Paying Attention To The Sky

Christopher Dawson

A nice mention on the Ignatius Press blog website for payingatttentiontothesky. There’s a great interview with Bradley Birzer over there that covers much of the same ground I am doing here. Birzer’s book on Dawson [Sanctifying the World], available at Ignatius or Amazon is a wonderful read. I was utterly entranced by it as it plays to a background theme that I find fascinating, namely the eclipse of the Catholic faith by the secular world in the 60’s and the 70’s. At some point Catholicism and the Pope became a late night joke and the idea that there was a Christian truth in the 60’s and the 70’s was almost absurd. I guess Monty Python pretty much saw to that. Dawson was an observer in his decade of decline in the 60’s. Not that he declined in any way. He continued to write and work but the influence and regard for his writings waned. It wasn’t until recently that we begin to see a reassessment of Humane Vitae  and Birzer’s groundbreaking work on Dawson is in that mode and hopefully many more of his works will be reissued by the folks at Ignatius.

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Perhaps first and foremost in terms of Dawson’s significant influence was that on poet, playwright, and social critic T. S. Eliot. Eliot first contacted Dawson, through Dawson’s publishers, Sheed and Ward, in the summer of 1929. He expressed his fondness for Dawson’s works, his desire to have Dawson contribute to his journal, the Criterion, and his wish that the two could meet. Eliot specifically hoped that Dawson would consider writing a piece on the “views of a practicing Catholic layman about marriage reform, birth control, the relations of the sexes in general in the modern world.” Dawson agreed, and he wrote one of his most perceptive articles, also published in booklet form, “Christianity and Sex.” In the article, described more fully in later chapters, Dawson argued that the ideological attack on the family — the true central institution in society — would inevitably lead to the increase of the power of the state, a theme that Dawson would take up in his five books written from 1931 to 1942.

As Eliot’s best biographer, Russell Kirk, wrote, “Of social thinkers in his own time, none influenced Eliot more than Dawson.” For three decades, Eliot was quite taken with Dawson’s views, and it would be difficult if not impossible to find a scholar who influenced Eliot more. In the early 1930s, Eliot told an American audience that Dawson was the foremost thinker of his generation in England. He explicitly acknowledged his debt to Dawson in the introductions to his two most politically and culturally oriented books, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. One can also find Dawson’s influence in two of Eliot’s most important writings of the moral imagination, Murder in the Cathedral and The Four Quartets. Eliot continued to acknowledge a debt to Dawson after World War II. In a speech to the London Conservative Union in 1955, Eliot told his fellow conservative that they should understand conservatism as Dawson does, not as political but as ante-political and anti-ideological. Only then, Eliot argued, could English conservatives truly and effectively shape society. Dawson wrote of Eliot fondly in his personal correspondence, though the two never became close friends socially, as “they were both very reserved.” Much of their influence on one another came from a group of Christian academics and scholars who met on a fairly regular basis over a ten-year period beginning in 1938. Called the Moot, it included those whom Eliot considered “the Christian elite,” such as Dawson, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Arnold Toynbee.

Dawson played a serious role in C. S. Lewis’s work as well. Lewis seems not to have admitted this outright, but Dawson assumed — probably correctly — that Lewis had taken much of the argument in his Abolition of Man from Dawson’s own 1929 work, Progress and Religion. Though Dawson may have influenced Lewis intellectually, the two had next to nothing in common in terms of personality, at least at the beginning of their relationship.

Humphrey Havard, the physician affectionately known to Lewis and the other Inkling as the “Useless Quack,” brought Lewis and Dawson together one evening dui ing the second world war, and the results were less than satisfying for eithe one of them. Dawson asked Havard to meet Lewis, and Havard took him to Lewis’s offices at Magdalen College. Havard remembered Dawson, in contrast to Lewis, as a “physically frail, shy, disappointed man” whose intellectual style “was tortuous, full of qualifications and abstractions.” C. S. Lewis “did his best to draw Dawson out; but he shrank from our vigorous humor and casual manners.”

