An Introduction to Christopher Dawson

by Dr. Andrew Seeley, President and Co-Founder of the Boethius Institute

This article was originally a talk given at the first Adeodatus Conference on Catholic Education and Culture.

Over the past 20 years, especially this past decade, the success achieved by several collegiate programs has spilled over into the pre-collegiate world with such force as to initiate a wave of renewal whose crest is still a decade or more away. Now is the perfect time for us to consider together the various sources of this wave so that it might not dissipate but, like the dews from the Trees of Valinor, become a vast reservoir of spiritual and intellectual light that will bring joy, strength, and consolation in an ever darkening world.

My task is to introduce Christopher Dawson to you as a significant source for the recent and ongoing renewal of Catholic liberal education. This is both a trial and a treat –  a trial, since I am a rank amateur in the thought of Dawson, and others in this room are more knowledgeable than I am; a treat, since it has driven me to return to read more widely and think more deeply about his works. I am still only ankle-deep in a lake of wisdom. It is also amusing, since I am a product of a tradition that is, in important ways, opposed to his ideas. But I will serve as I can.

First a brief introduction to the man. Born in 1889, three years before Tolkien, Dawson was a self-taught social historian who became the leading Catholic historian in England in the first half of the twentieth century. He earned respect from men of letters both Christian and secular. Brad Birzer, author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, names Eliot and Gilson, Lewis and Tolkien, among those influenced by him.

In 1950, the English Dominican journal, Blackfriars, claimed “that Mr. Dawson is an educator; perhaps the greatest that Heaven has sent us English Catholics since Newman.”  In the early 1930s, Mr. Eliot told an American audience that Professor Dawson was the foremost thinker of his generation in England.

Birzer, The Gray Eminence of Christopher Dawson

He never earned an advanced degree, yet he gained such a reputation that he was invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 1947 & 48. In 1958, he became the first chair of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard, during which time he lectured throughout the United States, and published The Historic Reality of European Christianity and the Crisis of Western Education. He returned to England in 1962 and went home to the Lord in 1970.

Reading Dawson is a treat, if you have some knowledge of history, for each sentence seems to unite a hundred details into one penetrating insight of wisdom. For a small taste, I will share this passage from The Historic Reality of Christian Culture, in which Dawson introduces his division of the history of Christian civilization:

I reckon there are six of these ages, each lasting for three or four centuries and each following a somewhat similar course. Each of them begin and end in crisis; and all of them except perhaps the first pass through three phases of growth and decay. First there is a period of intense spiritual activity when the Church is faced with a new historical situation and begins a new apostolate. Secondly there is a period of achievement when the Church seems to have conquered the world and is able to create a new Christian culture and new forms of life and art and thought. Thirdly there is a period of retreat when the Church is attacked by new enemies from within or without, and the achievements of the second phase are lost or depreciated.

Our moment seen through Dawson’s eyes looks like the first stage of the seventh age of Christendom, with our movement poised to a central role.

Teachers need practical recommendations  to take into the classroom. The most important thing a teacher can take into a classroom is what is in his mind and heart. So my first recommendation to you is to read Dawson’s works, such as The Historic Reality, Crisis, and The Dynamics of World History. Dawson is not easy to read because he is not a history teller but a sociological interpreter of history. So if you are weak on history, you need to read a few general histories first, such as John Vidmar’s The Catholic Church Through the Ages. On the other hand, Dawson is an essayist, so you can often enter into one of his books through a particular chapter of interest.

Dawson attributed many of his insights to the modern discipline of sociology, that is the scientific study of social life, which made possible “a general vision of the whole past of our civilization.” (Dynamics p. 3) He believed that sociological principles, properly understood and applied, give intelligibility to historical realities in a way unknown before our times, and comparable to the insight given by the discovery of gravitation or the periodic table. I will go more into this later. His approach led him to the theses for which he is most known, namely that every great culture is fundamentally an expression of its religious values and practices, and that Christianity provided for the cultural unity of European civilization. “The religious impulse…supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture….A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.”

