Edward Gibbon, RIP

Edward Gibbon died on January 16, 1794 at the age of only 56. Of course, he is most famous for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he blamed on Christianity in part. As Donald S. Prudio commented last year, the 250th anniversary of Gibbon's inspiration to write Decline and Fall:

Edward Gibbon sat upon the steps of Ara Coeli. He could just look over the crest of the hill where there spread out the expanse of the Roman forum, the domain of Cato, Cicero, and Caesar. He would not have had to face the brooding monstrosity of the Victor Emmanuel monument, a towering oversized expanse of white marble, charitably called by Romans “the dentures.” Its absence made for a clear view to the Basilica of San Marco and the Cancelleria, next to the tenements of the contemporary Piazza Venezia. To his left was the marvelous Campidoglio of Michelangelo, echoing for Gibbon the attempt to rescue the city from its medieval torpor, and bring pagan Rome back to life.

Just at that moment the Franciscan friars began one of the hours of the Divine Office. Their chants echoed out to Gibbon. Here were these Catholic religious in sole possession of this monument of Western humanity. Why had the magnificent civilization fallen, which Gibbon prized so highly? The concatenation of chant and ruin bore powerfully on the young man. Gibbon was an archetype for his own generation. His outlook was that of the Enlightenment, at one with men like Voltaire, straining against the forces of tradition which they considered to retard social development. Chief among these was the Catholic Church. Though the young man had a yearlong dalliance with Catholicism a decade before, it ended with a desultory reconversion to Protestantism, perhaps a factor in his later writing.

Gibbon began to turn over the matter in his mind. These chanting friars behind him were the cause of the fall of Roman dominion, for they had exchanged the spirited pagan search for glory for an otherworldly promise of salvation. In short, the Roman Empire had died of Christianity. It was a febrile religion, which had unmanned the ancient world. Rome became terminally ill when it converted to the Church because, to use his famous term, it suffered a “loss of nerve.”

Two other historians later visited the ruins of the great Forum and set out to refute Gibbon: Blessed Frederic Ozanam and Christopher Dawson. I just read Robert Royal's introduction and analysis of Christopher Dawson's project to understand the role of religion in culture and civilization, and specifically the role of Christianity in Western Culture in A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, and as ever when this is mentioned, I'm so surprised when Royal mentions how Dawson, who was so influential in mid-century Catholic and mainstream academic history, is relatively unknown. I've known about Dawson for decades, so I guess I was ahead of the curve. He--like Ozanam--was introduced to me when I was a sophomore in college at the Newman Center at WSU, and his Religion and the Rise of Western Culture was an assigned text in a Medieval History course. Eighth Day Books has featured that work and others of his on its shelves and in its annual catalog (formerly published) for years. I did not know that he had fallen out of favor at all!

Dawson's Six Ages

Last Saturday, my husband and I attended a class on Dawson and Church History at the Spiritual Life Center here in Wichita. The presenter, Jackie Arnold, had written her master's thesis on this organizing principle of Catholic Church history. She had her reading suggestions for Church history, but I introduced her and the class to John Vidmar's one-volume book The Catholic Church Through the Ages: A History, soon to be published in a second edition by Paulist Press:

The Catholic Church through the Ages, now in its second edition, is a one-volume survey of the history of the Catholic Church from its beginning until (and including) the pontificate of Pope Francis. The book explains the Church's progress by using Christopher Dawson's division of the Church's history into six distinct "ages," or 350-400 year periods of time, each cycle beginning with great enthusiasm and advancement and ending in decline and loss. Writing with the experience of thirty years of teaching, the author has fashioned an ideal text that combines substance with readability.

Undergraduates, graduates, and interested lay people have given the author an idea of what topics should be emphasized. As a result, he has emphasized such areas monasticism, the Crusades, medieval theology, the Inquisition, Reformation, French Revolution, the nineteenth century, and the Church in the United States. And he has added material on the Oxford Movement, John Henry Newman s contributions to the Oxford Movement and to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the Catholic literary revival that took place in several countries in the early twentieth century, as well as on the last three popes.

