The work of the great cultural historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) has made something of a resurgence in recent years. Here in far-flung Australia, Dawson’s work has inspired the establishment not only the first Catholic liberal arts college in Campion College (NSW), but also two organisations which bear his name and seek to promote not only awareness of his thought, but also the style in which he carried out his work—a style characterised by keen awareness of human nature and culture, and an openness and attentiveness to the divine.
Recent re-publications of his work, primarily through Ignatius Press and particularly the Catholic University of America Press have made much of his impressive catalogue available, and there is emerging a number of secondary studies of his work from the U.S., Australia, and his homeland in Great Britain. The recent publication by Joseph Stuart (2022) provides a thorough-going and eminently readable intellectual biography of the man, which is well worth your time. (You can see my review of Stuart’s excellent work here).
Why though, would this shy, bookish man, an historian of ‘culture’ of all things, be enjoying such a resurgence now?
While there are aspects of Dawson’s oeuvre that present to contemporary readers as rather dated, the appeal of Dawson lies, in my estimation, in the fact that he had a truly capacious vision. Dawson had the capacity to understand his not only the cultures of the past but contemporary culture in a way that was almost unparalleled. He could see and describe with great accuracy, not only the reality of the many cultural problems of his time but could trace both the metaphysical and historical genealogies of such problems to profound depths, thereby setting out something of a roadmap to help Christians and all men and women of good will to navigate the contemporary milieu.
Upon a reading even a fraction of his many works, one gets a real sense of how valuable Dawson’s cultural mind was in its application to the many problems that plagued Europe and the West following the Great War and throughout the twentieth century. One cannot help but see the tremendous value of the intellectual framework that he developed, and out of which he operated. As the Australian Theologian, and long-time friend of the Dawson Society, Professor Tracey Rowland laments in her breakthrough work Culture and the Thomist Tradition (Routledge, 1996) many of the shortcomings of the documents of the Second Vatican Council—specifically Gaudium et spes—as well as the ensuing aftermath, could have been avoided had the council fathers been judicious readers of culturally astute minds such as Dawson and Romano Guardini and adopted their critical reading of modern culture into their work (p. 22). Indeed, one begins to wonder how things would be if Dawson’s thought were able to be employed today in the face of the past few years’ worth of global pandemic, war in Europe and the Holy Land, and what seems like almost universal unrest in the face of the unremitting advance of what seems to be all pervasive digital and biotechnologies. The sheer breadth and openness of Dawson’s cultural mind is one which deserves both study in and of itself as well as emulation in our own cultural milieu.
Perhaps Dawson is just the right kind of model for those of us who are trying to think through the realities of our own day in a way that is neither dogmatically progressivist nor hopelessly reactionary.
