Dawson's History

...In this he is confirming common sense: We all believe that certain things—say the abolition of slavery— constitute true progress and can affirm it absolutely and universally...

...Even more worrisome to Dawson, Toynbee fitted the religions he accepted into the same kind of psychological and theological equivalence we see today...

...Christian culture as a specific subject offers many advantages, not least that it can be clearly identified and approached in much the same way that we can study Mesoamerican or classical culture...

...This deep structural difference, the result of religion and culture, points for Daw-son to two fundamental religious and cultural types that persist and resist easy equating with one another...

...For instance, he saw that religious values would have a hard time surviving in modern secular societies, even the non-totalitarian democracies...

...And, in the same way, what contemporary observer could have imagined that the execution of an obscure Jewish religious leader [i.e., Jesus of Nazareth] in the first century of the Roman Empire would affect the lives and thoughts of millions who never heard the names of the great statesmen and generals of the age...

...But neither a sociologist nor the most powerful philosopher of history can say when or where a new spiritual movement will emerge...

...The East's polytheism and mythology point predominantly toward a cosmology of recurring cycles and the denial of history as meaningful in any important way...

...The New York Times characterized him as having few rivals "for Robert Royal is president of the Faith & Reason Institute and author of 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History...

...Sociologists may predict, on the basis of past history, that when a certain percentage of a population falls below poverty, revolution ensues...

...But Dawson insisted that East and West are really quite different precisely because of their religions...

...These accolades make it all the odder that today hardly anyone even knows the name of one of the twentieth century's greatest historians: Christopher Dawson...

...But he wanted to preserve, and applauded it when he found it in Toyn-bee, the idea that there could be real human advances within and across cultures...

...In England, the reaction was, if anything, even more effusive...

...Most modern historians are so mesmerized by discrete portions of the historical record that they look askance at histories that try to do much more than chronicle a bewildering array of historical data...

...The West, by contrast, as is evident in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, takes the linear time of history—which is also the time in which revelation unfolds—as "bound up with the historic reality of their founders, and with the establishment of a unique relation between the one God and His people...

...Eliot thought him "the most powerful intellectual influence in England" and invited him to become a regular contributor to his Criterion, as did the editors of other prestigious journals...

...The family eventually moved to a long held, if modest, estate in Yorkshire, and the young Christopher took much of his emotional love of the countryside from that experience, which he also identified with primordial religious emotions...

...For Dawson, these efforts are both wrong and essentially doomed to failure...

...Toynbee made another, highly significant error...

...It was perhaps fitting that this ambitious and original global vision arose in a traditional English setting...

...He is a modern representative of a great historical tradition that, whatever its flaws and shortcomings, needs to be heard again if we are to understand ourselves as historical beings...

...Beneath the calm demeanor of this proper British intellectual beat a great heart...

...Christian humanism arises in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, underpins the recovery of classical antiquity, the new growth of art, and the development of early modern science...

...The Saturday Review called the author "the most exciting writer of our day" and "unequaled as a historian of culture...

...Whatever we choose to make of this story—Rome often bewitches Romantic temperaments—the sequel, though slow in developing, was quite impressive...

...After almost two decades, including fourteen years of quiet but intense reading and preparation, the author finally published his first book, The Age of the Gods (1928...

...But the mastery of these techniques will not produce great history, any more than a mastery of metrical technique will produce great poetry...

...Ultimately, the kinds of meta-his-torical judgments that Dawson makes depend on the quality of the history he actually wrote...

...Governments did not even recognize their intrusions into the religious sphere: "For modern education and propaganda give the community such control over the thought and emotion of the individual that religious emotion and belief no longer have free play...

...Toyn-bee's efforts, whatever their success, responded to this perception...

...Yet Dawson may have the better end of this argument...

...The author's old tutor at Oxford, the eminent student of classical political philosophy Sir Ernest Barker, referred to him as "a man and a scholar of the same sort of quality as Acton and von Hugel...

...The Spectator called Religion and the Rise of Western Culture "one of the most noteworthy books produced in this generation...

...In the most concrete historical sense, the spirit blows where it will...

...This view, so dear to our own multiculturalists, contains an obvious self-contradiction: "If cultures are completely self-contained microcosms, each with its own art and religion and philosophy and science which are unique and incommunicable, how can the historian ever get outside his own culture and see the whole process from the outside...

...Both had serious religious and intellectual interests...

...would have the greatest subsequent influence in the world: "He could not have imagined that 2,000 years later all this drama of world history would only be remembered in so far as it affected the spiritual fortunes of one of the smallest and least materially civilized of the subject peoples [i.e., the Jewish people...

...By the time his 1948-49 Gif-ford Lectures were published under the title of Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, the praise was universal...

...The Dynamics of World History is a beautifully thought out selection from over four decades of the work that emerged from this unofficial intellectual formation...

...This may seem to be a case of special pleading: After all, secular historians can make allowances for religious influences, and they get along quite nicely without the additional meanings religious people often want to foist on events...

...breadth of knowledge and lucidity of style...

...Whatever cyclical and otherworldly elements persist in the West, the story of creation and salvation makes Western civilizations dynamic and forward-looking as the East has not been...

...But by itself, being a Catholic, even a Catholic with an unusual view of Western history, would not have led to Dawson's recent eclipse...

...And therefore the best path to a revitaliza-tion of the spiritual underpinnings of the West lay, in his view, in the study of Christian culture...