As a supplement to each chapter, the author has included an updated the recommended readings and bibliography, as well as the audio-visual materials.

The Six Ages of the Church are:

The Apostolic Age (1-ca. 300)
The Patristic Age (ca. 300-650)
The Carolingian Age (650-1000)
The High Middle Ages (1000-1500)
The Age of Baroque (1550-1789)
The Modern Age (1789-Present)

We discussed in class whether or not we are about to enter into a seventh age of the Church with a new cycle of revival to address our late 20th century/early 21st century crisis.

The same speaker will make another presentation on Saturday, October 11 from 9 am. to 12 noon:

Catholic Authors of the 20th Century

If you love books and Catholicism, this course is for you!

This class is geared toward literature-loving persons who appreciate a good novel while also seeking out Catholic themes. During this morning course, Ms. Arnold will introduce a number of “great” (by her own estimation) 20th century authors: J.R.R. Tolkien, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Sigrid Undsett, Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, and Michael O’Brien. A brief biography of each author will be given along with a look at the ideas and synopses of their major works.

The focus of the class will be to show the moral, liturgical, spiritual, and doctrinal themes that each author focuses on, as well as trying to weave them into a larger picture of addressing the issues surrounding the 20th century from a specifically Catholic viewpoint. Time permitting we will have some “book discussion” groups, perhaps after reading a short story.  

Chesterton, Duffy, Dawson, and Lewis: 50 Best Books of the 20th Century

Intercollegiate Review re-published their list of "The Fifty Best Books of the 20th Century" on their blog and I'm glad to see that several of my favorites made the list:

The turn of the century is a time to take stock of the path we have followed, the better to discern where we ought to be going. Historical discernment requires coming to judgment about what has been noble, good, and beneficial in our time, but also about what has been base, bad, and harmful. In the life of the mind, what has our century produced that deserves admiration? What has it produced that deserves only contempt?

Earlier this year, the Modern Library published a list styled The Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century. A list of significant books can make a compelling statement about how we are to understand an age. In judging the quality of a book, one necessarily judges the perception and the profundity which the book displays, as well as the character of the book’s influence.

Yet many were dissatisfied with the several “Best” lists published in the past year, finding them biased, too contemporary, or simply careless. So the Intercollegiate Review (IR) set out to assemble its own critically serious roster of the Best—and the Worst—Books of the Century. To assist us in this task, we relied on the advice of a group of exceptional academics from a variety of disciplines.

To make the task more manageable, our lists include only nonfiction books originally published in English, and so certain giants of the century such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn will not be found here, on two counts. We left the definition of “Best” up to our consultants, but we defined “Worst” for them as books which were widely celebrated in their day but which upon reflection can be seen as foolish, wrong-headed, or even pernicious.

There was broad agreement about a majority of titles, but there were also fierce disagreements. Several titles appeared on both “Best” and “Worst” lists. We have tried to be faithful to the contributions of our consultants, but the responsibility for final composition of the list lay with the editors of the IR.

Among their choices:

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947)--Number 2 on their top five list!
Preferable to Lewis’s other remarkable books simply because of the title, which reveals the true intent of liberalism.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)
The master of paradox demonstrates that nothing is more “original” and “new” than Christian tradition.

Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950)
An essential work of European history that shows how the rise of Christianity altered civilization in the West. Credits the Roman Catholic Church with keeping civilization alive after the fall of Rome and during the barbarian invasions.

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992)
Revisionist history as it was meant to be written: as a correction to centuries of Whig historiography. Demonstrates that the brute force of the state can destroy even the most beloved institutions. What do you know . . . Belloc was right.

and a book I have not read, but certainly should:

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931)
Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better? No, and Butterfield provides the intellectually mature antidote to that premise of liberal historiography.

Check out the rest of the list here. How many have you read? Do you think they chose the right books?

