Dawson’s body of writing constitutes a powerful intellectual legacy for the church. He was the Catholic mind at its most incisive.
More and more I find myself reaching back to earlier authors who can shed light on the confusions of our time. The diet of daily media consumption can make us well informed, but the pressure to “keep up” robs us of the time for being reflective and gaining fresh perspectives.
The writings of the English Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), provide a prime opportunity for detachment – and re-engagement.
I first encountered Dawson in the late 1960s when my father recommended that I read his 1961 book, the Crisis of Western Education. A work ground-breaking importance, it addressed the root causes of the plight of Western education. The book fired my youthful imagination about the need for a Catholic Liberal arts institution in Australia, which eventually became Campion College in western Sydney.
Dawson believed that a fundamental fracture had occurred in the history of our culture, so that it ceased transmitting, from one generation to another, a clear tradition of learning and inherited wisdom founded on the Christian faith. Such a tradition had maintained a shared memory and worldview and set of unifying moral values among the peoples of the West, and its loss has meant that our society no longer has a compelling way of teaching the young.
It has lurched from one educational theory to another, each time adding to social division and alienation, and intensifying the experience of spiritual emptiness and moral confusion.
Dawson’s insights into education were part of a larger vision of the impact of religious faith on culture. He explored this central theme in many works, at first in The Age of the Gods (1928), a pioneering study of prehistoric cultures; then in Progress and Religion (1928), which analysed the relationship between religion and social progress; and in Christianity and the New Age (1931), which looked at the failure of humanist ideals divorced from their Christian roots. As in all his works, Dawson revealed a breadth of historical vision and a sharpness of contemporary insight.
In 1932 he published The Making of Europe, a work of seminal importance in which he explored the decisive role of Christianity during the so-called Dark Ages in inspiring and shaping Western civilisation. He returned to this theme throughout his life, in such works as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950), The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (1950), The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (1960), and The Formation of Christendom (1967).
Acutely conscious of the fading influence of Christianity on the West, Dawson gave special attention to secularisation of our culture – the extent to which religious faith has become privatised, and a sense of higher purpose no longer vitalises and guides our public institutions. A highly secularised culture produces divided natures – a kind of spiritual and socialised schizophrenia. It divorces the inner life of the ordinary person from the external organisation and activity of society.
This separation has catastrophic effects. Dawson was among the earliest to recognise the link between the functioning of a de-Christianised society and the wellbeing of the individual who was is now spiritually isolated and starved, and prey to such afflictions as loneliness and depression.
In The Crisis of Western Education and other books, he spelt out this connection, arguing that the sociological problem of a secularised culture is also the psychological problem of spiritual health and integration. When a culture neglects the spiritual needs of its people, it produces not only a deformed society but also distorted personalities. It spawns mental sickness – a rising scourge of our itme – as well as social injustice and disorder.
For Christians especially, the split between spiritual and material life produces a profound dilemma. Either they can maintain their faith by creating some form of ghetto, a close-knit community separated from the world, which Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” has recently highlighted; or else they can struggle to challenge and transform the public order so that it provides a fuller reflection of, and a more supportive environment for, their own faith.
In The Crisis of Western Education. Dawson explored ways of overcoming the separation between religion and culture through the medium of education. He recognised that Christian education head a crucial role to play in modern secularised society. To believers, it can reveal in compelling ways the cultural fruits of religious faith. Such expression as music and literature, art and architecture, law and philosophy, social customs and institutions- all have historically served as channels of religious truth and inspiration, which strengthen a Christian people’s sense of identity in the wider world.
At the same time, these cultural expressions testify to the ways in which a people defines and values itself. They have iconic value for the wider society, keeping open the points of access to divine realities. As the celebration of Christmas attests, even in its present secularised condition, the power of a religious festival can persist, shoring up the natural bonds and virtues – of family solidarity and charitable giving – that supply a basic social unity, which can be injected with higher meaning in the event of a religious revival.
In the biography of her father, A Historian and His World (1984), Christina Scott revealed how Dawson’s personal upbringing had a formative influence on his career as a scholar and educator.
As a child in Wales, he inherited a strong spiritual tradition fused with cultural inheritance. From this experience he acquired a love of history and an interest in the differences of cultures. He also developed a deep sense of the importance of religion in human life, as “a massive, objective, unquestioned power that impressed its seal on the outer and the inner world alike and held past and present together as a living whole.” (Tradition and Inheritance, 1949).
As a result, Dawson was sensitive to the cultural value of Christianity long before he entered upon his formal education – chiefly at Winchester school and Trinity College, Oxford. Ironically, given his vastly impressive learning, he derived little form school and university, and he subsequently spent the bulk of his life outside official academic circles.
Yet this does not imply that he was an isolated figure without influence on the society of his time. He was, in fact, an independent historian who stood on the now largely vanished tradition of private scholarship outside of universities – exemplified by people like Lord Acton in the 19th century and Sir Roger Scruton in our own time – which has enriched scholarly studies so much in the past.
When Assumption University of Windsor in Canada conferred on Dawson the Christian Culture Award for 1951, Dawson called his acceptance speech, “Ploughing a Lone Furrow.”
Near the end of his life, however, he received an opportunity to serve in a prestigious academic institution. In 1958, he was appointed to the New Chair of Catholic Studies at Harvard University, from which vantage point he was able to promote the value of studying Christian culture – as a means of challenging, not only the spiritual chaos of and hollowness of the secular West, but also the social and political oppression of totalitarian countries.
Dawson worked tirelessly to gain acceptance for a new education in American Catholic colleges and universities. The focus of this program was the study of Christian culture as a concrete expression of Christianity which brought God’s graces within the orbit of ordinary people.
The Crisis of Western Education explained the need for such study, offering a set of proposals which, while they had a lamentably small influence on Catholic educational institutions in American were of decisive importance in the design of the liberal arts program at Campion College.
Dawson never received in his lifetime the wider recognition that he deserved. A notable exception was the Australian Marist philosopher and theologian Fr John Thornhill SM. Only last year, a few months before he died, he published The Road All People Tread, a comprehensive digest of Dawson’s thought on the providential relationship between Christianity and culture. Dawson’s body of writing constitutes a powerful intellectual legacy for the church. He was the Catholic mind at its most incisive.
Karl Schmude is a co-founder of Campion College Australia and formerly University Librarian at the University of New England, Armidale NSW. This article previously appeared in Annals Australasia, issue 8, October 2019. Reproduced with permission of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, Australia.