Source of Renewal

Dawson is not as well known or read by many leaders in the liberal education movement, but his thought has played a significant role in today’s renewal, and I hope we will all come to know it better. Dawson is one of the sources of today’s renewal. In Crisis, he argued that the core of collegiate liberal studies at both Catholic and non-Catholic institutions should consist in a sociological study of Christian civilization. The original edition of Crisis contained several detailed sketches of possible collegiate and graduate programs. Collegiate Catholic Studies programs now number over 50, with prominent programs at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and Franciscan University among others. His thought has borne fruit in the pre-collegiate world through the Educational Plan of St. Jerome Academy in Hyattsville, Maryland, which is the best document on Catholic elementary education currently available and has provided a model for scores of Catholic classical schools around the country.

In an important way, Dawson has been a central influence on my thought and practice since I joined Michael Van Hecke to begin the work of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (ICLE). At the time, I had little knowledge of the history of education beyond my own experience. I began to correct that by reading The Crisis of Western Education. Dawson’s ideas were very new to me, but I immediately made his hope for American Catholic K-12 education my own: that it become “the gateway to the wider kingdom of Catholic culture which has two thousand years of tradition behind it and is literally world-wide in its extent and scope.” I have been blessed to see this hope becoming a reality in part through the work of ICLE.

Education, Culture, Community, and Civilization

Dawson’s historical and sociological approach to education gave me new insight yet it conflicted with the scholastic ideas central to my own formation. For me the conflict began on the opening page of Crisis, where Dawson makes the claim that education “in the widest sense of the term is what the anthropologists term ‘enculturation’, i.e. the process by which culture is handed on by the society and acquired by the individual.” To speak of education as enculturation seemed to relativize it and to make it historically conditioned rather than universally determinable. Some of my colleagues have argued that history, the very discipline that so deeply formed Dawson, should not even be considered a part of liberal education. Dawson would answer that such a view denigrates the real contributions of the rhetorical and literary tradition of learning that formed men such as Shakespeare, Newman, Chesterton, and Dawson himself and exhibits a misplaced prejudice against the scientific contributions of sociological history. I have been present when sparks flew between prominent proponents of each side, and would rather avoid them if I can. For that reason and others, I don’t intend to go too deeply into that dispute in this talk, but I am convinced that we will be better able to lead today’s renewal by understanding Dawson’s thought.

Culture

To make a beginning, I want to consider the meaning and implications of his claim that education is enculturation. What is culture? The word “culture”, commonplace now, was rarely used before 1800, but the idea in seminal form is present in authors from Herodotus to Plato to Augustine. Each of them recognized that a people is not defined so much by living in a geographical location as by sharing common loves, a common way of life, and common values. John Jay exemplified this in his argument for American political unity (Federalist 2):

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence….It appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead recognized that features like these are not just a list but form an intelligible unity that encompasses the many aspects of life and thought that make a people recognizable, studiable, and unique. She expressed this universally in a definition which Dawson quoted approvingly:

Culture is “an abstraction from the body of learned behavior which a group of people who share the same tradition transmit entire to their children and in part to those immigrants who become members of the society. It covers not only the arts and sciences, religions and philosophies…but also the systems of technology, the political practices, the small intimate habits of daily life, such as the way of preparing or eating food or of hushing a child to sleep, as well as the method of electing a prime minister or changing the constitution.”

Dawson adds an important note: “It has been shown by the experience of anthropologists that all this is a related whole, so that any change in one part of the field will be accompanied by changes in other parts.” The love of liberty and the instincts of a free people help illuminate the central values of American culture. That this is still alive today is witnessed by the fact that the rebirth of classical liberal arts education has taken place in America, and that others around the world are drawing inspiration and direction from us.

As I mentioned earlier, Dawson held that religious beliefs and practices make a people’s culture intelligible. Consequently, changes in religious practice have profound effects. Dawson believed that reverence for monastic life was one of the most important cultural determinants of the Middle Ages. Consequently,

It was the dissolution of the monasteries and the rejection of the monastic ideal which, more than any theological question or any question of ecclesiastical order, was the revolutionary change that separated Protestant Europe from the Christian culture of the past. (HRCC 61)

Community

If culture is central to education, then education is naturally an activity of a community and essential for its continued existence. Dawson recognized that education is an activity undertaken by a community – a family, a tribe, a polis, a nation – through which it initiates its young into the ways of life and thought which embody the moral, intellectual, and spiritual wealth it has achieved. In the most general sense, education is woven into the daily patterns of family and social life, as in the ways that parents pass on their language and their habits of eating and cleaning to their children.

