The Revival of Christopher Dawson

In his wonderful landmark 1969 television series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark surveyed the achievements of Western civilisation magisterially and in a Ruskin-esque way. Though showing some church architecture and art with religious themes, he nearly ignored the role of religion in civilisation. Having pioneered the television documentary series, the young David Attenborough, Controller of BBC Two since 1965, commissioned another blockbuster, Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. Ascent too saw no role for religion in its linking of human development to the development of science and scientific questioning and wondering. And this despite the fact that the title of the first program came from Psalm 8, “Lower than the Angels”. It amounted to a whig history of science. Much later, in 2008, highly-paid economic historian Niall Ferguson explained how we have come to be as we are mostly in terms of money, in his television series The Ascent of Money. All these shows are well worth re-watching and each has an accompanying book.

But do any of them really add much to an understanding of the puzzle of being human and the dynamic of humanity’s history? Does life, do the many lives, have purpose and meaning? And time: is it just one damn tick after the last damn tock? Are life and its remembrance all due to the chance products of blind evolution? Or does high art have a civilising effect? Is it possible to speak of morality and ethics when considering the mixed blessings of science and the dark arts of getting and spending? Is a grand narrative, a metahistory possible, beyond the valid and rewarding study of the past? Is it possible, in Christopher Dawson’s words, to study “the meaning of history and the cause and significance of historical change”? And, if so, how many grand narratives could there be, and were any worth the study?

From the 1920s, Christopher Dawson (1889–1970) began to present a view of the past that claimed history had a nature, a meaning. For him, metahistory was a term coined from Aristotle’s metaphysics, which meant beyond physics. It was a philosophy of history and was implicit in every mode or school of historical interpretation. To the disdain of some academic historians, he saw societies as witnesses to the arguments he was mounting. He followed the practice he discerned in the work of his lodestar thinker, Augustine of Hippo, in his book The City of God (begun ca. 413 and finished 426):

The City of God is not a philosophical theory of history in the sense of rational induction from historical facts. He does not discover anything from history, but merely sees in history the working out of universal principles. But we may well question whether Hegel or any of the nineteenth century did otherwise. They did not derive their theories from history, but read their philosophy into history.

So Dawson was uneasy with historical interpretation that saw unending material progress as the promise of the future. He argued that Britain’s might and exploitation as witnessed in the early twentieth century were based on a huge and horrible moral inversion, which he sheeted home to the eighteenth-century’s version of Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper. The maxim inverted so conveniently, even piously, was St Paul’s: radix malorum cupiditas est (1 Timothy 6:10), the love of money is the root of all evil. Dawson felt that the benefits flowing from new technologies and agricultural improvements might have been developed for the benefit of the many in England. Instead Britain became great through the appropriation of the expanding wealth by an already mighty few.

In his 1978 preface to the new edition of his anthology of Dawson’s best writings, The Dynamics of World History (1958), John J. Mulloy, Dawson’s friend, collaborator and editor wrote:

As a philosopher of history and culture, Dawson’s main purpose was to show how the development of human societies, whether on the primitive or civilized level, is intimately bound up with religious conceptions of reality. Thus, to Christopher Dawson, when a society becomes secularised, it undermines its own foundations and dissipates the spiritual capital which made its achievements possible.

In 1933 Dawson wrote:

The central conviction which has dominated my mind ever since I began to write is the conviction that the society or culture which has lost its spiritual roots is a dying culture, however prosperous it may appear externally … it is in religion that the ultimate spiritual roots of society and religion are to be found.

His was a mind of great originality, substance and consistency and he certainly did not equate religion with his own religion. The religion worth studying, he felt, was the one that was “strongest on its own ground” rather than that best able to adjust to secularism or science or modern thought. So, he noted, eighteenth-century English Deism was unable to withstand the Wesleyan revival of the following century. And he could regard powerful ideas, such as progress, as spurious religions.

While he did not disregard place or geography as unimportant, nor socio-economic circumstances, nor genes or blood, he regarded the study of its culture as the best way to study a society or civilisation. He portioned this study between history, sociology and anthropology. History’s main task, he held, was not with war and politics, and definitely not biography. His search was for synthesis, not specialisation, a comprehensive longue durée study of change in culture as the French Annalists school of history would later call it. (He thought Arnold Toynbee too telescopic and in need of some remedial microscopy.) Sociology’s mission was to open up all aspects of a society: he rejected the determinist sociologies of materialists such as Marx and also of the idealists who followed Marx’s mentor, Hegel. Anthropology too, was a study of the human condition open and awake to the evidence and not a search for evidence in support of a particular ideology.

