Christopher Dawson on the Spiritual Disease of the Secular West
by John R. E. Bliese
Christopher Henry Dawson has been called “the greatest English-speaking Catholic historian of the twentieth century.“[1] He was also a profound conservative critic of contemporary Western culture and his indictments were based on a synthetic interpretation of the history of mankind which is one of the most impressive ever produced. His analysis of the decline of the West must be considered an important contribution to conservative thought. Yet Dawson has been strangely ignored by American conservatives, to our disadvantage. Now and then one finds passing reference to Dawson, but seldom any serious recognition of his contribution. As a typical example of this neglect, although Dawson held a chair at Harvard from 1958 to 1962, he is mentioned only once in Nash’s history.[2] Patently we would do well to become better acquainted with Dawson’s thought: He combined two points of approach in his synthesis of history: the belief that cultures rather than nations are the basic units of history; and the development of what he called the Christian view of history.
Dawson would have us examine history from a cultural perspective. “Modern history has usually been written from the nationalist point of view…In the course of the nineteenth century this movement permeated the popular consciousness and determined the ordinary man’s conception of history…And the result is that each nation claims for itself a cultural unity and self-sufficiency that it does not possess.”[3] The national point of view is actually dangerous; it was “one of the great predisposing causes” of World War I. We should adopt instead the cultural conception of history “which goes behind the political unit and studies that fundamental unity which we term a culture.”[4]
A culture Dawson defined as “a common way of life—a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs.” Four main components serve as the basis for culture: “(l) race, i.e., the genetic factor; (2) environment, i.e., the geographical factor; (3) function or occupation, i.e., the economic factor,” and (4) “thought or the psychological factor.”[5] The first three affect the life of any living thing; the fourth is distinctively human. These four elements were identified in one of Dawson’s earliest works. In one of his latest, a slightly different analysis is given, still containing four factors: “(l) the sociological factor, or the principle of social organization; (2) the geographical or ecological factor—the adaptation of culture to its physical environment; (3) the economic factor—the relation between man’s ‘way of life’ and the way in which he ‘gains his living’; and (4) the moral factor—the regulation of human life in conformity with some system of values and standards of behavior.”[6] Dawson has also used an analysis limited to two elements, intellectual and material, of which the intellectual is the more important since it “gives a culture its specific form…Essentially the intellectual element consists in a common set of values which serve to unify the various activities of the group. Such values find expression preeminently…in a society’s religious beliefs.”[7] Dawson believed religion to be the key to history, because it is the key to culture. A religion is not simply a theology. Religion must be expressed in sociological ways as well for it “can never escape the necessity of becoming incarnated in culture and clothing itself in social institutions and traditions, if it is to exert a permanent influence on human life and behavior.”[8] The manner in which religion becomes embodied in temporal society establishes the form of a culture.
A religion may be introduced into a society in one of three ways. The religion may grow up “as it were naturally, with the life of a people” and inseparable from it. This is the normal process in primitive cultures, and has occurred in more advanced civilizations as well, as in the Greek and Roman. Second, a religion may be fully formed outside a culture and then be introduced into it, as Buddhism entered China or Islam Persia. Finally, a fully formed religion may enter a culture still in the process of formation, “thus itself becoming one of the constituent elements of the new culture that is growing up,” as happened with early medieval Christianity. [9]
A people may also lose its religion and become secularized. Without a religion, however, a culture cannot long survive. Secularization is inevitably a sign of “social decay;” since religion provides the principle of inner cohesion for a society, a secular society will sooner or later disintegrate: [10]
The loss of the historic religion of a society is a sign that it is undergoing a process of social disintegration…We cannot…assume the possibility of a culture continuing to preserve its unity and to persist indefinitely without any religious form whatsoever. When the process of secularization is completed, the process of social dissolution is consummated and the culture comes to an end. [11]
Secularization is precisely what Dawson believed was happening to the contemporary West.
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