Helloooo, Christopher Dawson
Having just posted the previous couple of stories (below) on Islam and Europe, what a good time this is to take up a serious study and application of the brilliant writing of scholar/historian Christopher Dawson. My seminarian son, Andrew, and I had a lively discussion of Dawson’s compelling ability to connect the dots in a way modern folks are missing.
At a time when the European Union has formed but refused to officially recognize its Christian roots in history, Dawson’s clarity of understanding that history could be a real ‘roadmap to peace,’ if only the mapmakers paid attention.
In Understanding Europe, Dawson emphasized its role in the world, and Christianity’s role in Europe’s history, all of which is misunderstood now. With dramatic consequences.
Thus, there is an urgent need for the better understanding of Europe, not only as a living society of peoples but as the creator of what we call “modern civilization”…Finally, we cannot begin to understand Europe itself unless we study the tradition of Christian culture, which was the original bond of European unity and the source of its common spiritual aims and its common moral values.
Like so many classics, his work is probably more true today than it was when he wrote it, this one in 1952. Look at this warning in which he saw the “problem of the future” as either “total secularization or a return to Christian culture.”
We have seen that the weakness of Western culture in face of the new forces that threaten its existence is due above all to its loss of faith in its own spiritual values and the growing detachment of its external way of life from its religious foundations and the sources of its spiritual vitality. If Europe is to survive–if we do not surrender to the inhuman ideal of a mass society which is a mere engine of the will to power–we must find some way to reverse this process and to recover our spiritual unity.
This is a problem of re-education in the widest sense of the word. For…the secularization of modern culture is inseparably connected with the secularization of modern education and the passing of control from the Church and the old teaching corporations to the modern state…
Neither in science nor elsewhere in the modern world do we see the emergence of any power which is capable of performing the essential function that religion has hiterto fulfilled in the societies of the past as a principle of cultural unity and as the creator of moral values.
In its absense, some set of values will take over and dominate the culture. In Europe as here, it has been an orthodoxy of secularism, with anti-Christian principles. It governs — among other institutions — our system of education. Dawson warned about that.
Taken in its widest sense education is simply the process by which the new members of a community are initiated into its way of life and thought from the simples elements of behavior or manners up to the highest tradition of spiritual wisdom. Christian education is therefore an initiation into the Christian way of life and thought and…there is no doubt that it has changed the world, and no one has any right to talk of the history of Western civilization unless he has done his best to understand its aims and its methods.
But, he points out, they were failing even at that time to understand Christianity’s role.
It is true that a treatment of history which is openly hostile to or contemptuous of Christian culture…is usually regarded as biased, but it is quite possible to write of European culture as of national history, leaving the Christian tradition entirely out of the picture, without the average reader’s realizing that anything is missing.
Now in nearly every instance above, replace the word Europe with American, and you have an accurate analysis of a cultural crisis. And an obvious solution.
