1952
<Medieval Essays>, 1954
<Dynamics of World History>, 1957
<The Movement of World Revolution>, 1959
<The Historic Reality of Christian Culture>, 1960
<The Crisis of Western Education>, 1961
<The Dividing of Christendom>, 1965
<Mission to Asia>, 1966
<The Formation of Christendom>, 1967
<The Gods of Revolution>, 1972
<Religion and World History>, 1975
Gerald J. Russello holds a degree in classics from Georgetown
University and has edited a collection of Dawson essays for
publication.
This article was taken from the April 1996 issue of "Crisis"
magazine. To subscribe please write: Box 1006, Notre Dame, IN
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