Christianity and European Culture - Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson PDF
Preview Christianity and European Culture - Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson
Christianity and European Culture -$- ChristainaEdnu irtoypC eualnt ure SelecftriotomhWn eos r okfC hrisDtaowpshoenr EdibtyeG de rJaR.lu ds sello The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C. The Historical Reality of Christian Culture, Medieval Essays, The Modern Dilemma, Understanding Europe, The Making of Europe, The fudgement of the Nations, The Kingdom of God and History, anTdh e Christian View of History copyr©i Cghhrti sStciontat , LiteErxaercyuo tfto hEres toaftC eh ristDoapwhse1or9n 6 109,5 3, 193129,5 129,3 2, 11993a48n3,1d, 9 r5I. n trodnuocttaeinsoad,nl ,l otheedri tmoartitacelor p yr©i TghheCt a thUonliivce orfs ity AmerPircea1s 9s9,8 . Alrli grhetsse rved Prinitnte hdUe n itSetda otfAe mse rica Thpea puesrei dnt hpiusb licmaeteittohsmne i nimum requireomfAe mnetrsiN caatni oSntaaln dfaoIrrnd fso rmation Science-PeorfPm aapnfeeornPr cr ei nLtiebdrm aartye rials, ANSsI3 9.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DawsoCnhr,i st1o8p8h9e-r1,9 70. ChristainaEdnu irtoypc eualnt: su erlee cftriotomhn weso rk ofC hristDoapwhs/eoe rnd ibtyeG de raJlR.du ssello. p. cm. Inclbuidbelsi ogrreafpehriecnacle s. rC. hristianit2y.C- hEruirsotpaienac.dnu ilttyu re Europ3e.E. u rope-chhiusrtcorhRr. uy s.s eGlelroaJ,l. d, 1971.- 11T.i tle. BR735.1D93988 261'.094-dc21 97-3l8 95 ISB0N- 8132-(0p9b:1ak 4l.-pk5a. p er) Matprait rmieqou e -$- Contents Introduction ix Acknowledgments xxxiii The Historic Reality of Christian Culture PART ONE 1. The Outlook for Christian Culture 3 What is a Christian Civilization? 19 2. 3. The Six Ages of the Church 34 4. Christian Culture as a Culture of Hope 46 5. The Institutional Forms of Christian Culture 54 6. Civilization in Crisis 6 5 7. Christianity and Western Culture 84 8. Is the Church Too Western? 98 Selected Essays PART Two The Study of Christian Culture 107 1. 2. The Modern Dilemma 118 3. Europe and the Seven Stages of Western Culture 132 4. The Classical Tradition and Christianity 152 5. The Secularization of Western Culture 170 6. The Planning of Culture 182 7. The Kingdom of God and History 19 5 8. The Christian View of History 213 9. The Recovery of Spiritual Unity 232 Index 25 r Introduction I This edition of selected works of the historian Christopher Daw son (1889-1970) brings together his thoughts on two general themes. The first is Dawson's contention that the modern era presents a challenge to traditional ways of living in the West that is totally new and inhospitable, yet one that at the same time offers a rare opportunity for evangelization and the develop ment of an authentic Christian culture. The second theme pre sented by these selections is Dawson's answer to this contem porary challenge and his suggested method of exploiting the pres ent opportunity. Dawson noted the paradox that a great expansion of the Christian faith throughout the world has taken place during the very centuries when Europe itself was losing its connection with its spiritual foundations. This dissociation of religious faith from other aspects of life has only increased since his death. Through his works Dawson sought to reconnect Europe's material wealth and economic power with the fundamental values that had made that wealth and power possible. He proposed to meet the challenges he saw for Christianity in the modern world by engaging in a deep study of the Chris tian past. This course of study, however, was not intended to recall a way of life that, however admirable, has disappeared. Rather, Dawson sought to refresh the theological and historical resources of Christian belief in order to build the foundations of a new Christian culture. Dawson did not think that the pres ent age had the spiritual depth required for such a task, and he turned especially to the early centuries of Christianity for guid ance. Dawson's vision of the basis of Christian society was (and is) an ambitious one. In "The Recovery of Spiritual Unity," an IX X Introduction essay included in this collection, he described the task in this way: [I]f we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual unity out of which all the separate activities of our civilization have arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at Western civiliza tion as aw hole and to treat it with the same objective appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted to the civiliza tion of antiquity. Dawson advocated the study of Christendom as ac ultural entity united by ac ommon faith and common moral standards. He would focus on Europe, but would include the other, non Western Christian societies, such as North Africa nda the sev eral cultures served by the Orthodox Churches. Indeed, Dawson's treatment of the cross-cultural nature of Christianity is am odel of engagement with other cultures, in sharp contrast to the more partisan contemporary forms of cultural studies. Dawson also stressed the importance of studying