Dawson on The French Revolution

Also announced for publication by Catholic University of America Press is a new edition of Christopher Dawson's The Gods of Revolution (January 2015):

In The Gods of Revolution, Christopher Dawson brought to bear, as Glanmor Williams said, "his brilliantly perceptive powers of analysis on the French Revolution. . . . In so doing he reversed the trends of recent historiography which has concentrated primarily on examining the social and economic context of that great upheaval."

Dawson underlines the fact that the Revolution was not animated by democratic ideals but rather reflected an authoritarian liberalism often marked by a fundamental contempt for the populace, described by Voltaire as "the 'canaille' that is not worthy of enlightenment and which deserves its yoke." The old Christian order had stressed a common faith and common service shared by nobles and peasants alike but Rousseau "pleads the cause of the individual against society, the poor against the rich, and the people against the privileged classes." It is Rousseau whom Dawson describes as the spiritual father of the new age in disclosing a new spirit of revolutionary idealism expressed in liberalism, socialism and anarchism. But the old unity was not replaced by a new form. Dawson insists the whole period following the Revolution is "characterized by a continual struggle between conflicting ideologies," and the periods of relative stabilization such as the Napoleonic restoration, Victorian liberalism in England, and capitalist imperialism in the second German empire "have been compromises or temporary truces between two periods of conquest." This leads to his assertion that "the survival of western culture demands unity as well as freedom, and the great problem of our time is how these two essentials are to be reconciled."

This reconciliation will require more than technological efficiency for "a free society requires a higher degree of spiritual unity than a totalitarian one. Hence the spiritual integration of western culture is essential to its temporal survival." It is to Christianity alone that western culture "must look for leadership and help in restoring the moral and spiritual unity of our civilization," for it alone has the influence, "in ethics, in education, in literature, and in social action" sufficiently strong to achieve this end.

I have a copy of an out-of-print edition with an introduction by Arnold Toynbee, who declares that "However often the subject has been dealt with by his predecessors, Dawson's handling throws new light on it." When I read this book several years ago, it completely opened my mind to the truth about the French Revolution--I had just my high school history course to go on and it had been depicted as a great crusade for the common good (aka Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity) with some unfortunate unintended consequences (The Reign of Terror), but Dawson cleared that error up for me. After his book, then Susan Dunn's book Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light continued my education.

Jacques le Goff, RIP

According to The Guardian, historian Jacques le Goff has died:

The historian Jacques Le Goff died in Paris on Tuesday aged 90, his family told newspaper Le Monde.

Over a long and influential career in academia and public broadcasting, Le Goff transformed views of the middle ages from a dark and backward time to a period that laid the foundations for modern western civilisation.

He was a leading proponent of "new history" – the shift in historical research from emphasis on political figures and events to mentality and anthropology. . . .

His many books included works on middle age intellectuals, bankers and merchants, a biography of King Louis IX and a seminal work on the introduction of the concept of purgatory.

"By transforming our view of the middle ages, you have changed the way we deal with history," Le Goff was told when awarded the prestigious Dr AH Heineken prize for history in 2004, whose jury described him as "without doubt the most influential French historian alive today".

I think that Le Goff's views of the middle ages were certainly shared by and articulated very effectively by Christopher Dawson in England and the USA, through his research on the spiritual tradition (Christianity) that infused Western Civilization. And Regine Pernoud's Those Terrible Middle Ages! also helped strip away the darkness imposed on the Middle Ages by the Enlightenment. But in popular thought (if that's not a contradiction in terms) the Middle Ages is still the dark, benighted, superstitious (that is, Catholic) era between the brightness of Greece and Rome and the rebirth of that brightness in the Renaissance (witness the EU's proposed constitution, which skips the era entirely!). Perhaps the fact that Le Goff was an agnostic helped his argument for the Middle Ages prevail in academia! 

