Update!

It's been years (!) since I've updated this blog, and I'm impressed how many page views this blog has received (tens of thousands) and continues to receive each and every day - a real testament to the enduring contributions of the great Christopher Dawson! I plan on deleting this current blog relatively soon but you can follow a new version of this blog which will be regularly updated as time permits. There is a lot of good material recently posted around the web pertaining to Dawson and his brilliant work that will be linked here in one place for your convenience in the coming days and weeks. 

The one thing necessary

The British historian Christopher Dawson, writing in 1938, aptly expressed the enduring role of this tradition, not only for Catholics, but for anyone who is both grateful for the moral, material, and political achievements of Western culture and concerned about the perils that beset it today.

If Christianity is necessary to Europe, the Catholic Church is no less necessary to Christianity, for without it the latter would become no more than a mass of divergent opinions dissolving under the pressure of rationalist criticism and secularist culture. It was by virtue of the Catholic ideal of spiritual unity that the social unity of European culture emerged from the welter of barbarism, and the modern world stands no less in need of such an ideal if it is to realize in the future the wider unity of a world civilization.

Many of Christianity's enemies and most of its friends—whatever their creedal affiliation—have today begun to recognize the point Dawson was making.

Taken from A "Roamin' Catholic" and the Cultural Crisis | Interview with Gil Bailie, Cornerstone Forum

History Within Culture

In the Spring 2008 issue of Communio, Glenn W. Olsen wrote a rather lengthy essay entitled “Why We Need Christopher Dawson”. I haven’t read too much in the way of scholarly history, but I’ve read enough to understand the differing views on the nature of history (i.e. what can we “know” from historial inquiry?). I find the topic fascinating and thus far* have not read a better treatment of it than N. T. Wright in Part II of The New Testament and the People of God. So when I read Olsen’s essay on Christopher Dawson’s approach to history through culture, I was very intrigued. I found myself agreeing with much of the essay, and can second Olsen’s opinion that we need more of a Christopher Dawson view of history in the world.

Read parts I, II and III, h/t la nouvelle theologie

Dawson translated in Italian!

The Totus Tuus Network offers several of Christopher Dawson's books in Italian! It's a free registration, and you simply download the books.

http://www.totustuus.net/librigratis.htm

Several lectures (mp3's)

Thanks to the John Olin Online Lecture Library, you can listen to several lectures about Christopher Dawson.

The High Achievement of Christopher Dawson
Historical Lecture
Russell Kirk

Christopher Dawson's Historical Philosophy
John Lukacs, Author
Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, NC
3/10/2000

The Thought of Christopher Dawson
Gleaves Whitney, Speechwriter, Governor John Engler of Michigan
Belmont Abby College, Belmont, NC
3/10/2000

Christopher Dawson & Pluralism
Gerald Russello, Litigation Associate for Covington & Burling
Belmont Abby College, Belmont, NC
3/11/2000

Christopher Dawson and the Rise and Fall of Christendom
James Hitchcock, Professor History at St. Louis University
Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, NC
3/11/2000

Dark Ages and Secularist Rages: A Response to Professor A.C. Grayling by Carl Olson

...Grayling's views are not only distortions of the historical record, they've been out of date among scholars for close to a century. Which brings us to the person and work of Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), one of the finest historians of the past century. Dawson, a Catholic, has sometimes been called a "metahistorian" because of how he approached the big picture of cultures and historical epochs. In books such as Understanding Europe, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Religion and Culture, Medieval Essays, and Progress and Religion (and the excellent compilation of essays, Dynamics of World History), Dawson explored the relationship between culture and religion, especially between European culture and Christianity. In the essay, "The Scientific Development of Medieval Culture," found in Medieval Essays, Dawson discusses the criteria used by historians in evaluating the role of religion:

The ultimate criterion by which we must judge the value of a religion is not its cultural fruits but its spiritual truth. This, however, is not the criterion which the historian or the sociologist applies in his judgment of an age or a civilization. A false religion which produces a great art or a great literature, a religion which expresses itself in a brilliant civilization will naturally be of greater interest to him than a true religion which produces only martyrs or mystics. But while the historian is justified in judging the cultural value of a religion by its cultural fruits, he has no right to treat his conclusions as final from the religious point of view. Actually, however, it is very difficult for an historian to preserve this distinction between religious and cultural values. If he believes a religion to be true, he will naturally tend to take a favourable view of the culture with which it is associated, and if he regards a culture as barbarous or unprogressive he will be apt to condemn or depreciate its religious standards and beliefs.

