The
Cultural
Consequences
of Christian Disunity
.
by Christopher
Dawson
Note: A renowned
Christian historian of the 20th century,
Christopher Dawson (1889-1970 ) wrote
several books on Christianity's influence on
the development of culture in the West, and
its decline due to the growing influence of
secularism, and the necessary return to
Christian unity. The following article was
first delivered as part of a lecture series
delivered at Harvard University in 1958.
Christopher Dawson was one of the founding
members of an ecumenical movement among
Catholics and Protestants in Europe, called
the Sword of the Spirit, which began
in 1939 and the early '40s The movement as a
whole was short-lived because the climate
for ecumenical cooperation between Catholics
and Protestants was not yet ripe. Dawson's
writings are very relevant today as
Christians seek to build bridges and
ecumenical cooperation together. ed.
Of all
divisions between Christians, that between
Catholics and Protestants is the deepest and the
most pregnant in its historical consequences. It
is so deep that we cannot see any solution to it
in the present period and under existing
historical circumstances. But at least it is
possible for us to take the first step by
attempting to overcome the enormous gap in
mutual understanding which has hitherto rendered
any intellectual contact or collaboration
impossible. From this point of view the problem
is not to be found so much in the sphere of
theology, strictly speaking, as in that of
culture and historical tradition. For the
changes that followed the Reformation are not
only the work of the Churches and the
theologians. They are also the work of the
statesmen and the soldiers.
The Catholic and Protestant worlds have been
divided from one another by centuries of war and
power politics, and the result has been that
they no longer share a common social experience.
Each has its own version of history, its own
social inheritance, as well as its own religious
beliefs and standards of orthodoxy. And nowhere
is this state of things more striking than in
America, where the English Protestant North and
the Spanish Catholic South formed two completely
different worlds which had no mental contact
with one another.
It was not until the 19th century that this
state of cultural separation came to an end; and
the change was especially sharp in the
English-speaking countries when Catholicism and
Protestantism finally came together within the
same societies and cultures. In England this was
due to the movement of intellectual
rapprochement which is represented by the Oxford
Movement and the personality of Newman, while in
America it was the result of external forces –
above all the mass immigration of the Irish
Catholics to America in the middle of the 19th
century, which produced such profound social
changes, particularly in New England.
Nowhere in the world have Catholicism and
Protestantism been brought together more
suddenly and closely than in Boston. Throughout
the I9th century these two sections of the
population remained separate peoples, although
they necessarily shared the same national and
regional citizenship. It is only in quite recent
times that they have come to share a common
culture. But this culture is a purely secular
one; and one of the reasons that it is so
completely secular is that there has been this
complete cleavage of spiritual tradition and
absence of intellectual contact between
Catholics and Protestants.
No doubt there are many other factors in the
secularization of modern culture, but this is
one for which Christians are directly
responsible. The movement of history, which for
Christians in some way reflects the action of
divine providence, has put an end to the social
division of Christendom which followed the
religious revolution of the I6th century. Hence
it is now our business to see that the inner
division in our culture should also be overcome
by a progressive movement of intellectual
understanding, the reconstitution of a common
world of discourse and of a new dialogue between
Catholics and Protestants.
In this work of mutual explanation there are two
main fields to be covered. First there is the
theological field, in which the student has to
study the positive developments of Catholic and
Protestant doctrine so as to understand the
exact nature of the divergence in our beliefs.
In the past this field had become a battleground
of theological controversy so that it was a
source of division and antagonism rather than
understanding. Indeed it was the controversial
character of theology that did more than
anything else to discredit it in the eyes of the
world. It is only in recent times that
theological studies have taken a new direction
and there is a growing tendency to re-examine
the whole question in the light of first
principles. We see the results of this new
theological orientation in the French series
published under the title Unam Sanctam,
and there has been a parallel movement of
theological thought in Germany. Indeed it was
there that the new approach first originated
more than a century ago with the writings of
John Adam Moehler. Today there is an
international literature on the theology of
Christian unity, which is likely to increase as
a result of the Ecumenical Council.
But in addition to this theological study we
have also to study the historical background and
the cultural development of Catholic and
Protestant society during the centuries of
disunity. It is these historical studies that
have been most neglected in the past, owing to
the artificial separation between ecclesiastical
and political history, which has had the effect
of focusing the light of historical research on
certain limited aspects of the past and of
neglecting others that were intrinsically no
less important.
Thus political history has developed as the
history of the European State system and the
power conflict between the European dynasties
and empires, and finally of the political
revolutions that have changed the forms of the
state.
