An excerpt from "Christianity and the History of Culture" | Christopher Dawson | From Chapter 2 of
"The Formation of Christendom" | IgnatiusInsight.com
An excerpt from "Christianity and the History of Culture" | Christopher Dawson | From Chapter 2
of The Formation of Christendom
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/cdawson_focchap2_oct08.asp
The history of Christianity is the history of a divine intervention in history,
and we cannot study it apart from the history of culture in the widest sense of
the word. For the word of God was first revealed to the people of Israel and became
embodied in a law and a society. Secondly, the word of God became Incarnate in
a particular person at a particular moment of history, and thirdly, this
process of human redemption was carried on in the life of the Church which was
the new Israel--the universal community which was the bearer of divine
revelation and the organ by which man participated in the new life of the
Incarnate Word.
Thus Christianity has entered into the stream of human history and the process
of human culture. It has become culturally creative, for it has changed human
life and there is nothing in human thought and action which has not been subjected
to its influence, while at the same time it has suffered from the limitations
and vicissitudes that are inseparable from temporal existence.
Now there are those who reject this mingling of religion and history, or
Christianity and culture, since they believe that religion is concerned with
God rather than man, and with the absolute and eternal rather than the
historical and the transitory. We certainly need to recognize how important
this aspect of religion is and how man has a natural sense of divine transcendence.
And we know from the history of religious thought that we do actually find
religious men of this kind--men who seek to transcend human nature by the
flight of the Alone to the Alone, in the words of the Neo-Platonist philosopher,
and who find the essence of religion in the contemplation of pure being or of
that which is beyond being.
But this is not Christianity. Although Christianity does not deny the religious
value of contemplation or mystical experience, its essential nature is
different, it is a religion of Revelation, Incarnation and Communion; a
religion which unites the human and the divine and sees in history the
manifestation of the divine purpose towards the human race.
It is impossible to understand Christianity without studying the history of
Christianity. And this, as I see it, involves a good deal more than the study
of ecclesiastical history in the traditional sense. It involves the study of
two different processes which act simultaneously on mankind in the course of
time. On the one hand, there is the process of culture formation and change
which is the subject of anthropology, history and the allied disciplines; and
on the other there is the process of revelation and the action of divine grace
which has created a spiritual society and a sacred history, though it can be
studied only as a part of theology and in theological terms.
In Christian culture these two processes come together in an organic unity, so
that its study requires the close cooperation of Theology and History. It is
obvious that this is a difficult task, but it is a very necessary one, since
there is no other way of studying Christianity as a living force in the world
of men and it is of the essence of Christianity that it is such a force and not
an abstract ideology or system of ideas. Thus the history of Christian culture
differs in nature from Church History. The latter has been for centuries a highly specialized study, which
stands somewhat outside historical categories. There is a sense in which the
Church as a theological concept stands outside and above history. But during recent
centuries Church History has been regarded as equivalent to ecclesiastical
history--a kind of special subject which lies outside the margin of political
history. From this point of view Church History is something only to be found
in societies and periods which distinguish clearly between Church and State or
between Religion and Politics. It therefore tends to become a somewhat
arbitrary and artificial subject, since the history of the modern churches is
conditioned and limited by the history of the state to which in a sense they
belong. And where there is a complete separation of Church and State, as in the
United States in the nineteenth century, Church History becomes emptied of
significant content, as one sees in the (typical) nineteenth-century,
twelve-volume American Church History Series. It has no scientific unity, so that finally it is
held together only by the corporate traditions of the particular sect.
Church History can, of course, be studied scientifically from the sociological
angle as Ernst Troeltsch did in his famous book, but this leads to theological
difficulties.
