This is part 3 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)     

“In Southern Europe, the Renaissance developed as a reaction against medieval culture. On this point Dawson says:

              It was a true national awakening. Men saw the revival of classical learning as a recovery of a lost inheritance. They revolted against the mediaeval culture not on religious grounds but because it was alien and uncivilized. They entered on a crusade to free the Latin world from the yoke of Gothic barbarism.” (p. 200)

Dawson quote: “[In the Renaissance] Life was regarded not as a pilgrimage towards eternity, but as a fine art in which every opportunity for knowledge and enjoyment was to be cultivated.” (p. 200)

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This is part 1 of my notes on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. “PwG” refers to my own thoughts.)     

In the 11^th century Europe finally emerges from the “Dark Ages”: “But with the eleventh century a movement of progress begins which was to continue almost without intermission down to modern times.” The foundations of the modern world were laid then “by the creation of institutions that were to remain typical of our culture” and “by the formation of that society of peoples which, more than any mere geographical unit, is what we know as Europe.” (159, my emphasis)

My (PwG) thought on this: Today, governments around the world are replacing those institutions with ones that conform more to their will to power. And in Europe specifically, the nation states, which weakened the church, are now trying to recreate the unity of the continent that previously this church had formed, in particular in the 13^th century.  

A reviewer called Edward I. Watkin wrote about some of Dawson’s work, saying that it provided a kind of counternarrative to a secular interpretation of the history of mankind, as e.g. exemplified by the work of H.G. Wells, and writes: “Every step of human progress is shown to be directly or . . .  indirectly the result of a religious attitude to life, every culture a religious culture. In the service of the Mother Goddess men invented agriculture, in the name of Christ the Church built up the civilisation of Western Europe from the ruins left by the fall of Rome.” (163/64, my emphasis)

(PwG:) Here, Rodney Stark’s work provides a lot of supplementary information. See in particular his “The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (2005)”

(PwG:) “Every culture is a religious culture”: That leads to the question: What “religion” underlies the current culture? Because it certainly ain’t Christianity. Our current culture may include some fading remnants of Christianity, but that’s about it.

Should we “go back” to the middle ages? No, says Dawson: “We cannot of course regard the mediaeval civilisation as the model of what a Christian civilisation should be – as an ideal to which modern society should conform itself. It is admirable not so much for what it achieved as for what it attempted – for its refusal to be content with partial solutions, and for its attempt to bring every side of life into vital relation with religion.” (172/73, my emphasis)

(PwG:) This smacks a little of totalitarianism. However, there are at least two differences between the medieval attempt at a comprehensive “living out” of a religion and today’s attempt to subjugate and unify everyone and everything under one ruling narrative. One: It was done openly and honestly, not incrementally. Two: It was done under the lived-out faith in a creator God ruling above even the most powerful worldly leaders. Today’s creed is imposed manipulatively, incrementally, and under the deceptively and dishonestly used term of “diversity”. And any faith in a creator God is mocked and derided. Instead, (wo)man is elevated into a god-like position, either individually or collectively, with disastrous results. So obvious are those disasters, that people are now looking for another god, and hoping to have found it in the Earth as “mother goddess”. A sign of regress, not progress.     

“In the early thirteenth century, it seemed as though the foundations were being laid in Europe for a unitary religion-culture, but the second half of the century marks a turning-point and a moment of crisis. The medieval ideal of a unified Christian civilization was destroyed by the rising power of the territorial secular state.” (178)

(PwG:) Unfortunately, no explanation is given in TRBRAC as to why the secular state arose there and then. Connor only quotes Dawson at this point, saying essentially the same thing. When I go to the source (Christopher Dawson: “Religion and the Rise of Western Culture”) I find that, at the time, there was some “intense political conflict” between the Popes and the Hohenstaufen, who had taken over the “Holy Roman Empire” after Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) had died. This conflict ended victoriously for the Papacy, “but with a serious loss of moral prestige”. (p. 215/16 of “Religion and the Rise …”) “This crisis of the reforming movement and the decline of the unifying energy of medieval culture found outward expression in the two great external catastrophes of Dante’s generation – the end of the crusading states [in the Middle East] and the destruction of the great crusading Order.” “The destruction of the Templars by Philip IV [of France], … was far more serious, since it marked the complete victory of the temporal power of the new monarchy over the international elements in medieval society.” (p. 216/17 of “Religion and the Rise …”) At the same time, “the region between the Mediterranean and the Iranian plateau which had been the focus of world civilization for four thousand years lost its position of cultural leadership and became stationary and decadent . . . Now for the first time Europe is forced to follow untrodden ways and to find new goals, and at the same time becomes conscious of its own powers, critical of accepted traditions and ready for new ventures.” (p. 217 of “Religion and the Rise …”)

(PwG:) It appears ironic, and even providential, that this new role for the West started at exactly the time when the culturally unifying force of Christianity first began to fade.

The subtitle of the book named above is “A Synthesis of the Writings of Christopher Dawson”.

This is the introduction to my notes on this book, and therefore on the thoughts and ideas of Christopher Dawson.

I’m particularly interested in the connections that exist between of the idea of progress and Christianity.

Christopher Dawson (12 October 1889 – 25 May 1970 [I’ve just realised that I’m posting this on his 132nd birthday – I honestly did not plan this!] ) is a now largely forgotten scholar, who was once called “the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century”. Here’s one of his quotes:

“As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.”

That is, IMHO, the 20^th century described in a nutshell. And the first two decades of the 21^st too. And the third, so far.  

The tragedy of our time is that the notion of “ends justifying means” is thoroughly anti-Christian, yet the Christian churches have been incapable, in the past century or two, of standing up against it, let alone turning its rising tide. If they even tried. One big exception in the 20^th century was Pope John Paul II, whose very presence in the Vatican, let alone his words, inspired the Catholics in his mother country Poland to rise up, peacefully, against their communist oppressors. This was the beginning of the end of the most atheistic empire there has ever been. And it died with hardly a gunshot fired, hardly a loss of life (except a few in Rumania and the Baltic states).  

Anyway, back to Christopher Dawson. He wrote a large number of books, some of which I have recently read. To make my life a bit easier, I also read a book which claims to be “A Synthesis of the Writings of Christopher Dawson”, the title being “The Relation Between Religion and Culture” (TRBRAC), by Daniel A. Connor, first published in 1952. The next few posts are my notes and thoughts on the parts of that book I found interesting. (In brackets the page numbers of each quote from TRBRAC, unless another book mentioned. I precede my own thoughts with the acronym “PwG”.)

Content of the review (so far):

1. On the beginnings of “Europe”
2. On religion and medieval science
3. On the Renaissance
4. On Lutheranism and Calvinism
5. On the Enlightenment as a “Religion of Progress”
6. On the industrial revolution
7. On natural science
8. On the return to Christian unity and the predicament Christianity is in now
9. On Christianity and International Order
10. From the conclusion of “The Relation Between Religion and Culture”