It is only in modern times that historians have
attempted to rectify this one-sided emphasis by
opening up the new field of economic history,
which today is generally recognized as no less
important than political history.
But this is an exception, and there are still
important fields of culture which are relatively
uncultivated by the historians. The obvious
solution would seem to be the expansion of
historical science to include the whole of human
culture in all its manifestations; but in spite
of the efforts of German culture-historians to
create a new study of this kind, it has failed
to establish itself as a scientific discipline
and is still looked on with considerable
suspicion by the professional historians. In any
case, we have to consider the question of
religious history as a field of study which
historians ought to take account of, but which
they have in fact neglected. No doubt their
answer would be that this is the business of the
ecclesiastical historians. This is true enough
in theory. In practice, however, ecclesiastical
history is as highly specialized as political
history, which it resembles in certain aspects.
The ecclesiastical historians have dealt
exhaustively with the history of heresies and
theological controversies, but they have shown
little interest in religious culture. Even such
a famous book as Ritschl's History of
Pietism is not a genuinely historical
work. It is a polemical work, devoted to the
demonstration of a theological thesis rather
than to the exposition of a phase of religious
history or the explanation of a form of
religious experience. In fact it is not to the
ecclesiastical historians but to the literary
historians that we must look for the main
achievements in this field. With all his faults
Sainte Beuve was a real religious historian when
he wrote his Port Royal; and in our own days I
think that the best approach to religious
history has been made from the literary side, in
respect of Catholicism, by Bremond in his
literary study of religious experience in France
in the I7th century, and of Protestantism by
Professors Perry Miller and Johnston in their
study of the New England mind.
When we come to the subject of this work, which
is the development of the Catholic and
Protestant cultures in modern times, we shall
find ourselves in a no man's land, between the
political and the ecclesiastical historians. For
while the actual schism which destroyed the
religious unity of Western Europe has been
studied exhaustively by both groups of
historians, neither of them has paid much
attention to the development of the new forms of
religious culture which took the place of the
old common culture of medieval Christendom. Yet
no one can deny their importance, for they had a
considerable effect not only on the development
of literature and music and art but also on the
structure of social life, as we see in a very
striking way in the contrasts in the social
development of the two Americas.
And it is the same with the following period.
For the political and ecclesiastical historians
have both written a great deal on the history of
the I8th-century Enlightenment and on the
political and religious revolution which
followed it, but the religious revival of the
19th century, which transformed and re-created
the Christian world that we know and in which we
live, has, I believe, never been studied in its
cultural aspects. One should perhaps make an
exception as far as North America is concerned.
For American Catholicism is the creation of this
period, and in so far as historians attempt to
study American Catholicism, they are bound to
focus their attention on the I9th-century
development. Even so, it is impossible to study
that development without studying the European
background from which it emerged and which
influenced its development in so many different
ways. Yet there has been no study of the
European Catholic revival by American
historians, so far as I am aware, and very few
translations of European works on the subject.
Moreover there is another and more fundamental
reason why religious history during the last
century or two should be a neglected and
difficult field. For this is the age when the
secularization of Western culture was triumphant
and when religion was consequently pushed out of
social life and increasingly treated as a
private affair that only concerned the
individual conscience. Whereas in the past
religion had occupied the center of the stage of
world history, so that a monk and a mystic like
St. Bernard had moved armies and had become a
counsellor of kings, now it had withdrawn into
private life and had left the stage of history
to the representatives of the new political and
economic forces.
This progressive extrusion of Christianity from
culture is the price that Christendom has had to
pay for its loss of unity-it is part of what
Richard Niebuhr has called "the Ethical Failure
of the Divided Church'. The tragedy of schism is
that it is a progressive evil. Schism breeds
schism, until every social antagonism is
reflected in some new religious division and no
common Christian culture is conceivable.
In the old world of united Christendom these
social antagonisms were as strong as they are
today, but they were antagonisms within a common
society, and the Church was seen as the ultimate
bond of unity. As William Langland writes, "He
called that house Unity – which is Holy Church
in English.” No one was more aware than Langland
of the evils of contemporary society – the
whole of Piers Plowman is an impassioned
plea for social and religious reform, so much so
that he has sometimes been regarded as a
harbinger of the Protestant Reformation. But his
emphasis is always on unity: "Call we to all the
Commons that they come into Unity” "and there
stand and do battle against Belial's children.”
As I have pointed out elsewhere, the creative
age of medieval culture was the result of the
alliance between the Papacy and the Northern
Reformers, represented by the Cluniacs and the
Cistercians, and when this alliance was broken,
the vitality of medieval culture declined.