Beyond history, sociology and anthropology, the vision of reality possessed by a culture was expressed most clearly in the religion and philosophy which gave them moral character and authority. So, in 1931, he wrote:

Chinese civilization culminates in the metaphysical vision of cosmic law and ethical ideal of the Confucian just man; Indian civilization in the metaphysical vision of absolute being and in the moral ideal of the Sadhu; and Hellenistic civilization in the vision of the intelligible world and in the ethical ideal of the philosopher …

The experience of Mohammed in the cave of Mount Hira, when he saw human life as transitory as the beat of a gnat’s wing in comparison with the splendour and power of the Divine Unity, has shaped the existence of a great part of the human race ever since.

Dawson disagreed with nineteenth-century thinkers who thought that for primitive peoples, the struggle for food and other necessities made religion but a sideshow. Indeed he came closest to anger when facing such views: people did usually believe the religion they professed and were not like those Victorian and Edwardian Anglicans he encountered whose formal religion was agnostic and whose worship was money and prestige, church being a social occasion rather like a day at Royal Ascot. He maintained that for primitive people, prayer and religious ceremony were more important to hunting than the weapons they carried. In Religion and Culture (1948) he instanced the tribes of Central Australia:

They possessed a most elaborate and highly organised system of religious rites to ensure the continuity of the life of the tribe and the maintenance of its food supply—a regular liturgy, which in some instances, as described by Spencer and Gillen, occupied the community for three or four months at a time. In this case the way of life of the community is conceived as dependent on another and a sacred world—the world of the totemic ancestors from which the spirit comes and to which it returns.

Yet for all his great erudition, his intelligence—in the USA in the 1930s T.S. Eliot nominated Dawson as the most powerful intellectual influence in Britain, and his sway spanned the ideological and theological spectra, and extended across the Atlantic—he is little known today, though many of his twenty-two books remain in print. Before looking at why he was passed by, let us examine his life, briefly.

Apart from a useful entry in Wikipedia there are three biographies. His daughter, the late Mrs Christina Scott, published A Historian and His World: The Life of Christopher Dawson during his lifetime. The Amazon reader edition contains Dawson’s reflections on his Victorian childhood and James Oliver’s appreciation of him as a historian of ideas. In 2007 Christendom Press published Dr Bradley Birzer’s Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson. Adam Schwartz has also produced what sounds like Catholic triumphalism, though in a heavily footnoted format, The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson and David Jones. The nearly 100-page relevant chapter is titled “Christopher Dawson’s Progress in Religion, Tradition, Inheritance and the Dynamics of World History”.

Dawson was born into a wealthy Anglo-Welsh family, high Anglican but anti-Catholic, who lived in the ramshackle Hay Castle. He studied at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, and briefly in Sweden. He loathed boarding school, detesting the games, conformism, regimentation and group-think of the institution much as he was unsatisfied with the religious fare provided: no substance, mere ethics and good feelings and no dogma or doctrine to feast the mind. The school made him none the wiser regarding God’s Creation, the Trinity and especially the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus Christ, which was to be central to his personal view of history, to his strong view that time has meaning.

Like John Henry Newman, Dawson’s pursuit of history and his disillusionment with the Anglican establishment led to his adoption of Roman Catholicism in 1914. Two years later he married Valery Mills and they lived in the country, where he read and wrote history. There he was an independent scholar, a man of true leisure in the sense Josef Pieper advocated in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

While ceaselessly polite, he was not afraid of confrontation. It was a brave Dawson who, lecturing to a Rome audience including Mussolini and Goering in 1932, said that to subtract non-Nordics from German culture would leave it “incalculably impoverished”. The historian Andrew Roberts reported this in 2005 in the London Daily Telegraph, adding that Goering must have reached for his Luger.

Apart from writing in various journals, Dawson gave occasional lectures and conferences including the 1934 Forwood Lectures, published as Medieval Religion and Other Essays. In 1947–1949 he delivered the Edinburgh Gifford Lectures, resulting in the publication of two books, Religion and Culture and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. He also lectured at University College, at Exeter, and for the British Academy. In 1958, aged sixty-nine, he was invited by Harvard University to hold the Charles Chauncy Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies. There his collaboration with John Mulloy expanded from the latter’s compilation, The Dynamics of World History, to The Movement of World Revolution and his anticipation of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. A debilitating stroke forced his return to England where he died in May 1970, aged eighty-one.

So why was he ignored for so long? In 1958 Hayden White, a historian in the literary tradition, who was to write his own metahistory in 1973, offered an explanation. He accounted Dawson’s metahistory—a mixture of history and theology in the spirit of Augustine of Hippo—as the work of one of the rebel historicists who reject the main stream of historical thought in English that has been dominant since Hume—historical empiricism. Alan Bullock in History Today (February 1951) demanded metahistory’s banishment from academia. In 1960, the American Protestant intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr said of Dawson in a New York Times book review, “one man’s mote is a beam to another”. Dawson’s interpretations, he held, were “often strictly controlled by Catholic dogmatic presuppositions”.