One of Le Goff's most influential books was The Birth of Purgatory, translated by Arthur Goldhammer for The University of Chicago Press:

In The Birth of Purgatory, Jacques Le Goff, the brilliant medievalist and renowned Annales historian, is concerned not with theological discussion but with the growth of an idea, with the relation between belief and society, with mental structures, and with the historical role of the imagination. Le Goff argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not appear in the Latin theology of the West before the late twelfth century, that the word purgatorium did not exist until then. He shows that the growth of a belief in an intermediate place between Heaven and Hell was closely bound up with profound changes in the social and intellectual reality of the Middle Ages. Throughout, Le Goff makes use of a wealth of archival material, much of which he has translated for the first time, inviting readers to examine evidence from the writings of great, obscure, or anonymous theologians. 

His most recently published book is about The Golden Legend, published by Princeton University Press: In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and The Golden Legend:

It is impossible to understand the late Middle Ages without grasping the importance of The Golden Legend, the most popular medieval collection of saints' lives. Assembled for clerical use in the thirteenth century by Genoese archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, the book became the medieval equivalent of a best seller. By 1500, there were more copies of it in circulation than there were of the Bible itself. Priests drew on The Golden Legend for their sermons, the faithful used it for devotion and piety, and artists and writers mined it endlessly in their works. In Search of Sacred Time is the first comprehensive history and interpretation of this crucial book. Jacques Le Goff, one of the world's most renowned medievalists, provides a lucid, compelling, and unparalleled account of why and how The Golden Legend exerted such a profound influence on medieval life.

In Search of Sacred Time explains how The Golden Legend--an encyclopedic work that followed the course of the liturgical calendar and recounted the life of the saint for each feast day--worked its way into the fabric of medieval life. Le Goff describes how this ambitious book was carefully crafted to give sense and shape to the Christian year, underscoring its meaning and drama through the stories of saints, miracles, and martyrdoms. Ultimately, Le Goff argues, The Golden Legend influenced how medieval Christians perceived the passage of time, Christianizing time itself and reconciling human and divine temporality.

Authoritative, eloquent, and original, In Search of Sacred Time is a major reinterpretation of a book that is central to comprehending the medieval imagination.

Dawson on Victiorians and Catholicism

After posting on the History Today book review yesterday, I found this essay by Christopher Dawson on ENGLISH CATHOLICISM AND VICTORIAN LIBERALISM in the EWTN Library:

The hundred years that have elapsed since the restoration of the English Hierarchy [in 1850] have been a time of slow but uninterrupted progress for English Catholicism [Dawson thus was writing in 1950]. There have been no spectacular triumphs and no catastrophic defeats, but step by step the Church has been gradually recovering her lost position in the life of the nation. And this is no small achievement when one considers how completely the face of the world has changed during the last century: how the old European order and the new liberal order that aspired to take its place have both alike been swept away by new forces that were hardly perceptible in 1850, so that Europe itself and the millennial tradition of Western civilization are now in process of dissolution.

In 1850 English Liberalism, having surmounted the crisis of Chartism, was settling down to enjoy the fruits of the new order that it had created. The collapse of the old regime on the Continent in 1848 and the failure of the revolutionary movements to establish a stable democratic order had combined to strengthen the prestige of English institutions and ideals, not only in our own eyes but in those of Europe. Consequently, it is not surprising that the restoration of the Hierarchy and the reappearance of Catholicism as a living power in nineteenth-century England should have been regarded as a challenge to the spirit of the age, an act of "papal aggression." For the liberal rationalist and the conservative Protestant alike, the Papacy seemed the embodiment of those forces of reaction against which the modern world was in revolt.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the final achievement of the Victorian compromise in which all the leading elements of English society found their place. High Tories like the Duke of Wellington, cosmopolitan pacifists like John Bright, Christian idealists and scientific rationalists, artisans and capitalists, all came together under the leadership of the Queen and the Prince Consort to celebrate the triumphs of science and industry and the dawn of a new era of universal peace and enlightenment. But there was no place for the English Catholics in this festival of national and international unity. The unpopularity of the Oxford conversions combined with that of Irish Nationalism and that of the Papal Government caused Catholics to be regarded with hostility and suspicion by Liberals and Conservatives alike. In their attitude to Catholicism there was nothing to choose between Liberals like Lord John Russell and Tory extremists of the type of Newdegate and Sir Robert Inglis.