And then, a description that could just as well be put to the recent column and comments of Professor Grayling:

Now it was on this ground that the traditional humanistic criticism of medieval religion was based. Medieval literature, medieval philosophy and medieval science alike appeared beneath contempt in the eyes of the Renaissance scholar, and still more of the philosopher of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and consequently medieval religion either shared in their condemnation or, still more frequently, was regarded as primarily responsible for the cultural backwardness of medieval Europe--in Gibbon's famous phrase, the Middle Ages were "the triumph of barbarism and religion". [5]

But, Dawson notes--in 1934--that such views were no longer tenable, nor in vogue:

This wholesale condemnation of medieval culture has long since been abandoned by the educated world, and it was the rediscovery of the purely cultural values of the Middle Ages--of medieval literature and medieval art--which was the main factor in bringing about the change, and which contributed very materially to the wider appreciation of the value of medieval religion. [6]

And yet Grayling and others are able to be so unremittingly negative about the history of Christianity in general and the medieval era in particular because there remains, for various reasons, a huge chasm between scholarly research and popular knowledge. As Grayling's column indicates (and as he even tacitly admits), appealing to popular prejudices and longstanding stereotypes about the "dark ages" is often a successful polemical tactic.

Read parts one and two of Olson's response

Roger Scruton on the "lifeblood" of a culture

Religion is the lifeblood of a culture. It provides the store of symbols, stories and doctrines that enable us to communicate about our destiny. It forms, through the sacred texts and liturgies, the constant point to which the poet and the critic can return — the language alike of ordinary believers and of the poets who must confront the ever-new conditions of life in the aftermath of knowledge, of life in a fallen world.

--- Roger Scruton, writing about T.S. Eliot, h/t Vox Nova

What Christopher Dawson Lamented in Modernity

SANTIAGO, Chile, NOV. 27, 2007 (Zenit.org).- When a society loses its religion, sooner or later it loses its culture. This is one of the reflections of English historian Christopher Dawson, highlighted in a book on his philosophical contribution to the study of history.

Jaime Antúnez Aldunate, editor of the Chile-based review Humanitas, is the author of "Filosofía de la historia en Christopher Dawson" (Philosophy of History in Christopher Dawson), a man he says was the best Catholic historian of the 20th century. The book is available in Spanish from Ediciones Encuentro.

In this Interview with ZENIT, Antúnez reflects on the main principles of Dawson's thought and how his reflections can be applied to modern culture. Dawson lived from 1899 to 1970.

Q: In your book, you make it clear that Dawson the historian can also be analyzed as Dawson the philosopher.

Antúnez: Indeed, he can. No one could deny the depth and originality of a significant number of his philosophical intuitions springing from a meditation on history, even if they sometimes lack a certain systematic nature.

I looked specifically at his writings on the meaning of human acts. I must say that on the subject of the philosophy of history, Dawson is a strenuous defender of what he calls metahistory -- his own and most genuine field of thought -- an area in which history, theology, sociology, political science, anthropology, art and philosophy cohabit and complement each other.

The concept of culture has particular relevance in Dawson's metahistory. This concept is a common thread throughout his body of work and enriches his thought. It is based on a well-balanced equation of material elements, covering everything from geography to spiritual elements.

This formula surpasses the imbalance that had arisen from various philosophical determinisms, such as materialism that denies the importance of the spiritual realm. In Dawson's equation the spiritual factor -- the final guarantee of human liberty -- always prevails.

For Dawson, the synthesis of a culture is obtained on the level of rationality, with the highest expression of rationality being the intelligibility of religion. More specifically, he suggests that the light provided by Judeo-Christianity to understand history finds its natural fulfillment in the presence of the divine: God has first revealed himself to human beings and has later become human through the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. Incarnation and Trinity constitute, therefore, the core of Dawson's metahistory.

Q: Can you explain how Dawson understands the role played by consciousness in religion and culture?