The Protestant Reformation of the I6th century
represents a final breach between the Papacy and
the Northern Reformers – between the
principle of authority and the principle of
reformation. But both principles were alike
essential to the traditions of Western
Christendom, and even in the state of division
neither part of the Christian world could
dispense with them. Therefore the Catholic world
developed a new reforming movement, as
represented by the Jesuits and the other new
religious Orders; while the Protestant world had
to create new patterns of authority and
theological tradition, such as we see in the
ecclesiastical and theological discipline of the
Calvinist Churches. But this pattern was never a
universal one, and the Protestant world was
weakened from the beginning by continuous
theological controversies which produced a
further series of schisms and permanent
divisions between the different Protestant
Churches.
It is difficult to exaggerate the harm that was
inflicted on Christian culture by the century of
religious strife that followed the Reformation.
The great controversy between Catholicism and
Protestantism rapidly degenerated into a state
of religious and civil war which divided
Christendom into two armed camps.
There could be no question of spiritual
reconciliation so long as Catholics and
Protestants were cutting one another's throats,
and calling in foreign mercenaries to help in
the work of mutual destruction, as was the case
in France in the I6th century and in Germany in
the 17th. Even within the Protestant world
religious controversy became the cause of social
conflict or its pretext, as we see in the case
of the Civil War in England. That war was indeed
far less destructive and atrocious than the
great religious wars of the Continent, but it
demonstrated even more clearly the essential
futility and irrationality of religious
conflict, in which each military victory led to
fresh divisions and further conflicts until no
solution was possible save a tired and
disillusioned return to the traditional order in
Church and State.
It was during this century of sterile and
inconclusive religious conflict that the ground
was prepared for the secularization of European
culture. The convinced secularists were an
infinitesimal minority of the European
population, but they had no need to be strong
since the Christians did their work for them.
All they had to do was to point the moral, very
cautiously at first, like Montaigne, and then
with gradually increasing confidence and vigor,
as with Hobbes and Bayle, and the English
Deists. It was, however, an Anglican clergyman,
a High Churchman to boot, who spoke the final
word in The Tale of a Tiub.
Thus it is not too much to say that the fate of
Christian culture and the development of modern
civilization have been determined or conditioned
by the state of war which existed between
Christians from the Reformation to the
Revolution – first a century of civil war in
the strict sense and then a century or more of
cold war and antagonism. And though today
Christians are at last emerging from this
atmosphere of hatred and suspicion, the modern
Christian world is still divided by the
religious frontiers established in that age of
religious strife.
As a volcanic eruption changes the face of
nature – overwhelming fertile lands with fields
of lava and changing the course of rivers and
the shape of islands – this great religious
cataclysm has changed the course of history and
altered the face of Western culture for ages to
come. It is impossible to ignore this dark and
tragic side of religious history; for if we do
not face it, we cannot understand the inevitable
character of the movement of secularization.
On the other hand, it is a still greater mistake
to see the dark side only, as the thinkers of
the Enlightenment did, and to ignore the
spiritual and cultural achievements of the
post-Reformation period.
For the energies of divided Christendom were not
all absorbed in internecine conflict. On both
the Catholic and the Protestant side the
Reformation was followed by the development of
new forms of religious life and thought. These
were of course very different, so that they have
sometimes been regarded as opposite to one
another. Yet I think it is possible to trace a
certain parallelism between them, which was no
doubt due to their common historical background
and to common cultural influences. In the first
place there was on both sides of the religious
frontiers a return to moral discipline after the
laxity of the early Renaissance period. On the
Protestant side this took the form of the
Calvinist discipline, which was the main
inspiration of English and American Puritanism
in the 17th century and the parallel ethos of
the Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland.
It is one of the paradoxes of religious history
that a theology which centered in the doctrines
of predestination and reprobation and denied or
minimized the freedom of the human will should
have developed an ethos of personal
responsibility which expressed itself in moral
activism. There can, however, be no doubt that
the hallmark of the new Protestant culture is
just this spirit of moral activism, which was
based on intensive theological training, but
which found expression in secular life-in war
and business-no less than in the life of the
Churches.
On the Catholic side the restoration of moral
discipline took the form primarily of a return
to the tradition of monastic asceticism. But
this tradition was now brought out of the
cloister into the world and applied by the new
religious orders, above all by the Jesuits, to
the contemporary situation, that is to say, to
the needs of the Church, to the restoration of
ecclesiastical unity and order, to the education
of both the clergy and the laity, and to
preaching and missionary propaganda.