Strangely, this first meeting did not put an end to the relationship, and a friendship of sorts, or at least an alliance based on mutual respect, developed. When Dawson took over the editorship of the most important English Catholic intellectual journal, the Dublin Review, in 1940, he made a list of roughly twenty persons he wanted as permanent contributors and reviewers. Prominent on the list were the non-Catholic Lewis and “I,ewis’ Oxford Group,” better known as the Inklings, which included J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. And, in 1941, Lewis wrote to Dawson, “Dear Dawson (If we might both drop the honorific now?).” In such a formal time, the dropping of the honorific meant something, and especially to Lewis, who did so only with those he greatly respected. Religion and Culture, Dawson’s first set of published Gifford Lectures, especially pleased Lewis. After praising the book and its “magnificent ending” in a letter of appreciation to Dawson, Lewis concluded, “Thanks very much: you have given me a great treat.” Lewis also invited Dawson to participate in his prestigious Socratic Club.

The two disagreed on the meaning of history, though, and Lewis wrote his famous essay, “Historicism,” in 1950, in part, to counter Dawson’s philosophy of history. “I give the name Historicism to the belief that men can, by use of their natural powers, discover an inner meaning in the historical process,” Lewis argued. Had the Ulsterman left his argument there, Dawson might not have disagreed. After all, as Dawson argued in his own Stoic, Augustinian fashion, all good comes from the One, the Creator of all. Further, when he, Dawson, discovered the truth of history, he believed he did so by grace alone.

But Lewis took his argument further, giving examples of what he meant. “When Carlyle spoke of history as a `book of revelations’ he was being a Historicist. When Novalis called history `an evangel’ he was a Historicist.” These two examples were enough to include, by implication, Dawson. After Lewis sent Dawson an offprint of the article, Dawson returned the favor by writing two articles against Lewis’s view, entitled “The Christian View of History” and “The Problem of Metahistory.” Dawson challenged Lewis directly in the former article and implicitly in the latter article. Dawson seems to have won this argument, though, as in Mere Christianity Lewis claimed to know “the key to history,” a process by which the devil time and time again fools ordinary humans into doing the wrong thing. Ironically enough, Dawson would not have disagreed with Lewis on this.

The founder of modern American conservatism, Russell Kirk, found much to his liking in Dawson’s work. As early as in Kirk’s second but most famous academic book, The Conservative Mind, originally published in 1953, he noted that the first problem conservatives must solve is the “problem of spiritual and moral regeneration.” To support his first tenet of conservatism, Kirk cited Dawson approvingly. Indeed, it is impossible not to notice Dawson’s influence on Kirk’s historical understanding throughout his many works and forty-three-year writing career. Kirk first admitted to Dawson’s influence on him in a 1984 review article in the Chesterton Review. “Dawson wrote many books, all of them important. In this perspective, it comes home to me that I have been saturated in Dawsonian historical studies, and that my own books i reflect Dawson’s concepts.”

In his autobiography, Kirk again revealed that, “strongly influenced by Christopher Dawson and Eric Voegelin, Martin D’Arcy and Mircea Eliade,” he had “come to conclude that a civilization cannot long survive the dying of belief in a transcendent order that brought the culture into being.” At the time of his death in 1994, Kirk was planning to edit the collected works of Dawson, and he and his wife, Annette, had just returned from a trip to England, tracing Dawson’s path there. A historian endowed with imagination,” Kirk wrote with great praise, “Christopher Dawson restored to historical writing both an understanding of religion as the basis of culture and a moving power Of expression.”

Obviously, Dawson’s influence went well beyond Kirk, Lewis, Eliot, Merton, Jones, and Griffiths, each of whom had developed his own reputation through a variety of means and works. But by the late 1950s, as noted above, Christopher Dawson was arguably one of the most influential Roman Catholic scholars and public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. With only a few exceptions, Dawson’s mind rivaled any within the Roman Catholic Church.