He was between the Charybdis of empiricism and the Scylla of American Protestantism: effectively isolated. But he should be appreciated for his scholarship. He has much to offer an age which has debased the difficult but important notion of culture to the status of war and politics. Whatever the spirit which animates people, even when that spirit is as mean as material progress, as thoroughly evil as Nazism or Marxism, or easily dismissed as superstition, it has to be appreciated. If it is not, then the history and life of the people involved may only be imperfectly grasped, more imperfectly than is usual with history. Indeed, without this respect and honesty, history, sociology and anthropology are at risk of becoming captive to propaganda, ideology or romantic and emotional frippery.

Dawson had an eye for a good historian. Apart from English historians, he was well read in German, French and Italian history. A good historian required more than method. He allowed that philosophical fashions change in history as elsewhere, that there was no final metahistory, but he was impatient of spurious metahistory. Of Michelet and Carlyle he wrote:

The metahistory of the one consists of superficial generalisations and that of the other is a bombastic and interminable sermonising. Better an antiquary or an annalist than a minor historian who writes like a minor prophet.

Dear old Manning Clark, towards the end of his work, was guilty of the latter part of that last charge.

Despite hero worship and residual Catholic triumphalism, Dawson was not flawless. And he was not, as many of his admirers were, fixated on the medieval period as a lost golden age: like China, like India, like Islam, like the Australian Aborigines, the Middle Ages presented him with one—very familiar and personally appealing— instance of the role of culture and religion in human experience. His reliance on Augustine of Hippo provides one possible basis for questioning his views.

As Augustine’s views were influenced by the Sack of Rome in 410, so was Dawson by the two world wars and the Great Depression. But he did not become pessimistic as a result, even though he witnessed something of the continuing disintegration of European culture. He appears to have accepted Augustine’s view that history is mastered by God, whose glory it serves, though he does not appear to have commented on Augustine’s opinion that God’s purposes cannot be discerned from a study of the history of man, that God cannot be put in a footnote. Nor does he seem to have commented on the harsh take on predestination, a Jansenist-Calvinist predestination, which Leszek Kolakowski (God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark an Pascal’s Religion and the Spirit of Jansenism) found pre-existing in Augustine. Dawson certainly did mention Augustine’s theory of grace, which is the nub of the matter, but he does not seem to have explored it the way Kolakowski did.

But the mood is changing. In 2004 in the Times Literary Supplement, medievalist Giles Gasper reviewed a new edition of The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. It bears quoting at length:

Seventy-two years ago, H.M. Stannard in the TLS said of The Making of Europe that it was “impressive alike by the authority of its learning and the originality of its arguments”. That this judgement is still applicable is justification enough for the reissue of this famous study from CUA Press, in their series dedicated to Christopher Dawson’s works. It was one of the few books that he completed and produced in the form he intended during his lifetime (1889–1970), but one of his very best, and certainly the one which has withstood well the advances and specialization of scholarship since its first appearance in 1932 … the perspective Dawson offers is remarkable; after the Later Roman Empire he treats equally the world of Islam, of Byzantium and of the West.

Quite as remarkable are the occasions on which Dawson anticipates future study.

One example is his emphasis on the Islamic conquests as an agent of change in the Mediterranean economy, a thesis later made famous by Henri Pirenne. At the core of the book lies the theme of European civilization and culture. It is in this period, Dawson argues, that we find the creation of this civilization, which provided “the root and ground of all subsequent cultural achievements” in Europe.

The stress on the unity of European culture is one factor giving the book a cutting edge for modern readers, and Dawson’s reflections, especially on the fragility of that culture, are thought-provoking in this respect. For Dawson, the culture of the period was overwhelmingly religious. His sensitivity to religious matters and ability to explain complex doctrinal problems are among the strongest aspects of the book …

This is a book with much for the specialist, and a great deal for the general reader. It is a classic, but one which has kept its teeth.

In a 2008 interview, his recent biographer, Bradley Birzer, offered this sympathetic appraisal:

Dawson read voraciously in all fields. Because he wrote about such a wide variety of topics and attempted to cover these topics and areas well, he sometimes overlooked some important ideas here or there, and he sometimes got a few of his facts wrong. I don’t want to exaggerate this. Dawson got far, far more right than he got wrong …

Dawson believed the best historians were those who used their imaginations to understand the world and man’s place within it … As Dawson explained it: “the mastery of” professional historical methods and “techniques will not produce great history, any more than a mastery of metrical technique will produce great poetry.” The true historian, Dawson argued, will recognize that “something more is necessary—intuitive understanding, creative imagination, and finally a universal vision transcending the relative limitation of the particular field of historical study.