Antúnez: Dawson explains that when man adores the mystery expressed in nature, or simply nature, we are still in the stage of paganism. However, when the forces governing nature lead human beings to perceive God in the soul, in the deepest darkness of consciousness, the grounds for a religious evolution are already lain, as seen in historical religions.

In this same line of thought, the world of culture comes to exist through the cooperation between the psyche and reason, and, achieving this unity has been the historical function of religion. World religions have been the cornerstones of world cultures. And as a result, if taken away, the arches will fall and the buildings will collapse.

Dawson concluded that over the centuries it has been repeatedly confirmed that religion is the greatest cohesive force of culture and it constitutes the cornerstone of every major civilization; so much so that when a society loses its religion, sooner or later it loses its culture.

Q: In 1945, just at the end of World War II, Dawson wrote that the barriers of culture and religion have fallen and, for the first time in history, the whole physical world comes to be one. What did he mean by this, given that tumultuous period?

Antúnez: The cultural reality that he observed originated in Europe and was inspired, though not exclusively, by the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The same materialistic tendency exists today, but not so much in the force of ideological structures. It exists in Western scientific techniques that provide the common structure of human existence and the basis upon which the new, universal, scientific civilization is being created.

The challenge for religion, Dawson noticed, and particularly for the great universal ones, is this scientific world, one [that is] unified, organized and controlled by knowledge and scientific techniques. Religions survive and continue to have an influence on human life, but they have lost their organic relationship with society; a relationship that was expressed in the traditional synthesis of religion and culture, in the West as well as in the East.

Not just in 1945, but before our eyes is the most extensive, comprehensive and intense secularization the world has ever seen. From this Dawson concludes that a culture of this sort is not in any way a culture in the traditional sense; that is, it is not an order that assembles all the aspects of human life into one living spiritual community.

Q: How did Dawson tackle the topic of philosophy of progress that came from the Enlightenment agenda?

Antúnez: In 1929, Dawson's book "Progress and Religion" dealt with the ideological perspective of the concept of progress adopted in modern culture, beginning mainly with the Enlightenment, and its consequences.

Coinciding with other authors who wrote analyses of this period on the history of thought -- such as Nicolas Berdiaev and Jean Guitton -- Dawson noticed that in the 18th century, due to the influence of Enlightenment philosophers, a sort of replacement of religious sentiment takes place. Faith in a beneficent and provident Creator and maintaining the main precepts of Christian morality, Dawson said, were "divested of their supernatural dimension and adapted to a utilitarian, rational scheme of contemporary philosophy."

In this way, moral law was deprived of the ascetic and spiritual elements and put on a level with practical philanthropy. Moreover, the providential order was transformed into a mechanistic natural law. This took place particularly in the idea of progress. Consequently, the belief in moral perfectibility and in the indefinite progress of the human race replaced the Christian concept of eternal life as the final aim of human effort.

Q: Have these concepts been handed down to us today?

Antúnez: Several events throughout the 19th century, especially the catastrophic circumstances at the beginning of the 20th century, deeply shook the stability of the creed of progress. This does not play down, however, the timeliness and scope of the problem.

Though it is true that this faith in progress in the terms formulated by the Enlightenment philosophers would not be accepted today, it still remains as a backdrop, permeating, to a great extent, the problems of our times.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger observed in the 1980s that our times are "found at the halfway point between millenarian irrationality and hopeless positivist rationality." This coincides well with Dawson's early prediction, expressed in 1927, that a new culture was about to be born. He said it would be one that would not recognize a hierarchy of values and that, abandoning itself to the chaos of feelings, would allow "the most astonishing perfection of scientific technology to be dedicated purely to ephemeral ends."

Q: From all of this, did Dawson have a deep-rooted, critical vision of modernity as culture or did he see anything redeeming in it?

Antúnez: In light of Dawson's analysis, it is the human being and his position in the universe that, as a result of the phenomena described above, was altered.

Even though he says in "Progress and Religion" that the new synthesis of modern man is superior in relation to the physical world compared to the synthesis of the 13th century, in its totality it is inferior. Human beings not only lost their central place in the universe as the link between the superior reality of the spirit and the inferior reality of matter, but "they were left in danger of being expelled from the intelligible order." This is due to the fact that the universe is conceived as a closed mechanical order, governed by mathematical laws, in which there is no room for the spiritual and moral values that were previously considered as the absolute reality.