Formal education, the kind that occurs in the schools that every literate society establishes, represents a significant commitment of time and resources on the part of the community. And, while it forms individuals for personal excellence, yet it also, and per se, makes them into members of society who bear within themselves the values of the community. The better the education, the more it forms them into leading members of a society.

Civilization

Every real community has a culture, and the cultures of more comprehensive communities impact and incorporate those of subsidiary communities. In this way, Dawson understands a civilization to be the most comprehensive community. “A civilization…may be described as a superculture…[It is] a way of life: it possesses common values, common standards of conduct and common rules of behavior, all of which contribute to the formation of that common moral order which is the essence of cultural unity.” In this sense, Socrates described the Peloponnesian War as a war among brothers, even though the Greeks never had political unity; it is correct to speak of Christendom and the West as civilizations, even though they lacked political unity.

The connection between education, culture, and civilization reveals how dire our situation is. A crisis of education is also a crisis of civilization.

The survival of a civilization depends on the continuity of its educational tradition: a common educational system creates a common world of thought with common intellectual values and a common inheritance of knowledge, which makes a society conscious of its identity and gives it a common memory of its past. Consequently any breach in the continuity of the educational tradition involves a corresponding breach in the continuity of the civilization.

By 1960, when Crisis was published, the education Dawson received was on its way to oblivion, not only in colleges but at the secondary level as well. I was fortunate that my public college prep high school still retained something of the old education – three years of required Latin, ancient mythology, classic literature (Latin and English) – but I was also present for the triumph of the engineers. Replacing the old education by a soul-less technological training meant the end of Western civilization, though only now are we experiencing it when the moral and spiritual capital built up by the Christian and humanist culture has been completely spent. Dawson believed those who initiated the educational revolution would not mourn its consequences. We might feel that education has failed because Johnny can’t read and test scores have plummeted, but

behind this smokescreen of blue books and hand books great forces are at work which have changed the lives and thoughts of men more effectively than the arbitrary power of dictators or the violence of political revolutions. (VIII.77)

Prescription

In a medical sense, the word “crisis” signifies the point when the patient must either submit to an illness and die, or break the illness and begin to return to health. To help the patient, the doctor must properly diagnose the illness, identify its underlying causes, and then prescribe the proper medications and regimen to alleviate the crisis and promote the return to health. Dawson did not prescribe a return to the past practices, either the humanistic studies of his youth, or the scholastic education that had come to form the core of twentieth century Catholic university curriculum. Such prescriptions misunderstood the needs of the patient and the underlying causes of the illness. The limitations of each form of education and their hostility to one another were among the most significant of the underlying causes.

Dawson pointed out that Scholastic education in the high middle ages was exclusively clerical and Latin. It never adapted itself to the needs of the laity nor incorporated the vernacular culture which began to flourish outside of the universities and laid the ground for the flourishing of European literature. The renewal of Scholastic education in the twentieth century was insufficiently cultural in a time when universal, democratic, lay education was to be the norm. It was ill-suited to prepare laity for leadership in an intellectually illiterate world and would  encourage the ghettoization of Catholics in a world which would soon no longer tolerate ghettos. Note the shift of schools to lay leadership.

In contrast, Renaissance humanism did find models for educating lay leaders, but it was in the pagan ideals of the literary and rhetorical training promoted by Cicero and Quintilian.

Hence the rise of a new lay educated class brought with it an independent ideal of lay culture….While the clergy studied the Bible and the Fathers, the laity studied the classics; while the clergy studied the history of the Church, the laity studied the history of the State; while the clergy studied the traditional Christian philosophy, the laity studied the philosophers of pagan antiquity and the new natural sciences….