Dawson believed that myth, theology, and a deep understanding of language should always inform one’s understanding of history. History, too, should inform our understanding of myth, theology, and language.

He maintained that religion, the temple, the city were already present at the dawn of recorded history. What he called the primitive and the civilised were always found side by side. Later archaeology might question this view, to some extent, but it remains substantially true regarding ancient civilisations, and ancient primitives. Egyptians for example were there together with the followers of a tribal Moses, the court administrator who, in Hebrew mythology, bridged between civilisation and desert wanderers to begin a distinctly new tribal people bonded by a unique religion, monotheism. In the same expansive way, he saw Christian culture as far more than Western European medievalism, even though he paid perhaps too little attention to Eastern Orthodoxies, the Homoousian controversies arising from the 325 Council of Nicea, as well as the ambiguously beneficent four Lateran Councils spanning the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that were perhaps more concerned with papal political power than piety and were anti-Semitic in both senses: Muslims as well as Jews were obliged to wear distinctive clothing within Christendom. They also frustrated reunion between the churches of East and West. In Arians of the Fourth Century, the book that began his Rome-ward momentum in 1833, J.H. Newman suggested that the need to define and proclaim a creed betrayed a certain weakness in belief, a restrictive codification of religion made necessary by human disagreement. Dawson might perhaps have paid more attention to the recurring systemic weaknesses within religion, because of religion’s frailty, its imperfect condition in any culture, regardless of claims to holiness, divine inspiration, even infallibility. On the other hand, he criticised the Oxford Movement and nostalgic Catholics who tended to equate the Middle Ages with Christian culture.

Recently he was also re-appraised by Gerald J. Russello, editor of the University Bookman, in an essay in the March 2010 number of the New Criterion. Russello puts Dawson’s work in the context of September 11: it has a title its subject might not easily accept: “Christopher Dawson & the coming conflict”. Russello invokes in support of his Armageddon views the work of a current Dawson-like historian, Michael Burleigh, author of two formidable attacks on secularism, Earthly Powers (2005) and Sacred Causes (2006). He could have added others, such as Charles Taylor (A Secular Age, 2007). They, too, might be less panicky, less persuaded by religious and cultural stereotypes, however much they may deplore the cultural deserts of secularism and multiculturalism.

Part of Dawson’s appeal is that he had reasoned, incisive and unorthodox (rebel?) views on the great ages of European history. He helped people to see more in the “Dark Ages” than barbarism and decay. The Renaissance and its humanism he also regarded as an attempted apotheosis of the human, a cleavage between religion and reason and, pace Thomas More and Erasmus, a rejection of human dependence on the divine. To him, “Renaissance man” might not quite carry the praise intended. The Reformation he saw as a failure of leadership in the Catholic Church and the so-called Counter Reformation as an attempted reassertion of unity. He regarded the baroque in art and architecture (but not music, which he seldom discusses) as better than Protestant minimalism (J.S. Bach was no minimalist!). But the Counter Reformation also entailed a legalist Italian takeover of the Catholic Church, making it indeed Roman and a harbinger of the secularisation of Western Europe. Witness the farce of ultramontanism in the nineteenth century: how utterly disengaging for ordinary people, the fabled man in the street, these church arguments and posturing over a fading authority were to become. The Enlightenment he saw as an advance of the secular spirit and as a breach between philosophy and myth leading to combat between supporters of rationalism and romanticism. In like way T.S. Eliot regarded Shakespeare as the last English poet able to write from within the framework of an agreed if fraying philosophy; he instanced William Blake as an example of the poet having to make up his philosophy as well as his poems (see Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).

The French Revolution was a consequence of the Enlightenment and Dawson saw, as de Tocqueville had, danger in its implied and disembodied philosophy, its fond regard for easily manipulable abstract conceptions of reason, truth, freedom, rights, civilisation. Catholics then underestimated the power of these ideas, he thought, mainly due to a fixation on the Middle Ages, much as some people today blithely accept the need for a bill of rights or the infallibility of climate-change science.

Also like de Tocqueville, he was a canny observer of America. He perfectly caught the drive on American exceptionalism when he noted, “American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.” Had he been more musical, he would have added American music. It would be interesting to know how he might have incorporated contemporary globalism into his views on culture.

The writing of this has forced me to return to a part of my library which I have only visited now and then in the last thirty years. It was refreshing to return for a few intense days to the work of one who writes so easily and whose breadth and depth of learning still engages as much as, by its richness, it embarrasses. The re-publication of his books might be of interest to those who think there is something missing in our current cultural wars, in our grasp of history and the human.

Gregory Haines has written the occasional book review for Quadrant.