Yet in spite of all this, the deeper intellectual tendencies of the age were far less hostile to Catholicism than one would suppose from the expression of popular opinion in Press and parliament. The great writers of the Victorian age, such as Carlyle and Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, were as a rule highly critical of the optimism and selfcomplacency of Victorian liberalism.

Dawson goes on to cite cultural influences like the Romantic and Victorian interest in the Middle Ages, and of course the rise of Catholic intellectual converts like Newman and Manning.

But even as he comments on this rise and influence of Catholics in English Society, Dawson notes that it proceeded along the lines of Victorian liberalism and secularization:

Yet throughout this period the secularization of English culture has proceeded almost without a check, so that our position today is no longer that of a Catholic minority in a Protestant society, but that of a religious minority in a secular or neo-pagan civilization. We have become so accustomed to this change that we are apt to forget its tremendous implications. During the last hundred years English Catholicism has developed under the protection ofthe Victorian compromise. We have accepted the Victorian principles of individual freedom, religious toleration and the limited character of the State as elementary conditions of existence which hardly needed to be defended. But, in proportion as civilization becomes secularized, all these principles and rights lose their political expression in totalitarian States.

Dawson's argument reminds me of Russell Shaw's American Church and recalls Owen Chadwick's classic study of the rise of secularism in the nineteenth century. The Catholic Church in both the United States and in Britain accepted the values of the modern democratic state as the means of increasing influence and effectiveness. The great pitfall of this process is that those values wane as secularism waxes:

Today all the basic liberties which were formerly regarded as essential conditions of modern civilization are everywhere questioned and often completely abolished, and the new secularist ideologies are establishing themselves as exclusive dogmatic anti-religions which demand the total surrender of the mind and will. It is true that this country is still relatively immune. A feeble gas-jet of freedom still flickers in the dilapidated Victorian basement. But it is obvious that English Catholicism cannot rely on the continuance of the conditions which prevailed during the first century of its restored existence. Sooner or later it must come up against the same forces that prevail in the rest of the world. No doubt this will involve great changes in our apologetic, which, like so much else, is an inheritance from the Victorian age, and which has been dominated for a century by the long- drawn-out controversy with Anglicanism. Today these familiar controversies are overshadowed by the world debate between Christianity and atheism, and we have to deal not with the validity of Anglican orders but with the existence of the human soul and the ultimate foundations of the moral order.

The ever prophetic Christoper Dawson!!

Christopher Dawson's Incomplete Trilogy of Church History

From The Catholic World Report comes this article by Dawson biographer Professor Bradley Birzer, about three of Christopher Dawson's great historical studies:

Although largely ignored in its day, Christopher Dawson’s Christendom trilogy is the masterwork of one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers.

As it turned out, the Christendom trilogy served as the last great work of English-Welsh historian and man of letters Christopher Dawson (1889-1970). Sort of. The trilogy derived, originally, from lectures Dawson had delivered while teaching at Harvard University between 1958 and 1962. As desired, the Christendom trilogy would consist of The Formation of Christendom (1967); The Dividing of Christendom (1965); and The Return to Christian Unity. In the broad, each volume represented one of three great periods of the Christian world: the ancient-medieval nexus; the Reformation and Counter Reformation; and the Church in the age of democracy, nationalisms, and ideologies.

Though The Formation of Christendom is technically volume one of Christendom, it came out two years later than volume two, The Dividing of Christendom. The idea to publish the lectures as a trilogy came to Dawson in 1963. His publisher, Frank Sheed, readily agreed. The only question was whether to publish them separately as a three-part work or immediately as a three-volume set. Sheed wanted to get them out as soon as possible, as he hoped the books would serve as the basis of discussions for the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). . . .

