Pope Benedict XVI has written that Christianity is not primarily about morality or doctrine. Christianity is about the encounter with an event, a Person, Jesus Christ, who gives life a new horizon and decisive direction.

“Vital Tension” as 

the Creative Spiritual Energy of History

by Charles Klamut

Jesus Christ came to reveal to men that 

they have no enemies but themselves.– Pascal

It is this vital tension between two worlds and two planes of reality

 which makes the Christian way of life difficult but which is also

 the source of its strength.– Christopher Dawson

My college education was unusual. In the early nineties, when most college students were learning the typical narrative of Christianity as a tool of Western imperialism, I was learning how Christianity was the source of Western culture’s greatest personal and cultural achievements. While they were coming to believe that Christianity produced little but inquisitors, conquistadors, and benighted Galileo-bashing prelates, I was being shown how it provided the creative inspiration and spiritual capital behind the Gothic cathedrals, Palestrina, and the Divine Comedy. While they saw the legacy of the Christian West in misogyny, homophobia, and smug eurocentrism, I was coming to see it in monasticism, martyrdom, and sanctity. While they learned identity politics, I was discovering Christian humanism. While they were learning the Borgias, Richelieu and Cortes, I was meeting St Francis, St Ignatius, and St Teresa of Avila. In short, I was educated into the conviction that Christianity is far more solution than problem. For this, the credit, or blame (depending on one’s point of view) goes largely to Christopher Dawson.

I somehow stumbled into the “Humanities and Catholic Culture” major as a sophomore at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in 1992. Clueless and lacking direction, I decided to pay a visit to the office of my admired history professor, James Gaston, to investigate this strange program I had read about in the university course catalog. On a grim November afternoon, Gaston barraged me with information about why Christopher Dawson, whose vision underlies the major, was basically the most brilliant and enlightened historian of the twentieth century, and the man with many of the answers. I did not even know the questions; but no matter, that is now beside the point. Gaston spoke with great zeal and passion of Dawson’s ideas of Christianity as the soul of Western culture. Regretfully, I probably understood all of about ten percent of what he said. Thankfully, it was enough to intrigue me and, in the end, convince me . Happily, I signed up. Thus began a trajectory which is still bearing fruit in my life today.

The rest of this essay is an attempt to explain some of what I learned, why it is important, and how it can continue to help us.

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Modern man is a spiritual failure.

This is the provocation with which Christopher Dawson begins the first chapter of Understanding Europe, written in 1952. It is a theme that runs throughout his works. Why is modern man a spiritual failure? Because he has proven unable to control the new forces he has created. Educated, economically shrewd, technologically advanced, materially successful… none of these have been enough to hold at bay the centrifugal, de-unifying tendencies unleashed by the abandonment of the Christian ideal of personal conversion and a universal spiritual society. Evidence of these tendencies is seen in the trajectory of history for especially the past four or five centuries, up through today’s postmodern era of widespread alienation and division and global volatility, and in the nihilism and despair which stifle and censor serious attempts at higher meaning and authentic human aspiration, at least in the developed, post-industrial Western world.

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The coming of God as man into history through the Christ event, and the subsequent new way of life this event generated, Dawson insisted, introduced a dynamic and creative spiritual process into the consciousness and history of Western culture which is the source of its greatest accomplishments and achievements, both personal and collective. European culture, in the best sense of the term, “is the external expression of a dynamic spiritual process” – rather than the accomplishment of political, national, racial, or tribal interests, conflicts or rivalries. Christianity provided the inspiration for the internal combat against the darkness within through the grace and power of Christ – rather than the old pagan dualistic pattern of external combat against tribal enemies . Its ideal is the “perfection” of the Father revealed and embodied in his Son sent to earth, as articulated in the call to repentance and the Sermon on the Mount:


Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.[1]

Dawson, himself a Christian and early twentieth-century English convert to Catholicism, spent his life’s work studying and discussing the relationship between religion and culture. A central thesis of his work is that religion is the soul of culture, its chief animating principle; and that a culture’s neglect or abandonment of its religious ideals leads to the decline of that culture. Dawson insisted and sought to demonstrate continually through his works that Christianity was the soul of Western culture.

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The Postmodern Era

There is today a widespread, though not often clearly articulated, sense that what has gone before us is a failure, including Christianity, and we are left with nothing compelling to put in its place. The current postmodern era of the aftermath of the wars and the catastrophes of the twentieth century has, despite its understandable intentions, seen a continuous descent into ever more strident movements of negation, rather than creation. Contemporary ideologies have become more and more boldly anti-. One need only think of such examples as the renouncing of language (deconstructionism), gender (radical feminism), ethics (relativism), meaning and destiny (nihilism), spirituality (technological, materialistic consumerism), dialogue (fundamentalism, terrorism), contemplation (the absurd activism and corresponding spiritual acedia of modern life). Reason itself has been reduced to positivism, leaving everything but hard science and mathematics relegated to the domain of the subjective, the sentimental, and the sectarian. What is left is one’s own very personal project of creating an individual meaning for him- or herself; or, more typical, accepting the meaning imposed by power.

Even Christians have been left confused. Christianity has to a large degree been slow to recognize and respond to this bewildering state of affairs. Sterile dialectics between liberal and conservative, traditional and progressive, etc, have polarized even Christians into ideological camps.

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