The study of Christian Culture, on the other hand, does not involve this
dualism, since the concept of culture is a unity which embraces both Church and
State. Culture is a universal phenomenon which can be made the subject of
scientific study, and since every historic culture has its religious aspect, Christian
culture is not exceptional in this respect, but is comparable to the other
cultures which are associated with a particular religion, the culture of India,
for example, or the culture or cultures of the Muslim peoples. The distinctive institution
of Christian culture, a Church of its nature independent of the political
society is irrelevant to the comparative scientific study of cultures.
On the other hand, we cannot ignore the great difficulties which affect the
higher study of religion today and the change of intellectual climate which has
become increasingly unfavorable to the study of the relations between religion
and culture in the modern world and the modern university. For theology has
long since lost its position as a dominant faculty in the university and as an
integral part of the general educational curriculum. It continues to exist on
sufferance only as a specialized ecclesiastical study designed for the clergy.
Consequently the student in a modern university may be totally ignorant of
religion, so that he requires a very elementary type of instruction, whereas
the theological student has no need of elementary studies, since he already
takes for granted (however unjustifiably) the validity of some particular form
of Christian theology. This is a very unfortunate state of affairs, for it
creates a gap between university studies and theological or ecclesiastical
studies which it is nobody's business to fill. There is, as I see it, a
no-man's-land between the university and the theological school.
It is clear that in this situation there is no longer any common religious
tradition. One can no longer take for granted any common principles or truths
that are generally accepted. We have to allow for the existence of four or five
fundamentally different points of view in religious matters, secular and
Christian, Protestant and Catholic. And there is a wide difference in the
secularist camp between the liberal humanists and the dogmatic materialists.
And again in the case of the Protestants, there is a division between the
liberal Protestants, who represent the old humanist Unitarian tradition, and
the neo-orthodox, who seek to revive the traditions of the Reformers and the
Puritan theologians. So wide is this gap that it is difficult to find anything,
above all in regard to natural theology and the nature of religion, on which
these two agree.
In these circumstances the only remaining approach that is common to all
potential students is the phenomenological approach, which is both social and
psychological. On the one hand, everyone is agreed that Christianity and
Catholicism are momentous sociological and historical facts which have had a
profound influence on human history; while on the other, religion is a
psychological phenomenon which is almost universal and common to all cultures
and periods, so that it is impossible to question its subjective human
importance. Moreover, in spite of the almost infinite diversity of religious phenomena,
there are certain elements that are common to them all and which may be
regarded as essentially religious. Such are worship and prayer and such also is
the rite of sacrifice.
Worship implies the existence of some power other than man which men venerate
as greater than themselves, while prayer and sacrifice imply the existence of a
twofold relation by which man establishes some channel of communication with
the higher power. This unknown power which man instinctively and naturally
worships is habitually known as God or the Gods; in fact, the phenomenological
definition would be: "God is what man worships, and what man worships is
God."
It may be objected that this notion of worship tells us nothing about the real
nature of the object of worship. Indeed we know from the study of comparative
religion that man is capable of worshipping almost anything from the highest to
the lowest, and it has been the great task of philosophy to purify man's
concept of the divine and to liberate the mind from the service of idols--from
the worship of all that is not God. And this process is in some respects
parallel to the work of revelation, which has also consisted in the
purification of man's natural religious instincts by the elimination of false objects
of worship and the redirection of the human mind towards God, the one ultimate
and absolute transcendent reality.
To modern man the word "God" means far more than this, for it has
come to us enriched by the content of the Jewish and Christian revelations, so
that it has acquired moral and personal values which have become almost
inseparable from the word. But even apart from this religious tradition, the word
has also acquired a philosophical meaning and has been enriched by centuries of
philosophical tradition.