As Dawson says, his generation had been taught in the same school and by the same Masters…reading the same books and conforming their minds to the same standards as their Roman predecessors 1800 years before (CTC 153). But precisely because it was the same education as the pagan Romans it was not sufficiently Christian, neither in the authors of its curriculum nor in the exposure it provided to the complete Christian culture which included icons, chant, monastic life, and the vernacular literature of the middle ages. Nor was it sufficiently alive – it presented an ideal of culture but not a living and complete one.

Dawson’s Prescription

What is needed, therefore, is no less than a radical reform of Christian education: an intellectual revolution which will restore the internal unity of Christian culture. XII.123.

Dawson believed that the study of Christian civilization should form the core of undergraduate programs at Catholic universities. The Spirit which animated the Christian body expressed itself in a thousand cultural practices that were an essential part of the total education of the young. Since these were no longer a part of social initiation, some sense of them needed to be included in formal education.  It would include reading Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, St. Benedict’s Rule, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Undset’s Kristen Lavransdatter. It would incorporate liturgical and monastic theology and practices, as well as the literature and art that flourished outside of the clerical circles. All of this would be presented in the context of a sociological/historical study of Christianity, which would show the intelligible connections among all of the cultural facets. Christian studies should form an important part of the core even in non-Christian schools. For Western civilization, though different from Christian civilization, could never understand nor maintain itself without recognizing its Christian inspiration.

St. Jerome Academy

I will leave more detailed consideration of Dawsonian collegiate programs in better hands. Instead I will introduce you to the Educational Plan of St. Jerome Academy, an elementary diocesan school in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., which in 2010 gave concrete realization to Dawson’s hope for Catholic schools when it became the first parochial school in the U.S. to embrace a classical education. In danger of closing, the parish and school leaders involved homeschooling parents in a complete overhaul of the vision, curriculum, and culture of the school. Led by Dr. Michael Hanby of the Pope St. John Paul II Institute and Dr. Jared Ortiz of the Catholic University of America, they developed and made freely available “The Education Plan of St. Jerome Classical School”, which brought about the renewal not only of their school but of scores of others around the country.

The plan bears many marks of Dawson’s thought. It cites Crisis prominently among its sources on the nature of Catholic education, because it “shows why classical education must be accompanied by a historical approach to the story of Christian culture.” Even apart from Dawson’s influence, the thoroughness of its Educational Plan makes it a great example of what it looks like to fulfill the call of the 1977 document of the Sacred Congregation for Education, The Catholic School, to every Catholic school “to review its entire programme of formation, both its content and the methods used, in the light of that vision of the reality from which it draws its inspiration and on which it depends” (Congregation 1977, n.28). Even more, it exemplifies the very Dawsonian definition of a school given in that same document.

A school [is] a place of integral formation by means of a systematic and critical assimilation of culture. A school is, therefore, a privileged place in which, through a living encounter with a cultural inheritance, integral formation occurs….

St. Jerome Academy makes formation through assimilation of culture a central part of its Vision of education: “We seek to incorporate our students into the wisdom of two thousand years of Catholic thought, history, culture, and arts so that they might understand themselves and their world in the light of the truth and acquire the character to live happy and integrated lives in the service of God and others.” The Plan is clear that the study of Christian culture is not merely an intellectual exercise, but a means of formation in the light of the transcendent goods of truth, beauty and goodness. The ultimate aim is to arouse love of truth in students through the beauty found in Catholic culture: “The Vision Statement seeks to root a comprehensive understanding of education in a compelling and beautiful vision of reality worthy of students‘ love.”

Following Dawson, the Plan envisions that a historically and culturally oriented curriculum will provide that compelling and beautiful vision of reality. “The curriculum presents history as a coherent story propelled by the human desire for God and God‘s coming to meet, inflame and satisfy that desire in Christ.” According to the Plan, the Christian story includes all of history, for pre-Christian civilizations are discovered to have been implicitly longing for God, and so ready to be incorporated into Christian civilization, as the barbarians were in the post-Roman West. “And they should seek to understand the birth of modern culture as an event within Christianity, as simultaneously a development of Christian culture and a reaction against a Christian view of reality.” The curricular years are divided in a way compatible with this view, with years devoted to Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Modern history.

