Christopher Dawson’s work is a kaleidoscopic treatment of a dizzying amount of Western history. Throughout, he looks at everything from the giant, even “theocratic” and “unitary” states such as Charlemagne’s empire, to the smaller “petty states of France and the Low Countries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.” While he is objective about the goods achieved in large political entities such as the former, he clearly prefers the smaller states with “their very multiplicity and limited character” as the ideal societies for the ferment needed for a society to integrate culture and religion. In works such as his Medieval Essays and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Dawson identifies the characteristics important to nourish the kind of interior action that made Christian Europe at its best. His analysis provides us with guidelines for thinking again about what kind of political units and politics allow for a vibrant Christian culture.

Contemporary Context

While Christopher Dawson was a man steeped in the past, his own writing bore witness to his desire to think clearly about the present and the future. His essay “The Six Ages of the Church” makes clear that his attempt to understand the dynamics of the Church’s life in the past is in service of both speculative clarity and practical wisdom. We know neither the day nor the hour, and the old age of the Church that he saw as on its last legs may well be the last age. Alternatively, the Lord may tarry, and we will endure fifty ages hence. 

Dawson was convinced that the old order of Christendom had broken down and the modern world was something completely different. In the early days of World War II, in Dawson’s 1939 Beyond Politics, he wrote that the then-current divisions “between Democracy and Dictatorship or between Fascism and Communism” did not represent the real issue. Instead, “[i]t was a change in the whole social structure of the modern world, which affects religion and culture as well as politics and economics.” That change involved “forces” that created “social uniformity and the mechanization of culture” and were “no less strong in England and the United States than in Germany and Italy, so that we might expect to see the rise of a democratic totalitarianism which would make the same universal claims on the life of the individual as the totalitarian dictatorships of the Continent.”

The title Beyond Politics refers to the evacuation of spiritual values in modern societies that allows for spiritual substitutes in the form of political or ideological movements to create an organization of the entirety of life according to a single “programme and ideology.” Modern parliamentary democracy had rendered the State “a neutral impersonal organization which was operated by whatever party or combination of parties happened to predominate at the moment, and since rival parties and rival interests tended, with universal suffrage, and representation, to cancel one another out, the democratic State was incapable of deciding fundamental issues and the whole government became weak and inept.”

While a full analysis of how things have really changed in the West, formerly known as Christendom, is beyond the scope of this essay, it is safe to say that the weaknesses Dawson identified in the 1930s are still present. The spiritual values that would allow rebellion against the tyrannies facing us are still somewhat thin on the ground on a societal level, whether in Europe or elsewhere. Much of the controversy over the supposed threat of “Christian nationalism” seems to hinge on a conflation of two different sets of questions: 1) those dealing with the spiritual and theoretical foundations of our society, as discovered in both the people and the logic undergirding our laws, and 2) the relationship between temporal authorities and spiritual, or, as we say, Church and State. While there has been a small, vociferous contingent of Catholic thinkers advocating a return to a formal relationship in which the Church is acknowledged by and gives direction to the State—a state of affairs often called “integralism”—the question of political mechanisms and a formal relationship to the Church can be separated from that having to do with the grounds beneath the institutions and practices we use. 

Dawson’s concerns for the twentieth century are connected to both questions, of course. As Dawson scholar Joseph Stuart has argued, Dawson’s doubts about the value of the “unitary state” were developed (as many were) in response to the totalitarian governmental experiments. What he saw in the Middle Ages was the liberal tradition, as opposed to a philosophical “liberalism.” Liberal tradition involves a whole host of practices and ways of thinking that make life much more endurable and, perhaps, the Gospel more believable.

As he wrote in Medieval Essays, in the chapter “Church and State in the Middle Ages,” the effect of this unitary conception of Church and State in the Carolingian period was “the secularization of the former and the clericalization of the latter.” Dawson describes the “history of the medieval Church” as “largely…a series of attempts to remedy this state of affairs and to emancipate the spiritual power from lay control and exploitation by a return to the traditional principles of canonical order.” The papacy’s growing claims to a kind of twofold rule over both the Church and the whole of Christendom provided something very interesting. Ultimately, however, they bred “an inevitable confusion between the temporal and the spiritual orders which led to tragic misunderstanding and conflicts,” a pitched battle between two forms of unitary rule—Church and Empire. Dawson credits St. Thomas Aquinas with the development of “a solid intellectual foundation” for an “autonomous State which does not transcend its proper sphere by theocratic claims” and is bounded by an understanding of the natural law.  

