THE ACHIEVEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER DAWSON
Fr. David Knowles, Cambridge Professor of Medieval History,
wrote these words about Christopher Dawson in an obituary at
the time of the latter's death on May 25, 1970:
"The death of Christopher Dawson, in his 81st year, will
probably pass unheeded by many of those who are not forty
years old. He had left England for America twelve years ago--and
what twelve years those have been!--and for some years before he
went and since his return he had been, as it were,
incommunicado, partly through choice, but more on account of
weak health. But to those who were young, or not so old, in the
late 1920s and the 1930s he will always remain as a master,
indeed as a prophet. His vast learning, his faultless scholarship,
were at the service of a mind that did not fear to take the
broadest view of history and religion, yet which never turned
history into meta-history, and never imposed thought-patterns
upon the story of the living past.
His origins and background seemed "improbable" enough to
those who knew him only in middle life. The slight figure and
gentle voice gave one the fear that a gust of wind might sweep
him out of sight, and his frail, if striking, appearance, his weak
health, and his retiring, even shy disposition kept him away from
any form of display or <r�clame>, and indeed sometimes kept at
a distance those whom he would probably have wished to
welcome. In fact, he was the son of a soldier, Lieut. Colonel H.P.
Dawson, who was also the squire of Hartlington Hall, near
Skipton. He was educated at Winchester, a school which has
produced more "improbable" alumni than most, and at Trinity
College, Oxford. It was there that his boyhood friendship with Mr.
E.I. Watkin matured into a kinship of mind. He was received into
the Church in 1914, a few years before Ronald Knox, and for the
rest of his life was to be, not precisely a Church historian or a
theologian, but a cultural historian of the people of God, who
held that religion, and not economics, was the mainspring of
man's life.
Indeed, his whole corpus of writings might have been collected
as an Augustinian <City of God> today. Just as Augustine saw the
Christians Church sheltered in the Roman Empire and making its
own the thought of Greece, so Dawson saw the Church of
yesterday and today as the inheritor of all that was best in earlier
civilizations, and as the transmitter of the legacy of Israel and
Greece and Rome to the new Europe that took the place of the
classical world.
His first major work, <The Age of the Gods>, was hailed by Dean
Inge as a masterpiece of wide and impartial learning, and the
next book, <The Making of Europe>, drew the attention of
scholars and students to the epoch between Constantine and
Gregory VII that is far more familiar to historians now than it was
in 1930. In a sense he never surpassed those two books; the
steady stream that followed, <Progress and Religion>, <The Spirit
of the Oxford Movement>, <Medieval Religion>, <Christianity and
the New Age>, <Religion and Culture>, <Religion and the Rise of
Western Culture>, <The Rea-lity of Christian Culture>, <The
Dividing of Christendom>, and <The Formation of Christendom>
(his last work), are all variations of the same great theme. For
some twenty years his voice was heard in many places, and he
adorned whatever he touched. His essay on Augustine's City of
God in <A Monument to St. Augustine> (1930), and that on
Langland in <The English Way> (1933) are small masterpieces that
remain as valuable now as when they were written, and the same
can be said of his collection of <Medieval Essays> (1954)....He was
elected to the British Academy in 1943, and he livered the Gifford
Lectures at Edinburgh in 1947-8, but though he lived for a time at
Boars Hill he never returned to a teaching post in his own
university, which he would have greatly graced. In 1958 he was
chosen to be the first holder of the chair Roman Catholic Studies
in Harvard University, from which he retired in 1962.
He lived long enough to see a wide swing away from the
intellectual pattern that he loved. Pre-eminently a historian of
culture, he saw each phase of cultural history not as one valid
and authentic only for its representatives, but as a reflection of
one and the same human spirit in its aspirations and
achievements, all of which had a legacy and lesson for their
successors and for ourselves. He lived to see his life-line
weakened by the eclipse of the classical tradition and the
emergence of an existentialist and relativist cast of thought. The
disappearance of the Latin liturgy and the Gregorian chant, and
the virtual loss to Catholic worship of so many of the prayers and
hymns that were the creation, not of a maligned Tridentine piety,
but of centuries of Christian Europe, struck at much that he had
presented as a precious legacy held on trust.
From <The Tablet> (London) June 6, 1970
This article was taken from "The Dawson Newsletter," Spring
1994, P.O. Box 332, Fayetteville, AR 72702, $8.00 per year.
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