'The Break': Dawson and the Modern World

by Gerald J. Russello - February 10, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson

Bradley J. Birzer, Christendom Press, $30, 332 pages

Since September 11, and the subsequent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West has been engaged in a period of intense self-scrutiny. Some commentators, like Christopher Hitchens, believe the West will survive as a secular culture and applaud its supposed rejection of its religious heritage. Others contest the conclusion that growing modernization requires reduced religious feeling, arguing instead that religion is in fact growing in importance across the world, including the West. At the same time, and straddling both of these trends, books like Charles Taylor's monumental A Secular Age examine what is different between being religious now, and being religious in the pre-modern world.

During the 1920s and 1930s, a group of Catholic intellectuals explored the same questions. At that time, the threats were from the materialist ideologies of communism, Nazism, and fascism; more broadly, the West was faced with a general rejection of religious belief and with it a rupture from its cultural past, what the Welsh poet David Jones and others at the time called "the Break." Among the most important of these Catholic figures was Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), who in a series of influential books and articles crafted a Catholic understanding of, and response to, the immense changes brought about by modernity and advocated a new understanding of the place of religion in cultural history.

Dawson examined the same flashpoints that have so occupied our contemporary commentators. In his influential 1948 Gifford lectures, later published as Religion and Culture, Dawson set out his theory of secularization. Secularization – what Taylor calls the "disenchantment" of the world – went hand in hand with scientific methods and techniques, joined at first with Western ideals and, it should be said, Western colonialism. The idea that civilization in the absolute sense means only the West collapsed along with colonialism, but "the process of social and economic unification which it generated still continues with undiminished intensity. The emphasis to-day however is no longer on Western ideas but rather on the Western scientific techniques."

Dawson warns, however, that these techniques, cut off from the humanistic culture from which they arose, create the risk of a spiritual vacuum, in which science will be used only for destructive or anti-human ends. Unfortunately, Dawson's work has remained marginalized, in part because of ignorance and in part because of an unfair caricature of Dawson as a Catholic apologist.

In Sanctifying the World, Bradley J. Birzer, a professor of history who holds the Russell Kirk Chair at Hillsdale College, has written an engaging overview of Dawson and his world. Birzer discusses the major events in the historian's life, beginning with his childhood in Yorkshire, where his Welsh heritage and rooted existence greatly influenced his view of historical change; his friendship with the writer E. I. Watkin (who later sponsored his conversion); and his increasing influence in Catholic intellectual circles. Birzer has done extensive research, and to our great advantage has spent time in the Dawson archives at St. Thomas University in Minnesota to complete his portrait of the man T. S. Eliot once called the most influential in England.

In particular, Birzer sets forth Dawson's "Augustinian" view of history. St. Augustine and Gibbon were perhaps Dawson's most important influences. Like Augustine, Dawson saw the modern world as a mix of the sacred and profane, and as an age when civilization itself seemed to be on the verge of collapse. In the fall of Rome, Augustine saw the hand of God and an example of the intermingled City of God with the City of Man. Dawson adopted an Augustinian stance in developing his historical method, seeking the underlying motivating forces in historical change, which would guide all his subsequent work. As Birzer notes, this approach, with its unabashed theistic core, put him at odds with most of the historical establishment, then and now.

Of particular interest are the discussions of Dawson's interaction with the so-called Moot and other groups of Catholic writers and intellectuals. In the early 1930s, Dawson edited a series of pamphlet-books under the general title Essays in Order, which arose from connections Dawson made with the Catholic publisher Tom Burns and others in the preceding decade. Eventually, 14 volumes of Essays in Order were published, including contributions form Watkin, Carl Schmitt, Nicholas Berdyaev, and Dawson himself.

Birzer also describes Dawson's successful run as editor of the esteemed Dublin Review. His account of Dawson's doubts about his work, and his sometimes difficult relationships with his publishers, provides an image of Dawson as a man rather than as just a writer.

Sanctifying the World helpfully brings together the disparate strands of Dawson's work, and gives us a rounded picture of the world in which he lived. But not the whole picture. Birzer's explanation of Dawson's Augustinianism, for example, is left somewhat vague in the end. Birzer rightly notes Dawson's rejection of what he saw as the abstract rigidity of the neo-Thomist school of philosophy, and indeed describes Dawson's more generous view that neo-Thomism needed to open itself to other influences. Dawson noted privately that neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain's True Humanism was "too dualistic." Yet, a few pages after this discussion, Birzer praises Dawson's metahistorical view for its "quasi-dualistic" approach. In the same chapter, Birzer aligns Dawson "with important western men," such as Plato, in rejecting mass democracy. But again, a few pages later, Birzer commends Dawson's separation from Plato's philosophy, specifically his metaphysics.

These positions are not necessarily inconsistent, but reconciling them requires additional explanation. Too often, the bounteous quotes from Dawson are made to carry more explanatory work than they are able to do. More generally, Dawson's views on Augustine have been challenged, both in his own time and in recent years by scholars such as Robert Markus. This debate goes unmentioned in Sanctifying the World.

Dawson's penetrating work provides a fresh window on the current crises facing the West. Regardless of these ultimately minor questions of emphasis, Birzer has done students of Dawson a service with Sanctifying the World.

Gerald J. Russello is a fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University. He is working on a book on Christopher Dawson.