The Power of Ideology: Christopher Dawson on the Modern Age

Christopher Dawson, FBA, was an English Catholic historian and independent scholar, who wrote on cultural history emphasising the need for Western culture to be in continuity with Christianity so as not to stagnate and deteriorate. Dawson has been called "the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century".

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Bradley J. Birzer, PhD

Since the Renaissance, Christopher Dawson feared, Western culture and society had embraced an arrogant form of humanism, one that places too much emphasis on the goodness of the human person. With the loss of the Medieval beliefs in the Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being, culture had adopted two radically dangerous institutions: the machine and bureaucracy.

In the 1920s, a youngish Christopher Dawson belonged to the Chelsea group, also known as the Order Men, a literary and philosophical society—comprised of young poets, authors, and impatient men of letters—dedicated to the rather strident promotion of Christian humanism, especially within the Catholic tradition. They wanted not only to challenge the reigning Church of England, but also the more complacent and timid English Roman Catholics. As a group, they especially admired Jacques Maritain. The order of the “Order Men” was not the mechanistic, brutal, and inhumane order of the Italian fascists or the Soviet communists, but rather of a Stoic, spontaneous, and libertarian variety, rooted in the common law tradition of trials by juries and being innocent until proven guilty. It was the kind of order that emerges from individual (and corporate) free choice employed to be commensurate with the Natural Law.

To profess their views more widely, Dawson and Tom Burns published a journal called Order. Though it only survived for four issues, all published between 1928 and 1929, Order was an intellectual and cultural tour de force, with articles covering everything from Catholic primary education to Western civilization (its origins and existence) to the psychology of sex. The journal even included original art by the soon-to-be famous modernist poet, David Jones. As a mission statement for the journal, Dawson and Burns proclaimed:

We are Catholics, speaking to Catholics…. The powers of the foolish mentality are varied. Noticeably, it has a tremendous and indiscriminating admiration for its kind, a constant and truculent attention to the sect called Anglican, and a behaviour that is alternately hysterical and somnolent in face of whatever else is alien and, for it, difficult to understand…. Order will try to represent those who wish to eradicate the foolish mentality, or at least render it innocuous.

True to its promise, Order’s four issues challenged—often in ways humorous and always in ways intense—many of the problems of the interwar period. In his own articles in Order, Dawson carefully considered the role of culture and civilization.

If civilization has nothing to do with morals or religion, if social justice and political liberty are matters of indifference to it, it can have but little contact with human life in its most universal aspects. It is an artificial growth, a hot-house plant which can only flourish in a world in which everyone is witty and well mannered and well dressed; where poverty and suffering are unknown. Such a society can never exist in its own right. It is the result of certain rare and transitory moments in the wider life of humanity. Its exquisite frivolity is powerless to withstand the hard facts of life.[1]

True civilization, he continued, came not from radically new innovations and fads, but, rather, from connecting the highest thing to the lowest thing, recognizing as such, a great chain of being, tying together the material and the spiritual. God, Dawson noted, must be the standard by which all things are measured, and not by the sophistic measure of man. While one can find such a standard blatantly in the works of Plato, all higher societies—whether in Europe, Africa, or Asia—possess a similar notion.[2]  “The fundamental primacy of the soul, the subordination of the State and the whole temporal order to spiritual ends and the conception of humanity as, in the words of St. Thomas, a great community or republic under the rule of God were formerly accepted as the unquestioned principles of the European social order,” Dawson believed.[3] Sadly, however, too many Catholics—especially when outnumbered and shunned in England—had grown timid about asserting themselves in the culture, losing even the knowledge that they should assert themselves in the culture. Further, all of aspects of modernity had placed forces such as economics and politics ahead of culture. To reclaim Catholicism and its rightful place, Dawson argued, the Catholic must recognize that philosophy is not merely one means by which to understand life or merely the topic of the specialist, but rather the way “towards the vision of immutable truth.”[4]

Yet, Dawson cautioned, man—as a complex, complicated, and often contradictory being—readily misunderstands his own place in the great Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being.

