6 July, 2022
Dear Reader,
We have asked specialists to write about aspects of Christopher Dawson’s work, and the first of these, our lead article in this issue, is by Dr Joseph Stuart of the University of Mary in the US. Details of Dr Stuart’s latest book on Dawson appear below. Our sincere thanks to him for this fine short essay.
Yours sincerely,
David Daintree
GUEST FEATURE:
CHRISTOPHER DAWSON’S CULTURAL MIND
by Joseph T. Stuart, Ph.D.
The British historian of culture, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), demonstrated the importance of Christianity in the history of Western civilization. However, his significance extends further than advocating Christian culture in education or defending the Western political tradition of ordered liberty. Dawson taught his readers how to think. He modelled an approach to cultural reasoning that is highly relevant today.
I call this approach his ‘cultural mind’ by which he attempted to see things whole. Dawson’s cultural mind applied in the social sciences John Henry Newman’s ‘philosophical habit’ of mind: the ‘power of viewing many things at once as one whole’ and their interrelations.
What did this look like? A certain Louis A. Schuster visited Dawson in the early 1950s and remembered crawling with him on hands and knees up and down between rows of books on the floor of Dawson’s library. ‘I think each row represented a different century,’ he noted concerning the historian’s method of study:
Books on architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, economics, philosophy, theology, history—seemingly juxtaposed at random. He opened and fondled quite a few explaining how valuable each one was because of a certain well written chapter, or this insight, or this interesting new primary evidence stuck away in a footnote on page 391 etc.
Seeing things whole meant reading in different fields and perspectives. In this way, Dawson countered simplification. This happens when a single method is applied indiscriminately to all problems, and parts are mistaken for wholes—a common problem in our own ideological age as in the Age of the Great War when the mobilization of minds accompanied the mobilization of soldiers and whole societies.
By reading Dawson’s texts in their historical context, I was able excavate four rules of Dawson’s cultural mind in my book Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War (CUA Press, 2022):
- Dawson used ‘intellectual architecture’ to build up mental structures to classify and locate new knowledge and relate it back to the whole. The rows of books in many fields on the floor of his study exemplify this architecture. As one commentator wrote, ‘That is the really essential quality of Mr. Dawson’s work: an opening up of frontiers, a broad integration of isolated disciplines in the crucible of a humane and passionate mind, an unfreezing of cold abstractions into the human realities.’ This was an exciting vision of the whole.
- Dawson’s ‘boundary thinking’ emerged out of his childhood at Hay-on-Wye on the border between England and Wales. Different kinds of cultural influences met and mingled there. Dawson was interested in the process of cultural change through migration and cultural interaction across boundaries, in the borderlands of history—such as between pagan and Christian cultures in sixth-century Egypt, between north African and Arab cultures in the medieval Islamic world, or between religious and secular cultures in the modern world. Responding to one’s own time wisely rests on understanding the cultural influences that created it.
Attention to cultural boundaries in history translated into Dawson’s respect for disciplinary boundaries. For example, Dawson accused sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who he otherwise admired, of explaining the origin of religion solely in terms of social consciousness—thus collapsing the former into the latter and nullifying metaphysical boundaries. Dawson wrote, ‘This is not a scientific explanation, but an amalgamation of religion and society by means of an illegitimate substitution of one category for another.’ Today, we also try to answer large questions with only one method—empiricism or fideism—and often run into the same problem. We need to respect limits.
- Dawson used ‘intellectual bridges’ to connect seemingly divergent things together, whereas boundary thinking distinguished between them. ‘He who will be chief, let him be a bridge’ was a maxim instilled in Dawson’s early literary imagination. Later in life, as editor of the Dublin Review in the early 1940s, he indicted the division among writers, politicians, and economists into two camps—’Left’ and ‘Right’—as the great obstacle to the preservation of the common values and traditions of Western culture. This gave a partisan character to all intellectual activity and left no room for common action. Dawson’s editorial policy sought to bridge that divide.
- Dawson’s ‘intellectual asceticism’ connected factual fastidiousness, ideological restraint, and English reserve to clear writing. He refrained from writing simply for fellow intellectuals, seeking instead to make the fruits of specialized scholarship accessible to a general audience—thus acting as a leaven in the wider culture.
These four rules—the logic of Dawson’s cultural mind—demanded smart integration: the analytical demands of boundary thinking and intellectual asceticism checked the synthetic thrust of intellectual architecture and intellectual bridges. In our own age of cultural fragmentation, secularists and Christians try to integrate life around their own ideals, exclusively. Historically, however, cultures have always interacted with each other. Dawson’s cultural mind points toward a smart integration that helps Christian culture remain itself even while continuing dialog with secular culture toward mutual, beneficial influence.
JOSEPH STUART: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Dr Stuart’s lecture ‘Christopher Dawson’s Cultural Mind’ (delivered at Ave Maria and the University of Mary in April); the CUA Press website and the Amazon Australia product page for the book.
‘THIRD EDUCATION REVOLUTION’
Vishal Mangalwadi is a protestant Christian author whose work is probably well known to many readers. His 2011 book on the influence of the Bible, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, is quite outstanding. His latest work on what he calls the ‘Third Education Revolution’, co-authored with David Marshall, is available here. Here is an interview with one of its authors.
LES MURRAY ONE-DAY CONFERENCE:
LIFE, POETRY & LEGACY
Campion College, 24 September 2022
Campion’s Centre for the Study of the Western Tradition is hosting a one-day conference on the poetry, life and legacy of the late Les Murray AO, one of the most important poets of the modern era. The conference will consider a variety of topics, including the relationship between Murray’s faith and poetry, his influence on Australian literature and culture, and his exploration of autism.
The day will include reminiscences of Murray’s life and readings from his extraordinary body of work.
Register at https://www.campion.edu.au/event/les-murray-conference/.
‘FRIENDS’ OF DAWSON
We welcome the following new ‘Friends’ –
Dr Peter Cunich
Mrs Eris Smyth
Gundars Simsons