For Western religion and theology represent a synthesis of two different
traditions, the Hebraic tradition of religious revelation, which is represented
by the Bible, and the Hellenic tradition of metaphysical or natural theology,
which has been accepted by the Christian Fathers and theologians as a kind of
rational propaedeutic or foundation for theology in general. Nevertheless, this
philosophic tradition was by no means lacking in religious content, a content
supplied by the aesthetic or mystical contemplation which was characteristic of
it. On the one hand, Greek philosophy contemplated the universe as a visible
order which was the reflection or creation of a spiritual principle--the divine
logos; on the other, it saw the spiritual world as an ascending order or
hierarchy of intelligible forms which culminated in absolute good and absolute
unity, so that for the Stoic and Neo-Platonist the intellectual disciplines of science
and philosophy found their final end in a religious act of contemplation which
resembles that of the mystic.
This Hellenic theology was readily adopted by the Christian theologians, as we
see in St. Augustine's early writings, in the Greek Fathers, and in the works
that pass under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. There has been a somewhat
similar development of philosophic theology in modern times during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the product of deism and rationalism. But
this modern movement tended to lose its religious character as soon as it
became separated from the Christian tradition, and it soon ceased to show any trace
of those contemplative or mystical tendencies which characterized the older
Hellenic tradition. Consequently in modern times the historical alliance
between natural theology and the theology of revelation has been broken, except
in the case of Thomism, which has held fast to the old tradition.
Modern Protestant theology, especially the school of Karl Barth, has utterly
rejected as false and worthless any rational or philosophical theology and has
refused to admit the existence of any form of genuine religious knowledge
except that contained in biblical revelation and apprehended by divine faith.
If, however, we accept the Barthian principle, the complete nonexistence of any
natural channel of understanding between God and Man, it is difficult to see
how such an act of faith can be elicited except from those who already possess some
kind of faith. The God who spoke to Abraham was not totally unknown being. He
was one who was accepted or taken for granted as the God of his fathers.
There is, however, nothing in natural theology, or the philosophic idea of God,
which contradicts or excludes the idea of Revelation. For once granted the
existence of a divine transcendent being who is the object of human veneration and
prayer, it is very conceivable that such a being should intervene in human life
by manifesting his will to man or by establishing some channel of
communication. The difficulty of this belief lies not in its abstract
possibility or probability but in the apparent impossibility of man
understanding the divine purpose or mode of operation. For it is obvious that
if man were to possess the power of influencing the behavior of insects by
scientific means, the insect would be incapable of understanding what was
happening, and that it could only be explained from the human standpoint. The
difference, however, between God and the rational animal is far greater than that
between man and the insect world, and it is inconceivable that the human intelligence
can understand the process of divine revelation, even though he is the
recipient of it. God is not only the giver of revelation, he must also create
the vehicle for its transmission and the faculty for its reception.
The Christian takes for granted the idea of a word that is in some sense common
to God and Man, but this is a truth of faith, which is unattainable by human
reason. It involves what the Greek theologians term a divine
"economy"--an adaptation of divine truth to the means of human understanding,
whether by inspired Scripture, as in the case of the Hebrew prophets, by a
historical dispensation, as with the history of the Chosen People, or above all
by the central mystery of the Incarnation by which the Word of God is embodied
in a historical Person who is both human and divine. This marks a new beginning
in the history of the human race--a new creation by which humanity is raised to
a higher spiritual level which transcends the natural life and the rational
knowledge of the human animal.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Excerpts:
• Rediscovering Christopher Dawson | An Interview with Dr. Bradley J. Birzer
• Are We At The End or The Beginning? | Glenn W. Olsen
• His Story and the History of the Church | An Interview with Dr. Glenn W. Olsen
Christopher Dawson born in Wales and educated at Winchester and at Trinity College, Oxford, was a lecturer at Univeristy College and Exeter, as well as
at Liverpool and Edinburgh Universities. In 1958 he became the first Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard University. Among his previous books are The Crisis
of Western Education, The Dividing of Christendom, The Dynamics of World
History, and Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.
If you'd like to receive the FREE IgnatiusInsight.com e-letter (about
every 2 to 3 weeks), which includes regular updates about IgnatiusInsight.com
articles, reviews, excerpts, and author appearances,
please click here to sign-up today!