...The inner world of spiritual experience has been opened up by the child psychologist and the schoolmaster and has become public property, so that the child can literally no longer call its soul its own...

...In a later journal entry, he described his plan as, in fact, "a vow made at Easter in Ara Coeli," and added that, since the initial inspiration, he had received "great light on the way it should be carried out...

...Before the twentieth century, many parts of the globe were isolated from one another and their civilizations were mutually incomprehensible...

...We prefer to believe that ethnicity, gender, and class, or large economic and political forces, are what make the world go, and then are surprised when we find that people are willing to commit suicide, blow up the World Trade Center towers or each other, over religious differences...

...The economic and technological realms seemed to be the dynamos, while the religious and cultural were the elements of stability and tradition...

...Much of his education took place at home...

...Among the moderns, Dawson probably most resembles Arnold Toynbee, with whom he also had many disagreements, but shared a wide-ranging project...

...Dawson's notion of progress was not, like Enlightenment or nineteenth-century idealist views, shallow and optimistic...

...To overlook that Christian humanism was to leave the modern world both culturally and spiritually rootless...

...But Dawson disagreed with Toyn-bee's approach, as he did with Oswald Spengler's, because he believed that they had both erred in regarding each civilization as self-contained and morally equivalent to the others...

...Daw-son would not have been surprised: Long before Samuel Huntington, he argued that the cult ultimately shaped the culture, and world civilizations...

...History in Europe and America by and large was Western or national, not a bad thing in itself, but a partial view calling out for enlargement as the various civilizations of the world came into contact with each other...

...Modern philosophers of history have tried to identify historical laws that would enable us to predict the future course of the human race or even to identify the end of history...

...One measure of Dawson's sheer historical genius is his canny assessment of previous historians...

...He felt moved to undertake an equally ambitious project: a comprehensive, multi-volume history of culture...

...To begin with, he points out that a "scientific" historian, absent knowledge of what later occurred, would have predicted that the sophisticated Near Eastern powers from the eighth to the sixth century b.c...

...The West has a dynamic society, economy, technology, and science, he argued, precisely because of the kind of culture that developed out of Biblical religion...

...And Dawson might have stayed in the New World's Cambridge if ill health had not forced him to return to England...

...Dawson grew up in an upper-middle-class family...

...Just forty years ago, Harvard's dean, Douglas Horton, recruited Dawson as the first Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Studies, telling Dawson that the invitation was "the most important I have ever had the honor of carrying...

...It is as simple as that...

...But in Dawson's view of history, this gets things backwards...

...But since then, Dawson's belief in religion as a central explanatory factor in the human record—from the Stone Age practices and beliefs of the "age of the gods" down to the post-Enlightenment forms of religion in the developed world—has become a kind of intellectual embarrassment, at Harvard and elsewhere...

...Or as he put it: "An individual who has lost his memory is a lost individual, and a society that has no history and historical consciousness is a barbarous society...

...When he was sent, at ten, to a prep school, he found "a horde of savages with no common interests or ideas or beliefs or traditions...

...Dawson early identified secular trends that only became clear to others much later...

...Dawson disagreed: "The academic historian is perfectly right in insisting on the importance of the techniques of historical criticism and research...

...In later volumes of Toynbee's A Study of History, Dawson thought he saw emerging a clearer position based on what the author called the Higher Religions, which departed from the cyclical and organic theories of Spen-gler and allowed for something like true progress within civilizations...

...For Dawson, the cultural and particularly the religious element was the most dynamic part of human history...

...He later wrote: "I got nothing from school, little from Oxford, and less than nothing from the new post-Victorian urban culture...

...First, Daw-son converted to Catholicism after his Roman experience, in part because he believed that Catholic Baroque culture was a central and overlooked feature in the West...

...His father was a retired major in the Royal Artillery and his mother the daughter of Archdeacon Bevan of Hay Castle, on the border of Herefordshire and Wales, where Christopher was born...

...If we believe in a God who is active in the world, as all believers except for a few Deists over a short period have believed, this introduces unpredictability everywhere...

...all my 'culture' and my personal happiness came from that much-derided Victorian rural home life...

...He would not have been surprised by developments in the United States and Europe, let alone by international bodies like the United Nations that have tried to impose a secular worldview as if it were a neutral force compared with religious "sectarianism...

...But neither Winchester nor, later, Oxford or any formal education did much for him...

...Several factors may help account for this...

...Dawson is essentially Augustinian in his view of the nature of time...

...The title neatly captures another dimension of the author's thinking...

...However unfit I may be, I believe it is God's will I should attempt it...

...For Dawson, real existing Catholicism came primarily not out of ancient or medieval Christianity— periods he admired, but thought were being overemphasized by certain Catholic apologists—but from centuries of Christian humanism...

...He was immediately recognized as a major cultural voice...

...Religious history in its broadest sense upsets any such scheme...

...BY ROBERT ROYAL On Easter Day 1909, a nineteen-year-old Englishman sat overlooking the Roman Forum on the spot where, more than a century and a quarter earlier, Edward Gibbon had conceived the idea of writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...

...While he saw that there were universal principles of science and ethics that were transcultural, he tried to combine this position with a morally equivalent view of civilizations that were clearly unequal by such standards: "I was always perplexed by the difficulty of reconciling the moral absolutism of his judgments with the cultural relativism of his theory...

...He was transferred to Winchester, where Arnold Toynbee was a classmate...