But in addition to the moral asceticism of the
Counter-Reformation there was also on the
Catholic side a certain tendency to theological
rigorism which is much more akin to the
theological tendencies of Puritanism. It
produced the Jansenist movement, which caused a
serious breach in the unity of Post-Reformation
Catholicism, at least in France. The theological
feud between the Jansenists and the Jesuits and
the controversy about grace and free will bear
an extraordinary similarity to that between the
Puritans and the Arminians on the same
questions.
In the second place the Post-Reformation period
is characterized by the interiorization of
religion and the intensive cultivation of the
spiritual life. In the Catholic world this
expressed itself above all in the great mystical
movement which began in Spain and Italy in the
I6th century and spread to France and England in
the following century. But it is also
represented by the ascetic spirituality of the
Counter-Reformation. Indeed the most influential
of all the spiritual works of the age – The
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius – was, as
its name denotes, essentially ascetic, and used
the reason and the imagination in order to
produce a psychological change in the
personality. On the Protestant side, the
mystical element is less significant, for the
main emphasis was always placed on the
experience of conversion and personal conviction
of sin and redemption.
The Pietist movement in the Lutheran church
(which was later in date than the Catholic
spiritual revival) was not devoid of an element
of mysticism, while some of the minority sects,
like the Quakers, were more definitely mystical
and ultimately came to be influenced strongly by
the less orthodox representatives of the
Catholic mystical tradition. There was in fact
an interesting underground movement towards
religious unity and spiritual reconciliation
which was carried on by representatives of these
extremist groups, such as Peter Poiret in the
Netherlands, who attempted to create a common
eirenic theology based on the consensus
mysticorum; and Isaac Watts translated Jesuit
sacred poetry. Though this movement was an
isolated one, which affected an infinitesimal
minority of Protestants, it does indicate the
existence of Catholicizing tendencies in the
Pietist movement as a whole, which explains the
hostile reaction to the movement on the part of
Protestant historians like Ritschl.
Finally, in the third place, both Catholic and
Protestant Europe were deeply influenced by the
culture of the Renaissance. On both sides there
was a continuous effort to use the new learning
for Christian ends and to bring the new culture
and art into relation with the Christian
tradition. Thus the ideal of a Christian
Humanism held a central place in both Catholic
and Protestant culture and provided an important
link or bridge between them.
It is true that its influence was much stronger
in Catholic Europe owing to the fact that Italy
was both the home of the Renaissance and the
center of Catholic culture. Moreover,
Catholicism was able to use the new art and
music and architecture of the Renaissance in the
service of religion in a way which the aniconic
and non-liturgical character of Protestantism
made impossible.
Thus the Baroque culture, in which the spirit of
Christian Humanism found its full social and
artistic expression, was exclusively or
predominantly Catholic, and the sharing of this
common culture gave the entire Catholic world
from Peru to Poland an international unity which
Protestant Europe never possessed. In Northern
Europe the influence of humanism was confined to
the educated classes and found expression only
in literature. But in this field it was
triumphant, and throughout the I7th century, in
England above all, the spirit of Christian
Humanism inspired not only the poetry of Donne
and Herbert and Milton and Vaughan but also the
thought of the Cambridge Platonists and the
Caroline divines, as well as of men of letters
like Sir Thomas Browne and Isaac Walton.
Nevertheless all this wealth of literary culture
could not prevent an increasing divergence
between the social and psychological tendencies
of Catholic and Protestant society. The Baroque
culture integrated asceticism with mysticism,
and humanism with popular culture, through the
common media of art and liturgy; but in the
Protestant world, the religious culture of the
masses, which was derived from the Bible and the
sermon, had no access to the imaginative world
of the humanist poet and artist. Thus it was on
the popular level that the differences between
the two cultures are most obvious and their
separation is most complete. For what could be
sharper than the contrast between the popular
culture of Catholic Europe with its pilgrimages
and festivals and sacred dramas all centering in
the great Baroque churches which were the
painted palaces of the Saints, and the austere
religious life of the hard-working Protestant
artisan and shopkeeper which found its only
outward expression in the weekly attendance in a
bare meeting house to listen to the long sermons
of the Puritan divines and to sing long psalms
in metrical but far from poetical versions?