“Other subjects such as literature, art, and music and even math and nature studies complement this understanding and deepen it. For instance, a class studying Greek culture… might read and discuss stories from Greek mythology to think along with the Greeks from the inside. A class studying the Middle Ages…might learn Gregorian chant in music, or consider the symbolism of Gothic architecture in art or the symbolism of shapes in medieval stained glass in conjunction with their introduction to geometry.”

The Plan does not present Religion as the integrating discipline, but it is “the key to its unity and integration”. The Christian religion reveals the God of love to us, and allows us to recognize Him in His historical providence, and in every manifestation of what is true, good, and beautiful. Through their study of the Trinity of Love and their participation in religious activities, students should be brought to see that “love is at the root of reality and what this implies for civilization and for the meaning of their own nature as embodied persons.” “This unified view reaches its summit in worship, which is the highest form of knowledge and thus the end and goal of true education.” Forming students who will be moved by liturgies, and will even contribute to them, should be a goal of our work.

Students must be formed so as to appreciate and embrace the Christian worldview, particularly (as in Simone Weil) in habits of attention and contemplative reception. This is accomplished particularly through training in art, music, and nature studies. “Approached in this way, the study of nature, music and art is a kind of preparation for contemplative prayer or adoration, and these in turn, prepare the student to study the world and to live in it in a fully human way.”

Evaluation

We have much to learn from Dawson. First of all, we need to see how important our educational struggles are. Our society is struggling in what might be its death throes because a century ago education began to be taken over by those who had no love for Western civilization, especially its Christian core. The more we immerse our young in the best of Christian culture, the more we can hope that we are preparing the way for a recovery of health.

The recovered patient might even be healthier than before the crisis, because we can make our curricula essentially more complete by providing, as Archbishop Miller exhorts us in The Holy See’s Teachings on Catholic Schools, “a Catholic worldview throughout the curriculum.” If we accept Common Core, or the Great Books, or simply return to schools of the fifties, we are taking the lead from the secular world. Dawson, on the other hand, can help us to gain a new appreciation of Christian civilization in its literature, history, thought, and life, which can then give our students a deeper understanding and appreciation of what it means to be Catholic.

Dawson’s thought can also enrich our comprehension of individual subjects by understanding them in their cultural connections. Theology approached only abstractly is like the separated soul, which though blessed is not fully a person. It is completed and enriched when we grasp how its most speculative doctrines are embodied in liturgy and prayer, in music, architecture, and art. All these disciplines discover their own significance in the light of theology. Dawson also helps us to see that history itself has an intelligibility, and can reveal to us with some confidence in important instances the Providential action of God.

Yet, I would not trade my scholastic/Great Books education, even with its imperfections. It grounded me in habits of thought which I think are necessary for those who hope to become wise. As laity assume leadership roles in Catholic thought and polity, a strong grounding in scholastic thought prepares us as it did the clergy of the Middle Ages. But I think Dawson is right that, alone, it is incomplete.

Ideally, the cultural foundation will be laid in pre-collegiate education, and collegiate education will include but not consist mainly in a sociological overview enriched by philosophical and theological studies. Plato images this idea in the Republic. In the earlier books, Socrates presents an ideal education of soul and body for his guardians that results in a harmoniously ordered recognition of and delight in the forms of what is true, good, and beautiful as they appear in the thought and art and celebrations of a well-ordered society and a corresponding hatred of their opposites. Through a careful attention to the stories and practices that surround them, the guardians are prepared for the testing that invites them to rise beyond their cave, where they can look back upon it in the light of the universal good, and embrace the wisdom that give meaning to the beautiful life in which they were raised. As Merry said in the Houses of Healing, “It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.”

This complete view of the education of the young is especially important today. Though their style of writing often conceals it, the scholastics of yore were raised in thoroughly Catholic Shires; some such as St. Thomas were raised in monasteries or received their formal education at the hands of the Cathedral masters. In contrast, probably all of us and most of our young are raised in a secular world. They need their schools to pay attention to their complete cultural formation; they must experience how the Eucharist is the center and summit of the whole of Catholic life and thought. Such an education would prepare them to readily grasp Dawson’s understanding of Christian civilization, and enter most fruitfully into its philosophical and theological core.