A Last Word on Catholic Culture

Dr Martin concludes his series on Christian Culture, appropriately, with an appreciation of Christopher Dawson, the greatest historian of that culture in the 20th century.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Christopher Dawson's legacy was to document as learnedly as he knew how both the natural and the necessary connection between religion and culture.

Not since its Puritan founding nearly four centuries ago would Harvard University have ever dreamed of installing an official Chair of Roman Catholic Studies—much less invite the world’s foremost Roman Catholic historian to occupy it. But times do change. So, in 1958, the unthinkable having happened, Christopher Dawson arrived at Old Mother Harvard to begin teaching.

He had but one request, however, which was that she agree to ship his entire working library across the sea, consisting of over two thousand books. Astonished that anyone should need quite so many, Harvard nevertheless agreed to do it.

The arrangement lasted until 1962 when, after suffering two cerebral hemorrhages, Christopher Dawson returned partially crippled to England where, eight years later, he died at age 81, leaving intact a reputation as the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the last century. 

So, what was so special about Christopher Dawson? To what end all that erudition? Nothing less, it would appear, than to document as learnedly as he knew how both the natural and the necessary connection between religion and culture. Countless articles and books would, over the years, pour forth from that prodigiously well-stocked brain of his, all in the service of a single, overarching vision he had of an integrated life in which faith and the public life of a people might somehow organically be joined at the hip. 

The key to history, in other words, without which the past remains impenetrable, is religion. And for Dawson, of course, there could only be one religion, that of Roman Catholicism. Get a fix on that faith, find the spark plug igniting the engine of belief, and the whole meaning of human history stands revealed. “It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force,” he wrote as far back as 1929 in Progress and Religion, “which unifies a society and a culture.

The great civilizations of the world do not produce the great religions as a kind of cultural byproduct; in a very real sense, the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest. A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.

It is no surprise, therefore, that once having lost the Catholic Thing, which is the only plot line we’ve got to explain the story we’re in, we simply haven’t got anything left with which to give direction and shape to the culture in which we find ourselves. Apart from the self-centered self, that is, which is hardly enough nourishment for anyone, much less an entire culture. “A people without history,” warns T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets, “Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments…”

For those of us in what nowadays may rather quaintly be called the Christian West, for whom the one “great religion” we know, indeed, the one on which our civilization depends, is the Roman Catholic religion, there can be but one explanation for it, to wit, the Incarnation of God Himself. It is here that we find the precise pivotal moment of intersection, the privileged place where time and eternity meet, where Heaven and history come miraculously together. How else can the distant God draw perfectly close to man unless He were to become an actual member of our race?      

At the still point of the turning world /

There the dance is, and there is only the dance…

For Christopher Dawson, there was the inflection point, the point of intersection where the enfleshment of God took place to fire the historical imagination. There could be no other event, no possible happening in the great sea of history to compare with the coming of God among us, pitching His tent in the midst of our human world. Without that animating impulse of faith binding him to the Catholic Thing, he would not have written a single word, no one would have known a thing about him.

 When did we in the West first learn of this, this unforeseen and apocalyptic turn of events? It was the moment, as Dawson would frequently remind us, when an obscure preacher-man named Paul of Tarsus left Bithynia behind, thereupon electing to enter the European world for the first time. That was the flash point that would set the Occidental world ablaze. Having just been enjoined by the Holy Ghost not to “speak the word in Asia,” to quote that first Christian historian, St. Luke, who tells the story in the Book of Acts (16:6-10), Paul hears in a vision a certain Macedonian “beseeching him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’” Which Paul straightaway does, setting sail from Troas in Asia Minor, to Philippi, a Roman colony north of Greece, which had never before heard of Christ. The Apostle to the Gentiles will be the first to speak the word of salvation to a pagan world.

“This mysterious text,” Joseph Ratzinger tells us in his masterwork in Catholic theology Introduction to Christianity, “might well represent something like a first attempt at a ‘theology of history,’ intended to underline the crossing of the Gospel to Europe, ‘to the Greeks’ as a divinely arranged necessity.”

Necessity or not, it changed the world. Europe would, in due course, welcome Christ, in order that a continent once subservient to Caesar would dramatically give way to another and very different King, whose reign would last forever. And so transformative an event has God’s coming among us been, so generative a force did it loose upon the world, that whole societies once steeped in barbarism and blood would find, as Dawson himself tells us, “their principle of unity in the public profession of the Catholic faith.”

Tacitus was surely right when he insisted that what most commends the City is not the nobility of its emperor, nor the strength of its arms, nor even the wisest of its laws, but the temples of the gods. It is upon those pillars alone that the survival of the City depends. Yes, I shall say it again, Tacitus was right. Only he could not know, nor could anyone have known or even guessed at the time—not in the absence of grace could anyone know—that with the Incarnation of God, the Birth of Jesus Christ which no one had taken notice of, all temples save one would come to dust. And once that Temple was raised up, the Reign of Christ the King might truly begin.

We are all beneficiaries of that blessed Event. Shouldn’t we be reminding others of that fact? Telling them what a good thing it is to build a culture upon that singular fact as well?