This difference in the form of the religious
life found expression in a corresponding
difference of psychological types and spiritual
personalities. A man like Cotton Mather had no
doubt received a good classical education, but
no one can call him a Christian Humanist. His
character was formed in the same mould as that
of his congregation. Whereas on the other side,
men like St. Francis de Sales or Fénelon were
humanists not only in their classical culture
but in their spirituality and their personal
relations. This failure of Protestantism to
assimilate the Christian Humanist tradition
completely caused a certain impoverishment and
aridity in English and American cultures and led
ultimately to those defects which Matthew Arnold
was to criticize so vigorously in the I9th
century.
Nevertheless Protestant culture had its own
distinctive qualities. The moral energy of the
Puritan tradition inspired the new bourgeois
culture of the English-speaking world in the
later I 7th and I 8th centuries and gave it the
strength which enabled it to overcome its rivals
and dominate the world. What I am concerned with
at the moment, however, is not to judge the
values of these two forms of culture, but to
point out their differences and show how their
divergence contributed to the disunity of the
Christian world. For when the age of religious
war was over, Europe was still divided (and
America also) by a difference of moral values
and psychological antipathies. And these
differences are harder to surmount than the
theological ones, because they go so deep into
the unconscious mind and have become a part of
the personality and the national character.
When we come to the 19th century we shall find
plenty of cases of men who have lost all
conscious connection with religion but who
nevertheless retain the social and national
prejudices which they have inherited from their
Catholic or Protestant backgrounds.
Similarly when the barriers were first broken
down it was due not only to the theological
converts and apologists, like Newman, but to the
cultural converts, like Arnold and Ruskin.
Arnold is a particularly significant case,
because he admitted his debt to the Oxford
Movement, though he did not concern himself with
the theological questions which were its raison
d'être, but concentrated all his attention on
the cultural weaknesses of the Protestant
tradition and the need for a revision of English
cultural values. The same phenomenon is to be
found on the Catholic side, though it is less
easy to point to a representative figure. But
one may mention the attempt of a group of
Catholic sociologists in France in the later I
9th century to criticize Catholic social ethics
by comparison with the moral energy and activism
of Anglo-Saxon culture – an attempt which
was, I believe, the real source of the
Americanist controversy.
Now I do not wish to suggest that we should
approach the study of Catholicism and Divided
Christendom in the spirit of Matthew Arnold
rather than in that of Newman or Moehler. These
are theological questions, and the last word
must always rest with the theologians.
Yet as an historian I am convinced that the main
sources of Christian division and the chief
obstacle to Christian unity have been and are
cultural rather than theological. Consequently,
I believe that it is only by combining the study
of the history of Christian culture with the
study of theology that we can understand the
nature and extent of the problem with which we
have to deal.
[Excerpt
from The Dividing of Christendom, Chapter
1, by Christopher Dawson, was originally
published by Sheed & Ward, New York 1965.
First English edition published by Sidgwick and
Jackson Ltd, London 1971. Reprinted in 2009 by
Ignatius Press, Sanfrancisco. © 1991 Julian
Philip Scott 2008 Literary Executor of the
Estate of Christopher Dawson.]
Christopher
Dawson and the Christian View of
History
While
lecturing in the United States in the
early 1930s, T. S. Eliot was asked which
of his contemporaries was the most
powerful intellectual influence in
Britain... He selected
Christopher Dawson. Dawson’s work was
similarly praised across the ideological
and theological spectra, as the likes of
G. K. Chesterton, Barbara Ward, Russell
Kirk, Dorothy Day, C. S. Lewis, Arnold
Toynbee, and Lewis Mumford all testified
to its importance for their efforts.
Christopher Dawson’s religious faith
undergirded all his intellectual
efforts. He believed that people are
naturally religious and, hence, as a
historian, concluded (with Lord Acton)
that “religion is the key of history.”
Yet Dawson also contended that the
Christian faith makes the distinctive
claim to be an essentially historical
religion, one based on belief not just
in the general direction of history by
Providence, but in “the intervention by
God in the life of mankind by direct
action at certain definite points in
time and place,” culminating in the
Incarnation. This “central doctrine of
the Christian faith” is hence “also the
center of history,” a synergy that,
according to Dawson, generated a unique
vision of history:
"The
Christian view of history is not a
secondary element derived by
philosophical reflection from the
study of history. It lies at the very
heart of Christianity and forms an
integral part of the Christian faith.
Hence there is no Christian
“philosophy of history” in the strict
sense of the word. There is, instead,
a Christian history and a Christian
theology of history, and it is not too
much to say that without them there
would be no such thing as
Christianity."
– Christopher
Dawson, “The Christian View of
History” (1951)
– excerpt
from Sitting Still with Christopher
Dawson, article by Adam Schwartz,
Touchstone Magazine, March/April Issue
1999
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