The theme of language and its importance to the human person

Dawson, Eliot, and the Word

by Bradley J. Birzer

Continuing the theme of language and its importance to the human person, both individually and relationally (see previous essay), let us turn now to Christopher Dawson.

The English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), another patron of The Imaginative Conservative, embraced a solidly Aristotelian view of the social world. Aristotle had famously written in his Politics that man is by nature a social animal, meant to live in community. To leave community, a man must become either a beast or a god, but he can no longer remain human. A man may not live outside his cultural inheritance, Dawson wrote, paraphrasing Aristotle, without becoming an “idiot, living in a private world of formless feelings, but lower than the beasts.” Not even offering the Aristotelian alternative of becoming a God, Dawson further noted that culture is the means by which “men have learned from the past” through “the process of imitation, education and learning and to all that they hand on in like manner to their descendents and successors.”

With St. John the Revelator, Dawson proclaimed the importance of the Word to the human person as well as to history and culture. As “little words”—that is, human persons as Imago Dei—humans pass on their civilization through the rational use of language. Language allows human societies to inherit and then transmit what is known and what is believed.

Against those who see war as the great precipitator of cultural evolution, Dawson claimed instead and rather importantly that all true progress comes from the proper employment of language. “The word,” he wrote, “not the sword or the spade, is the power that has created human culture.” The sword protects the word, Dawson claimed, and the spade supports the word.................
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