Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson

Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson, by Christopher Dawson, edited by Gerald J. Russello, The Catholic University of America Press, 1998.

 

Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) was a historian and a convert to Catholicism, and his work sought to trace the role that religion has on culture and civilization.  He paid particular attention to Christianity’s impact on the development of Europe, and he was deeply concerned about the future of a largely secularized continent.  Much of his work was epic in scope, charting the histories of entire regions, peoples, and their faith.

 

There are many other scholars of European history who have defended the role that the Catholic Church has played in the development of Western Civilization, and given the hostility of many prominent intellectual figures towards everything that the Church stands for and represents, many of these histories take a defiant and accusatory tone.  Hilaire Belloc, for example, fills his histories (such as How the Reformation Happened and The Crisis of Civilization), with detailed elaborations about the glories of high Catholic Europe, with rhapsodies about how so many aspects of medieval society were superior to their parallels in contemporary life, as well as angry dissatisfaction over how the flaws of the modern world create injustice and iniquity.  Though authors like Belloc were often highly pessimistic about the future of Europe, they were never devoid of hope­– they all believed that the world would be much better off by a widespread and sincere return to the Faith and a culture that was centered around true Catholic teachings and values.

 

Dawson’s style is very different from Belloc’s.  Belloc was a joyful controversialist, aggressive in his arguments, never shy about stating his beliefs, and always more concerned about making a point than he was about making an enemy.  In contrast, Dawson’s tone is never emotional.  He is consistently calm, measured, and precise in his work, although he never shies away from stating his views on why Europe would benefit from a return to its Catholic heritage.  

 

Christianity and European Culture is an anthology of some of Dawson’s best work regarding Europe’s religious heritage.  The vast majority of the work here is an overview of European religious history, focusing more on generalities than specifics.  Dawson’s book The Historic Reality of Christian Culture is reproduced in its entirety, and nine other essays from various sources are included in the second portion of this book.  These essays include titles such as “The Study of Christian Culture,” “The Modern Dilemma,” “The Secularization of Western Culture,” “The Christian View of History,” and “The Recovery of Spiritual Unity.”

 

In Russello’s fine introduction, which outlines Dawson’s major beliefs and theories in clear and extensive detail, he writes that:

“Dawson’s point, in essence, is a simple one.  Europe– indeed, any cultural unit– cannot be understood as a whole by studying only its parts; to study a culture through its parts alone renders its most important aspects unintelligible.  Dawson saw much of Europe’s modern difficulty as arising either from a loss of historical memory, as in his own Britain, or from the totalitarian attempts of the Nazis and Communists to borrow Christianity’s salvific message and transform it into a stage along the road of Aryan domination or the classless society.  These ideologies share an extremely narrow view of European history, which either exaggerated differences between the European peoples or elevated some aspects of culture over others.  Nationalist and racialist history deny the unitive nature of Christianity, which creates a supranational spiritual community from disparate nationalities.  If anything, the fragmentation of European identity has accelerated since Dawson first wrote.  In addition to a revived nationalism in many parts of Europe, scholars have increasingly chosen to view history through the narrow prisms of race, class, or gender, to the exclusion of other motivating forces in Western and world history.  For Dawson, the prime motivating force was spiritual.” (x-xi).

 

Historical memory is a far more potent force than many people realize.  A shared understanding of historical memory can direct the future of a nation by giving them purpose and a mutual goals.  If historical memory unites people through a shared sense of guilt (or alternatively, victimhood), that too can dictate the behavior of thousands, even millions of people.  

 

Dawson appears to feel real regret that the vast majority of Christians no longer have a thorough understanding of their shared religious past, and much of what they do know is either false or oversimplified.  The average Christian has no solid understanding of how Christians were persecuted under the Romans, or of what life has really been like for Christians in Muslim-controlled lands over the centuries, or the complex social upheavals in Europe with the coming of Protestantism.  Too often, Christians wrongly see the Middle Ages as a time of utter backwardness, or assume that the Christians were the villains in every conflict, or impose modern-day attitudes about certain issues or behaviors on past centuries.

 

Dawson wants Christians to be better informed about their past, and he takes pains to define what constitutes a thorough and acceptable understanding of this subject in his essay “The Christian View of History.”  At the end of this essay, Dawson writes:

“The Christian view [of history]… is co-extensive with time.  It covers the whole life of humanity on this planet and it ends only with the end of this world and of man’s temporal existence.  It is essentially a theory of the interpretation of time and eternity: so that the essential meaning of history is to be found in the growth of the seed of eternity in the womb of time.  For man is not merely a creature of the economic process– a producer and a consumer.  He is an animal that is conscious of his mortality and consequently aware of eternity.” (230).

 

Throughout his work, Dawson continually stresses that one of the surest ways for to solve the problems that mar the modern world is by better education.  For Dawson, faith is more than a mere nebulous feeling of hope and goodness.  Faith comes from filling the mind with knowledge as well.  For Dawson, being a good Christian means being an educated Christian.

 

 

–Chris Chan