If you don't recognize the title of the third book in the trilogy, that's okay: it never has appeared in print:

Unpublished, the only manuscript of the conclusion to the trilogy—badly in need of proof-reading, editing, and organization—resides in the Harvard theological library. Parts of it appeared as articles in various American conservative periodicals in the 1960s. But only very small parts. Someday, perhaps, a publisher might purchase the rights and release it properly. Until then, we must rest content with what Dawson left us.

And Dawson left us a very rich inheritance, indeed.

Perhaps Professor Birzer is the right man for the job of "proof-reading, editing, and organization" the manuscript of The Return to Christian Unity needs--and Ignatius Press the right publisher to "purchase the rights and release it properly"!

E.I. Watkins, Friend of Christopher Dawson

Sometimes I stumble across something on the web (ouch!)--the other day, after posting on Sir Colin Davis's death, I remembered that Davis had been one of the musicians who signed the letter to Pope Paul VI that led to the "Agatha Christie" indult for the traditional Catholic Mass (now aka the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Liturgy of the Roman Rite). Another name in that list is E.I. Watkin, whose biography was recently issued:

The Watkin Path: An Approach to Belief [by his daughter Magdalen Goffin] is a panorama of twentieth-century social and political history seen through the life of E. I. Watkin (1888–1981). The interplay of love, friction, war, politics and money, together with a relentless search for religious truth, makes this book read more like a novel than a biography.

Watkin was the only child of Emmeline Paxton Ingram, a daughter of Herbert Ingram, the founder of the Illustrated London News. His father was the nephew of Sir Edward Watkin, the Liberal MP and railway magnate, who started to build the first Channel Tunnel and later a tower to rival Eiffel’s where Wembley Stadium now stands. At birth Watkin was handed over to his Ingram grandmother, an old lady who lived alone in a mansion by the river at Walton-on-Thames. He met few other children, and his strange childhood may account for some of his eccentricities.

Watkin became a Roman Catholic when he was at Oxford. His experience as one of the inner circle of Catholic writers is revealing: He was allowed to publish his books on philosophy, history or literature, but when it came to the interpretation of the Catholic faith he was persistently harassed by the censors. Although Watkin was one of the foremost English precursors of the Second Vatican Council, he deeply deplored some of its consequences.

His extraordinary life experiences were many and varied: from sitting on Mrs Gladstone’s lap at the ceremonial opening of the Watkin Path up Snowdon, to falling instantly in love with Helena Shepheard at a party in 1912, at which point he stopped his diary writing. The story of that marriage, and the Watkin family’s engagement with politicians and theologians about the political and social issues of the time, make for a truly fascinating biography of a most extraordinary man.

At Oxford, Watkin studied at New College (which is actually quite old; founded in 1379, it was called "New College" to distinguish it from the older college at Oxford, Oriel, founded in 1326). Watkin was a mentor to Christopher Dawson in the latter's conversion to Catholicism and worked with Eric Gill and Donald Attwater on the Catholic pacifist movement Pax; additionally, he wrote many books:

Some Thoughts on Catholic Apologetics: A Plea for Interpretation (1915)

A Little Book of Prayers for Peace (1916)
The Philosophy of Mysticism (1920)
The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience (1931)
A Philosophy of Form (1935)
Theism, Agnosticism And Atheism (1936)
Men and Tendencies (1937)
The Crime of Conscription (1939)
The Catholic Center (1939)
Catholic Art and Culture (1942)
Praise of Glory (1943)
The Balance of Truth (1943)
Poets and Mystics (1953)
Neglected Saints (1955) -- Ignatius Press reissued this in paperback
Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 (1957)
The Church in Council (1960)

His son was a Benedictine monk, Abbot Aelred Watkin, of Downside Abbey:
Abbot Aelred Watkin was one of the most loved and most respected monks in the Benedictine Order. The two most conspicuous features of his character - a deep spirituality combined with an infectious love of life - are encapsulated in one of his favourite quotations from William Blake: "Everything that lives is holy; life delights in life."