Dawson’s meditations throughout so many of these writings are the conditions for a proper, liberal (in a non-ideological sense), healthy political life in which culture could develop and the Church could thrive. He does have positive words even in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture for aspects of the Carolingian unitary state, including Charlemagne’s promotion of education and literature, his attempt at a vast liturgical and ecclesiastical reform, and also his creation of a new sense of law:

Hitherto the legislation of the Western kingdoms had been of the nature of a Christian appendix to the old barbarian tribal codes. Now, for the first time, a complete break was made with the past, and Christendom enacted its own laws, which covered the whole field of social activity in Church and state, and referred all things to the single standard of the Christian ethos. This was inspired neither by Germanic nor Roman precedent. The Carolingian emperors gave the law to the whole Christian people in the spirit of the kings and judges of the Old Testament, declaring the law of God to the people of God.

Dawson’s meditation on the “theocratic constitutionalism implicit in the coronation rite” observes that the unitary character of the state was still served by a duality of priest and king as two authorities, whose domains and prerogatives were disputed throughout the Middle Ages. It was a majestic development that seemed a far cry from Fustel de Coulange’s observation, quoted by Dawson, that the Frankish kingdom was “a regime of despotism tempered by assassination.” 

And, yet, one can see in that outcome both the secularization of Church and clericalization of State. Dawson argues that, despite all of its official filling of the political ethos with Christian content, and despite the good and valiant attempt at creating a political life in which the polis was healthy and free and Christian, the advantage is still to “the older view of the limited and essentially dependent nature of divine right.” Without discounting the gifts of Charlemagne’s unitary state, Dawson still prefers the small beginnings of political life in which things may not be perfect, but the dynamism between Christian faith, culture, and the political life of the area has something alive in it. 

For Dawson, the transition periods often show the possibilities inherent in societies that receive the Gospel. He portrays the monks of England, Wales, and Ireland as bringing Christian faith and culture to Ireland. They changed the political situation by bringing a new conception of life that illuminates what remains good in the old cultures and polities. Dawson’s account of Irish monasticism in the fourth and fifth centuries illustrates this ability to leaven the cultural and political situation without destroying it. 

Although the monastic community, which was a society of peace, represents the opposite pole of thought and action to the tribal community, which was a society of warriors, there was a certain parallelism between them. On the one side we have the chieftain and his company of warriors who are bound to follow him to the death; on the other, we have the abbot and his community which is sworn to obedience to eternal life. On the one hand there is the ethos of honour and fidelity and the cult of the hero; on the other, the ethos of sacrifice and sanctity and the cult of the saint and the martyr.

Dawson’s claims that this appeal and this grafting of Latin Christian traditions on so many of these locales in the British islands via the Benedictine foundations and the influence of Gallic Christianity (in Wales and Ireland) was successful insofar as it affected both ruling figures and the people. It created a new kind of society with a politics that was not perfect but going in the right direction. 

Dawson’s account of the early development of Christian culture in the Barbarian kingdoms has the same sort of positive look—elegiac, in fact, for those early experiments were often destroyed. The barbarian rulers often saw that “their native tradition of warrior kingship was not enough.” Dawson quotes Procopius on the prototype of this kind of ruler, the Goth Theodoric, whose “manner of ruling over his subjects was worthy of a great Emperor; for he maintained justice, made good laws, protected his country from invasion and gave proof of extraordinary prudence and valour.” 

Yet, there is a danger. Concerning the gains made by the Christianization of kings in the small kingdoms, Dawson observes that the “weakening of royalty and of the social order” that “took place in all the barbarian kingdoms of the West as a result of the transition from pagan to Christian culture” had serious downsides. Dawson says that the right mixture of Christian culture and strength is hard to find. In a turn now seen as politically incorrect, Dawson suggests in his chapter “The Feudal World” that the later Christian world of the Crusades featured a “unity of Christendom” that found expression in “a dynamic militant activity which satisfied the aggressive instincts of Western man, while at the same time sublimating them in terms of religious idealism.”