Whether we view the world from a religious or a naturalistic standpoint, we have to admit that man is an unsatisfactory kind of creature. Judged as an animal, he lacks the perfection of an animal, because his spiritual capacity imparts something monstrous to his animality. And as a rational being, even the rationalists will admit that he is a failure, since he is for the greater part of his life at the mercy of his passions and impulses. If he attempts to suppress the animal side of his nature by a sheer effort of conscious will, nature finds a hundred unpleasant and unexpected ways of reasserting itself. If, on the other hand, he tries to come to terms with the instincts by giving them their natural satisfaction, the experiment is apt to end in the animalization rather than the rationalization of his nature, since it is just the element of passion which raises the indulgence of physical desire above the animal level.[5]

Dawson’s views, it would seem clear, were not only Thomistic but also deeply Stoic.

Still, for a Catholic to become a Catholic is, for Dawson, to become fully Christian humanist and fully humane, aware of one’s place in the order of existence, recognizing (and reconciling) both his material and spiritual sides, and knowing himself to be lower than God but higher than the animals.

Every Christian mind is a seed of change, so long as it is a living mind, not enervated by custom or ossified by prejudice. A Catholic only has to be in order to change the world in which he lives, but in that act of being there is contained all the mystery of the supernatural life. It is the function of the Church to sow this divine seed, to produce not merely good men, but spiritual men—that is to say super-men. In so far as the Church fulfils this function She transmits to the world a continuous stream of new life. But if the salt itself loses its savour, then the world sinks back into disorder and death. The unspiritual Catholic is the most abject of all failures. He is good neither for the Church nor for the world—in the words of the Gospel, neither for the land nor for the dunghill. He is only fit to be trodden on. But so long as the Church exists, there is always the promise of new life. . . . The Spirit breathes, and they are created, and the face of the world is renewed.[6]

In addition to commenting and sermonizing about aspects of scripture—such as Dawson’s analysis of the Sermon on the Mount—Order also brought the latest news from European—especially from French and German—Christian humanists.

After the four issues of Order came out, Dawson and Burns decided to publish a series of essays dedicated to the 1,500th anniversary of St. Augustine’s death, 1930. That book, for all intents and purposes, signified the beginning of a twentieth-century European Catholic Republic of Letters. A book of highest genius, A Monument to St. Augustine included essays from Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Dawson, and Martin D’Arcy, to name just a few of its varied and critical contributors.

Inspired by A Monument to St. Augustine, Frank Sheed—the head of the well-respected but young publishing firm, Sheed and Ward—encouraged Burns and Dawson to convert their previous journal and their editing experience into a book series. Called “Essays in Order,” sixteen volumes appeared between 1931 and 1936. This is, to be sure, one of the finest series written in the twentieth century and began a long communication between and among European Christian Humanists, establishing a true republic of letters, that foreshadowed Vatican II, but which was stunted and nearly derailed by World War II. Still, in the 1930s, it was, it seems, the beginning of nothing less than a Catholic literary revival, spearheaded by Sheed and Ward. Authors included the Frenchman Maritain, the Russian Nicholas Berdyaev, the Englishman Herbert Read, the German Rudolph Allers, and the Anglo-Welsh Dawson, who wrote two of the sixteen books of the series.

Dawson’s Christianity and the New Age was volume three in “Essays in Order” and the first to deal explicitly with the humanist movement. Published in 1931, it offered a hard and inspired look at a world being torn apart by fascisms, communisms, materialisms, and the Great Depression. In particular, Dawson considered the humanistic thought of three men: the nihilistic humanism of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900); the agnostic humanism of American Irving Babbitt (1865-1933); and the Christian humanism of Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948). Along the way, Dawson also explored, necessarily, the ideas of Charles Péguy, T.E. Hulme, Karl Marx, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and J. Murry Middleton.