He was born Christopher Ingram Watkin in 1918, the son of a Roman Catholic philosopher and historian, E.I. Watkin, their common middle name perpetuating descent from Herbert Ingram, the founder of the Illustrated London News. His mother, Helen Shepheard, was the daughter of Maria Pasqua, who had been a penniless Italian model until she was adopted by a member of the Baring family, the wealthy Comtesse de Noailles.

Liberal Arts and Campus Censorship

These two articles piqued my interest, because I was a liberal arts major (English and History) and then went on for an MA in English Literature too. I still look back to my years in college as a time of learning, discussing, and experiencing the thrill of discovering knowledge and truth. Bradley Birzer writes about Christopher Dawson's early/mid-twentieth century concern about the decline not just of the liberal arts as a discipline but of "the significance, love, and cultivation of ideas and respect for the faculty of imagination":

One of the greatest Catholic intellects and writers of the twentieth century, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), worried deeply about the ideological, political, and cultural crises of the western world during the entirety of his adult life. The root of the problem, Dawson had come to believe between the two world wars, was the fundamental decline in the significance, love, and cultivation of ideas and respect for the faculty of imagination.

For nearly a century, Dawson feared, the western world had, in all of its technological and scientific “progress” simplified its understanding of the immense complexities of man. The great intellects of the nineteenth century—men such as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud—had narrowed the understandings of what motivates a man, be it economics, biological adaptation, or misunderstood sexual longings at a young age. While any one of these things might be true, it is far more likely that each is true, along with millions of other complicated and complicating factors. Man, Dawson knew, could not be understood in merely simplistic, materialist terms. By his very nature of bearing the infinite Imago Dei, finite man carried a uniqueness within him that was genuine and irreplaceable, no matter how hidden such gifts might be to the person himself.

When Dawson saw this narrowing view of humanity force the individual into a homogenized mass of regulation and conformity, he determined that a revival of the liberal arts was necessary because it reverses the "centralizing, collectivizing, and mechanizing" of the human person with imagination and humility:

The liberal arts must also embrace and engage, at a fundamental level, the faculty of imagination. Only the latter would prevent the narrowing decay of an understanding of the world and the human person. Indeed, the imagination should not only allow a person to place himself within the created order and realize his relations with God and other men (a play on the classic definition of justice, to “give each man his due”), but it should also reveal to the human person just how extraordinarily complicated the world is. Consequently, the liberal arts humble and elevate the human person simultaneously, connecting a person to both time and eternity.

During the sixteen years prior to a series of strokes that forced Dawson into retirement, the English Roman Catholic offered a number of suggestions as to how to revive the liberal arts. He developed a four-year curriculum for Catholic Colleges, began to edit a series of works on the lives of the saints (the real movers of history, from Dawson’s perspective), and the formation of a new religious order dedicated to the Christian intellect. Unfortunately, poor health, poor administration skills, and poor fund-raising abilities hindered Dawson in each of these efforts.

Nevertheless, Dawson was on the right track, I think, and was an heir to Newman's vision of a university as a great "place of concourse", where ideas can be debated and excellence may thrive (see my emphasis):

a University is a place of concourse, whither students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge. You cannot have the best of every kind everywhere; you must go to some great city or emporium for it. There you have all the choicest productions of nature and art all together, which you find each in its own separate place elsewhere. All the riches of the land, and of the earth, are carried up thither; there are the best markets, and there the best workmen. It is the centre of trade, the supreme court of fashion, the umpire of rival talents, and the standard of things rare and precious. It is the place for seeing galleries of first-rate pictures, and for hearing wonderful voices and performers of transcendent skill. It is the place for great preachers, great orators, great nobles, great statesmen. In the nature of things, greatness and unity go together; excellence implies a centre. And such, for the third or fourth time, is a University; I hope I do not weary out the reader by repeating it. It is the place to which a thousand schools make contributions; in which the intellect may safely range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge with knowledge. It is the place where the professor becomes eloquent, and is a missionary and a preacher, displaying his science in its most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his hearers. It is the place where the catechist makes good his ground as he goes, treading in the truth day by day into the ready memory, and wedging and tightening it into the expanding reason. It is a place which wins the admiration of the young by its celebrity, kindles the affections of the middle - aged by its beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its associations. It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation. It is this and a great deal more, and demands a somewhat better head and hand than mine to describe it well.

