Seventy years ago Sir Basil Liddell-Hart wrote a little book, Why Don’t We Learn from History? An American military historian, Jay Luvaas, used to joke, “It ought to have been called, ‘Why don’t you learn what I already know?’” A perennial frustration for teachers is wondering what, if anything, their students have been taught in earlier stages of education.

Apparently no one has ever mentioned to them the name of Christopher Dawson. Although Christopher Dawson, who would be 125 this year, was once a prominent intellectual, he seems to have faded into an obscure world frequented only by scholars who are sympathetic to his point of view. Still, he is worth learning about, and his basic insight, that the driving force in man is religion, not economics or sex or power, ought to be considered anew. Dawson had a comfortable upbringing in northern England and was educated at Oxford, where he studied the ancient classics. By the time of the First World War, Dawson had become a Roman Catholic and taken a wife. Years later he said that he believed that his Anglican background had given him an appreciation of the Catholic heritage of England. After all, so much of late nineteenth-century Anglicanism looked back with nostalgia upon Gothic architecture and medieval liturgy.

In due course, Dawson made a name for himself by writing and lecturing. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and numerous other honors rightly came his way. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, towards the end of his life, he held a professorship at Harvard. During Dawson’s heyday, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, he set before the public more than twenty scholarly books. Dawson excelled at the Olympian survey of world history, his view from such lofty peaks always being conveyed to lesser mortals in clear, balanced prose. His perspective on world history was informed by the teachings of the Catholic Church, and so this titan in the field of world history generally has no place in schools today. Many scholars tend to write him off, thereby depriving themselves. Of course, one man’s faith does not disqualify him as an historian any more than another man’s lack of faith entitles him to study and write about the past.

Whatever his beliefs, Dawson was too honest a researcher and too good a writer to stoop to partisan pamphleteering. One has only to read Dawson’s work to see the breadth and depth of his reading and thinking. In 1932 Dawson published what became perhaps his most famous book, The Making of Europe, a dense but sweeping study of the medieval creation of the cultural entity now known as Europe. In 1956 it appeared as a Meridian paperback, but for a long time one had to search for it used bookshops. In recent years Catholic University of America Press has been reprinting Dawson’s works, so they are again accessible to the curious reader.

Dawson’s panoramic view of history allowed him to perceive the intersections of cultures, and he believed that, “it is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture.” Other candidates for that “cohesive force” pale beside Dawson’s; Dawson saw that humans can make anything into an idol. Catholics and others looking for an alternative to such discredited yet recurring nineteenth-century theories as Marxism would do well to mull over Dawson’s voluminous output.

Perhaps most representative of his writings is a collection of essays, The Dynamics of World History, first published in 1956 and reissued in 2002 by ISI Books. There one finds brought together thirty-one studies of such diverse figures as Karl Marx and Saint Augustine, Edward Gibbon and T. S. Eliot. There are essays on sociology and culture, evolution and art. As with most books of essays, it can be approached at random, reading an essay here and an essay there. Taking the leisure to think over Dawson’s various angles on his great theme helps one develop what Dawson was dedicated to hand on, a Christian sense of history.

According to Dawson, what gives history “significance and order” as well as “organic unity” is the birth of Christ. As he wrote in his essay “History and the Christian Revelation,” the Incarnation became the center of history, the point at which time and eternity intersect. “The real meaning of history,” wrote Dawson, “is something entirely different from that which the human actors in the historical drama themselves believe or intend.” He cited as the greatest example the fact that no astute observer of the day would have predicted that “the execution of an obscure Jewish religious leader in the first century of the Roman Empire would affect the lives and thoughts of millions who never heard the names of the great statesmen and generals of the age.”

As these few quotations indicate, however, Dawson’s prose is precise but dry, often soporific. His many ways of explaining the importance of religion and of the central historical role of Christianity, alas, require close attention and caffeine. Nevertheless, he is more than worth the effort, and by buckling down and reading these essays and books, it ought to become second nature for a Catholic historian to identify as a Dawsonian.

 

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B., is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno. He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.