In its most simplistic form, humanism simply means an exploration of the humanities (the liberal arts) and the existential questions pertaining to all humanity: learning, hoping, failing, excellences, innovations, confusions, etc. By 1900 or so, however, the word humanist had become so pervasive in Western culture—everyone and everything wanted to attach itself to humanism—that the word had come to mean everything, and, consequently, nothing. Our best equivalent in the first third of the twenty-first century would be “democracy.” In other words, when Dawson chose humanism as his topic in the early 1930s, he was both offering an obituary of the concept while also giving it—he hoped—a new lease on life, a sort of rebirth. If, however, Dawson could convince the world to reshape and hone its understanding of humanism, however, it would have to become a Christian humanism, a humanism that recognized the dignity of the human person, made in the Image of God, born unique in time and space, and armed with the freely-given grace of the Holy Spirit.

Since the Renaissance, Dawson feared, Western culture and society had embraced an arrogant form of humanism, one that places too much emphasis on the goodness of the human person without recognizing his innate failings or his dependence upon God. With the loss of the Medieval (a proper understanding) beliefs in the Economy of Grace and the Great Chain of Being (each of which placed man higher than the animals but lower than the angels), culture had adopted two radically dangerous institutions: 1) the machine; and 2) bureaucracy. As to the first, Dawson lamented:

In science, the growth of man’s knowledge and his control over nature is accompanied by a growing sense of man’s dependence on material forces. He gradually loses his position of exception and superiority and sinks back into nature. He becomes a subordinate part of the great mechanical system that his scientific genius has created. In the same way, the economic process, which led to the exploitation of the world by man and the vast increase of his material resources, ends in the subjection of man to the rule of the machine and the mechanization of human life.

Further, the other danger arises in a mechanized government, one that traps and strangles society through a myriad of rules and regulations, thus attenuating not only man’s free will but his very knowledge of free will.

It led, on the one hand, to the disintegration of the organic principle in society into an individualistic atomism, which leaves the individual isolated and helpless before the new economic forces, and, on the other, to the growth of the new bureaucratic state, that ‘coldest of cold monsters’, which exerts a more irresistible and far-reaching control over the individual life than was ever possessed by the absolute monarchies of the old regime.

The new economic forces and the new bureaucratic forces were the result of a staid and dreadful conformist materialism, itself totalitarian in reach and scope.

Only by reestablishing our deepest ties to the Catholic Church (the source of pre-materialistic Western civilization) and finding the “cult”—that is the religious expression—at the root of culture can we hope for a humane alternative to the devastation wrought by economics and ideologues. By embracing a Christian humanism, we can come to connect to the grace of the Incarnation (especially celebrating that Jesus was fully divine and fully man, simultaneously) and be open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus is the bridge between Humanity and Divinity. In Him God is not only manifested to man, but vitally participated. He is the Divine Light, which illuminates men’s minds, and the Divine Life, which transforms human nature and makes it the partaker of Its own supernatural activity.

Christianity, Dawson believed, must also be a totalitarian philosophy, one that demands the totality of our free will, our desires, and our actions.

In the end, one must ask if Dawson succeeded in his call to redefine humanism as a Christian humanism? Certainly, to at least some important degree, the answer is yes. At the time that Christianity and the New Age came out, it sold well and it received excellent reviews, even from the Protestant and secular presses of the day. But, one really only has to look at those who would come to see Dawson as a model and an exemplar of humane writing over the next half century to see that he mattered: Maisie Ward, Frank Sheed, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Etienne Gilson, Brother Thomas Merton, Russell Kirk, David Jones, Allen Tate, Father Theodore Hesburgh, Sister Madeleva Wolff, and Pope Benedict XVI, to name only a few. Not bad. Not bad at all.

This is part I of a talk that Dr. Birzer gave for the Tocqueville Forum, Furman University, December 2, 2021. Part II may be found here. He would like to thank Aaron Zubia and Paige Blankenship for their invitation and their help.

This essay was first published here in December 2021.

Notes:

[1] Dawson, “Civilisation and Order,” Order 2 (August 1928), 42.

[2] Dawson, “Civilisation and Order,” 43. In this argument, Dawson anticipates C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man by more than a decade.

[3] Dawson, “Civilisation and Order,” 44.

[4] Dawson, “Civilisation and Order,” 45.

[5] Dawson, “The Psychology of Sex and the Catholic Order,” Order (March 1929), 80-81.

[6] Dawson, “The Order of the Catholic,” Order (November 1929), 114-115