But sadly, this article in The Wall Street Journal demonstrates that universities do not always allow their students' intellects to "safely range and speculate" because their administrations emphasize "safely" I suppose:

"The people who believe that colleges and universities are places where we want less freedom of speech have won," Mr. Lukianoff says. "If anything, there should be even greater freedom of speech on college campuses. But now things have been turned around to give campus communities the expectation that if someone's feelings are hurt by something that is said, the university will protect that person. As soon as you allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and everything can be punished."

You might say Greg Lukianoff was born to fight college censorship. With his unruly red hair and a voice given to booming, he certainly looks and sounds the part. His ethnically Irish, British-born mother moved to America during the 1960s British-nanny fad, while his Russian father came from Yugoslavia to study at the University of Wisconsin. Russian history, Mr. Lukianoff says, "taught me about the worst things that can happen with good intentions."

And there's a book about those "worst thing"s:

In his new book, "Unlearning Liberty," Mr. Lukianoff notes that baby-boom Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth. But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.

"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."

Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes. FIRE maintains a database of such policies on its website, and Mr. Lukianoff's book offers an eye-opening sampling. What they share is a view of "harassment" so broad and so removed from its legal definition that, Mr. Lukianoff says, "literally every student on campus is already guilty."

More about Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate here. One of the most ridiculous cases of a university administration going after student was at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis in 2008: because the student/worker was reading a book titled Notre Dame versus The Klan he was accused and found guilty of racial harassment based on another student/worker referring to the cover of the book! (It offended him because he thought it was a book supporting the KKK.) According to Mr. Lukianoff, the university said that the student, reading a book about "How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan" was guilty of racial harassment for "openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject." (Perhaps this university won't show Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln, because students would be openingly watching a movie related to "a historically and racially abhorrent subject"!--slavery) The university finally backed down, apologized to the student, and cleared his record--but it took FIVE (5) months!

Christopher Dawson, RIP

The great historian Christopher Dawson died on this day in 1970. According to this site:

A gifted, eloquent and prolific writer, Dawson wrote more than twenty books and numerous articles on the nature of Christian culture. This topic concerned him so deeply that he considered it his vocation to explore the cultural role of religion, the relationship between Christianity and world cultures, and the specific history and institutions of the Christian religion. As a result of this vast research, he emphasized the need to recover the spiritual tradition at the root of the Western European history.

A life dedicated to the study of world cultures led him to claim that: "It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture... A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture." Writing against the positivistic and nihilistic attitude of his age, Dawson challenges commonly held assumptions about culture and history, and unmasks Western religion of progress. His contentions have as much relevance today as they had when he wrote them.

Dawson brilliantly applies Christian principles to the world of historic events, and sees the inner world of spiritual change "as the dynamic element in history and as a real world-transforming power." It is his vast erudition, coupled with his singular vision and talent to present a coherent and global vision of the different aspects that dominate the changing course of history, that have led some to consider him one of the greatest historians of our age, "more realist and convincing than Spengler or Toynbee."
I have benefitted greatly from Christopher Dawson's books and have read several of them, including The Formation of Christendom, The Dividing of Christendom, Religions and the Rise of Western Culture, and The Historic Reality of Christian Culture. Remarkably, Dawson anticipated much of the late twentieth/early twenty-first revisionist historiography of the English Reformation in The Dividing of Christendom. I also really enjoyed this study of life and works: Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson by Bradley Birzer. More here.