the Christian cultures both before and after the Middle Ages, an emphasis the philosopher Russell Bittinger has called Dawson's most significant contribu tion to Catholic historiography.1 Dawson's point, in essence, is as imple one. Europe-indeed, any cultural unit-cannot be understood as aw hole by studying only its parts; to study ac ulture through its parts alone renders its most important aspects unintelligible. Dawson saw much of Europe's modern difficulty as arising either from al oss of histor ical 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 as tage 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 ele vated some aspects of culture over others. Nationalist and racial- 1. Russell Hittinger, "The Metahistorical Vision of Christopher Dawson," in The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture, ed. Peter J. Cataldo (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 17. Introduction xi ist history deny the unitive nature of Christianity, which creates a supranational spiritual community from disparate nationali ties. 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. Dawson believed that it is only when we acknowledge the historic role of the Christian Church as the agent of and inspira tion for the community of nations called Europe that we can confront the problems that face it, now that the influence of Christianity has diminished. With great advances in material wealth has come a loss of the religious and moral values that alone give life to a civilization. In Europe, those values were provided by Christianity, a faith that exists as a separate entity from its constituent cultures even as it informs them. Dawson saw in the Christian faith the sole antidote to the secularism that originated with the West and has now spread throughout the world. While Dawson knew that the secular-the things of this world-were good because they are part of God's creation, he saw the ideology of secularism-the belief that the things of this world were made for this world alone-as a threat. He believed that severing a society from its defining faith will have tragic moral, social, and political consequences. Because Chris tianity maintains within itself the seeds of its own renewal, it can remain independent of secular culture and can draw on its own internal resources when challenged. Therefore, the Chris tian faith retains its capacity to resist the forces that wish to make religion an appendage of the state, or to eliminate it alto gether as a social and cultural force. Dawson's vision of our age was therefore both hopeful and anxious. In an early essay, "Progress and Decay in Ancient and Modern Civilizations," he wrote that the horrors of the present day had convinced the average person "how fragile a thing our civilization is, and how insecure are the foundations on which xii Introduction the elaborate edifice of the modern world order rests." This was written in 1924 with the memory of the First World War still 1 fresh in his mind. The Great War vividly revealed to Dawson that the future would hold no sure utopias for the world. So Dawson searched the past, seeking the elements for a new cultural program that would replace the old order swept away first at Verdun and on the Marne, then finally in Normandy and at Hiroshima. He published his first book, The Age of the Gods, in 1928 after almost a decade and a half of intense per 1 sonal study. It was the first installment in what was to be a five-volume history of culture. Two other volumes were com pleted-the magisterial Progress and Religion in 1929 and The Making of Europe three years later-before the chaos of the 19 30s and 1940s disrupted his schedule. Dawson went on to discuss in periodicals much of the subject he had planned for the remaining volumes and began to apply his knowledge of European history to contemporary affairs. The three completed volumes were received to great acclaim and earned praise from historians as well as anthropologists and sociologists, who mar velled not only at Dawson's immense erudition, but also (as anthropologist Gordon Childe said in a review) at the "wider vision" that Dawson brought to his scholarship. These early works reveal the central core of Dawson's thought, which he would express in various forms throughout his writings: religious cult is at the heart of every culture, and the society that disregards its spiritual foundations will collapse, no matter the level of its material well-being. The Age of the Gods first presents this argument, and Dawson was to expand and elaborate upon it in subsequent works. He saw that a cul ture was not limited by its geographic location or material re sources: to genetic, geographic, and economic factors Dawson added "a fourth element-thought or the psychological factor which is peculiar to the human species" and which cannot be explained by the other components. Indeed, Dawson noted the paradox of a "lower" material culture being the vehicle of a higher and richer spiritual culture, as in the case of the early
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