However, Dawson's critique of modern culture does not imply -- thanks to human freedom -- an irreversible or a predetermined process. As with everything human, its persistence or defeat depends on human will. Nor does this necessarily imply a regress in the field of scientific and technological advances. On the contrary, considering them as positive results of the civilization in which they came to light, the Christian one, they are elements, among many, to be reintegrated into a search for a spiritual unity of culture.

[Carrie Gress contributed to this interview]

Prof. Philip Jenkins on Europe’s Christian Comeback

The West is awash with fear of the Islamization of Europe. The rise of Islam, many warn, could transform the continent into “Eurabia,” a term popularized by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and other pundits. “A youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize—the term is not too strong—a senescent Europe,” Ferguson has predicted. Such grim prophecies may sell books, but they ignore reality. For all we hear about Islam, Europe remains a stronger Christian fortress than people realize. What’s more, it is showing little sign of giving ground to Islam or any other faith for that matter.

...

In fact, the rapid decline in the continent’s church attendance over the past 40 years may have done Europe a favor. It has freed churches of trying to operate as national entities that attempt to serve all members of society. Today, no church stands a realistic chance of incorporating everyone. Smaller, more focused bodies, however, can be more passionate, enthusiastic, and rigorously committed to personal holiness. To use a scientific analogy, when a star collapses, it becomes a white dwarf—smaller in size than it once was, but burning much more intensely. Across Europe, white-dwarf faith communities are growing within the remnants of the old mass church.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than within European Catholicism, where new religious currents have become a potent force. Examples include movements such as the Focolare, the Emmanuel Community, and the Neocatechumenate Way, all of which are committed to a re-evangelization of Europe. These movements use charismatic styles of worship and devotion that would seem more at home in an American Pentecostal church, but at the same time they are thoroughly Catholic. Though most of these movements originated in Spain and Italy, they have subsequently spread throughout Europe and across the Catholic world. Their influence over the younger clergy and lay leaders who will shape the church in the next generation is surprisingly strong.

...

Alongside these older Christian communities are hugely energetic immigrant congregations. On a typical Sunday, half of all churchgoers in London are African or Afro-Caribbean. Of Britain's 10 largest megachurches, four are pastored by Africans. Paris has 250 ethnic Protestant churches most of them black African. Similar trends are found in Germany. Booming Christian churches in Africa and Asia now focus much of their evangelical attention on Europe. Nigerian and Congolese ministers have been especially successful, but none more so than the Ukraine-based ministry of Nigerian evangelist Sunday Adelaja. He has opened more than 300 churches in 30 countries in the last 12 years and now claims 30,000 (mainly white) followers.

Ironically, after centuries of rebelling against religious authority, the coming of Islam is also reviving political issues most thought extinct in Europe, including debates about the limits of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to proselytize. And in all these areas, controversies that originate in a Muslim context inexorably expand or limit the rights of Christians, too. If Muslim preachers who denounce gays must be silenced, then so must charismatic Christians. At the same time, any laws that limit blasphemous assaults on the image of Mohammed must take account of the sensibilities of those who venerate Jesus.

The result has been a rediscovery of the continent’s Christian roots, even among those who have long disregarded it, and a renewed sense of European cultural Christianity. Jürgen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, “Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.” Europe may be confronting the dilemmas of a truly multifaith society, but with Christianity poised for a comeback, it is hardly on the verge of becoming an Islamic colony.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3881

The synthesis of faith and culture

The Pope said that "the history of the Church is inseparably linked to the history of culture and art."

The Holy Father made reference to various works, "such as the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, the 'Divine Comedy,' the Cathedral of Chartres, the Sistine Chapel and the cantatas of Johannes Sebastian Bach."

"These constitute incomparable syntheses of the Christian life and of human expression," said the Pontiff.

Benedict XVI clarified: "If, indeed, these are, so to speak, pinnacles of the synthesis between faith and culture, their encounter is realized daily in the life and the work of the baptized, in that hidden work of art which is the love story of each individual with the living God and with one's neighbor, in the joy and toil of following Christ in everyday life.

"In the cultural arena, Christianity has to offer everyone its powerful capacity for renewing and lifting up, that is, the love of God that becomes human love."

http://www.zenit.org/article-19888?l=english