The key is, as usual, in the dynamism between the elements rather than a particular formula. The key to successful political life doesn’t necessarily reside in a final political model to be followed. The Church is, as the Augustinian Ernest Fortin liked to say, “transpolitical.” She finds ways to operate in every kind of basically decent political set-up. And every basically decent political set-up can produce a livable situation. 

Yet, what is intriguing is again how often the most successful political and cultural operations relied upon something less than unitary. In his chapter “Reform in the Eleventh Century,” Dawson observes that the monastic reform movement, which was so important to stabilizing societies, relied in large part on the “decentralization and local particularism of feudal society, for these conditions made it possible for a founder to establish his religious founding without the interference of king or bishop.” 

Though they accepted many of the prior understandings of the “traditional Carolingian conception of the divine right of kings” and looked to them for support, the monks were operating in a fairly open political arena in which the good of the people depended much more on local politics than far-away emperors or, to some extent, popes. Monasteries themselves became important players in the political life of many areas, leading St. Abbo of Fleury to joke “that he was more powerful than the king of the Franks since his abbey possessed dependencies in lands where the king had no authority.” 

The monastic orders inflamed by reform “were arising like islands of peace and spiritual order in a sea of feudal anarchy.” In powerful monastic figures “such as St. Odo and St. Romuald and St. William of Volpiano the lawless feudal nobles, who cared nothing for morality or law, recognized the presence of something far stronger than brute force—a numinous supernatural power.”

In Chapter IX of Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, “The Medieval City: Commune and Gild,” Dawson demonstrates how the most successful political experiments depended upon something smaller than the unitary laws passed down from the top. The medieval city required the strength to secure a place of peace, but it is the smaller associations that were vital in building it. Gilds of merchants and pilgrims were established to provide protection of life and the ability to do business. They also bound the members according to “charitable or social purposes under the patronage of some popular saint.” 

Dawson says it is to these voluntary associations “that the development of medieval city life in North-Western Europe was primarily due.” These groups worked for common interests and provided a kind of government and provision that “could carry on an independent existence apart from the regular organs of the feudal state.” They led to the creation of the commune, which incorporated “all the inhabitants of a town, and not the merchants alone” in a pact by which they “bound themselves by oath to keep the common peace, to defend the common liberties and to obey the common officers.” Though these communes often rejected the authority of local prince-bishops, they were not anti-clerical as a whole. Instead, they were often “closely related to the movement of ecclesiastical reform” that had been preached by Gregory VII. 

Dawson treats the Italian city-states as the best representative of smallness molded to the universal culture of the Church, calling medieval Italy “a land of city states which is comparable only to ancient Greece in richness and diversity of civic life.” While there are differences between the cities of different regions of Europe, Dawson claims their general “integration of corporate organization, economic function and civic freedom” made them “the most complete embodiment of the social ideals of the Middle Ages.” 

The multi-layered hierarchy and organization of medieval cities allowed for strength as well as true social diversity. They relied upon both an organic sense of society and also a reversion of sorts to the older dualism between Church and world, grace and nature, that does not allow for a complete identification of the state as “the sovereign end of human life” but instead as “an organ of the spiritual community.” Dawson says the theoretical developments in thought about politics came almost exclusively from Italians who had experience of the city states, who were nevertheless able to extend their thoughts “to include larger political units like the medieval kingdom or the empire.”  

Small is beautiful, as E. F. Schumacher wrote. For Dawson, we might say, the smallness of experiments in ordered liberty under Christian influence are the most beautiful of all. If it is difficult to solve the problems of large, modern, and technologically sophisticated but barbarian states, we might, taking a page from Dawson, turn again for inspiration to the smaller units of our Christian past to see what we can do on lower levels. In that past, we might discover again how barbarian kings might be pacified (though maybe not too much) and how bands of merchants and enthusiastic pilgrims might help inspire and inform political organization from towns and cities upward.     

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A version of this essay was presented at the Dawson Seminar at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota in June 2026. 

The featured image is “The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius” (c. 1883), by John William Waterhouse, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.